“The music-room in the Governor’s House at Port Mahon, a tall, handsome, pillared octagon, was filled with the triumphant first movement of Locatelli’s C major quartet.”
Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian (1969)
“The sun clacked along an iron track among the gaslight stars high above the white city of Pelphia.”
- The Hod King, by Josiah Bancroft
I note that in past times (the 1930s), only the father was worth mentioning in a wedding announcement.
[del]I also take this opportunity to ask if anyone has ever made annotated editions of the Wimsey books, so as to provide references for all the illusions and translations of all the quotes.[/del]
You know, you’d think I’d learn to LOOK FIRST before asking. Of course there are!
But only Whose Body?. Damnit.
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.
“Would you baptize an extraterrestrial?”
Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial? And Other Questions From the Astronomers’ In-Box at the Vatican Observatory, by Guy Consolmagno, SJ and Paul Mueller, SJ.
“The personnel carrier lurches through the ruins under a wounded sky. The night hangs overhead like a sadist’s boot, stretching out the moment of terror before it falls.”
“Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.”
Middlemarch, by George Eliot
Authors and titles, please?
Sorry! Mine is Passage at Arms, by Glen Cook. I was talking about it in another thread and decided a reread was in order. Luckily, I’d just finished a different book. 
Thanks!
‘A passerby on that gray morning in March 1897, crossing, at his own risk and peril, place Maubert, or the Maub, as it was known in criminal circles (formerly a center of university life in the Middle Ages, when students flocked there from the Faculty of Arts in Vicus Stramineus, or rue du Fouarre, and later a place execution for apostles of free thought such as Etienne Dolet), would have found himself in one of the few spots in Paris spared from Baron Haussmann’s devastations, amid a tangle of malodorous alleys, sliced in two by the course of the Bievre, which still emerged here, flowing out of the bowels of the metropolis, where it had long been confined, before emptying feverish, gasping, and verminous into the nearby Seine.”
The Prague Cemetary, by Umberto Eco
“It is said that fifty-three years after his liberation he returned from the Golden Cloud, to take up once again the gauntlet of Heaven, to oppose the Order of Life and the gods who ordained it so.”
— Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light
I seem to be on a reread binge.
“Dirk Moeller didn’t know if he could fart his way into a major diplomatic incident. But he was ready to find out.”
The Android’s Dream by John Scalzi (2006)
“It was to have been a quiet evening at home.”
- well, now you didn’t ask for the book, now did ya?
John D. MacDonald, The Deep Blue Goodbye 
“The level was at his top lip now. Even with his head pressed hard back against the stones of the cell wall his nose was only just above the surface. He wasn’t going to get his hands free in time; he was going to drown.”
Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks (1987)
“I shall simply copy, word for word, the proclamation that appeared today in the One State Gazette.”
We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin (Translated by Mirra Ginsburg)
“Most people believe the human brain is solid.”
The Saturday Night Ghost Club, by Craig Davidson
“It’s like dancing sitting down. Squeeze - tap - release - twist. Left hand - right foot - left hand - right hand.”
The Beach House by Richard Patterson and Peter de Jonge (2014)
“A sharp clip-crop of iron-shod hoofs deadened and died away, and clouds of yellow dust drifted from under the cottonwoods out over the sage.”
- Riders of the Purple Sage, by Zane Grey. It’s a fun read so far, because it reminds me of the criticism of Shakespeare - that he just strung together a lot of well-known quotations. In ZG’s case, it is various cliches of the Western genre. They weren’t cliches when he wrote them. But I do get the same jar as when I read A Study in Scarlet - I don’t associate Mormons with sinister plots, just those nice clean-cut lads who show up at my door periodically rather than plot to steal my women.
Regards,
Shodan