“Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me.”
Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography, by Zora Neale Hurston.
“It was so early in the morning that the birds wasn’t even up yet, to my way of thinking, and here I was down to the gate of the Old Egypt Cemetery tryin’ to decide whether to tell a white woman a lie or not.”
Other Worlds, Better Lives: Selected Long Fiction, 1989-2003.
“Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case.”
The Sign of Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)
“The candidate was terrified.”
Headhunters by Jo Nesbo (2008)
“The monster has been here today.”
Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse
“Dr. Alexander Hoffman sat by the fire in his study in Geneva, a half-smoked cigar lying cold in the ashtray beside him, an anglepoise lamp pulled low over his shoulder, turning the pages of a first edition of The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin.”
– The Fear Index, by Robert Harris
“I have the worst luck with bot-driven transports.”
*
Rogue Protocol*, by Martha Wells.
Duncan Makenzie was ten years old when he found the magic number.
Imperial Earth - Arthur C. Clarke
“The real story isn’t half as pretty as the one you’ve heard.”
Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik
“Once upon a time on a small, watery, excitable planet called Earth, in a small, watery, excitable country called Italy, a soft-spoken, rather nice-looking gentleman by the name of Enrico Fermi was born into a family so overprotective that he felt compelled to invent the atomic bomb.”
Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente
(That’s a good one, DD!)
“I was happy then.”
American War by Omar El Akkad (2017)
“A comet hurtled through the cloudy summer sky.”
The Quest of the Spider by Kenneth Robeson (Lester Dent)
“An angry squeal erupted from the pile of deadwood.”
- For We Are Many, by Dennis E. Taylor
“I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Shop in Butte.”
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (1929)
“Shortly before one o’clock on the afternoon of Tuesday, 27 September 1938, Mr. Hugh Legat of His Majesty’s Diplomatic Service was shown to his table beside one of the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Ritz Restaurant in London,ordered a half-bottle of 1921 Dom Perignon he could not afford, folded his copy of The Times to page 17, and began to read for the third time the speech that had been delivered the night before in Berlin’s Sportpalast by Adolph Hitler.”
– Munich, by Robert Harris
“President Dewey Congratulates NACA on Satellite Launch”.
The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal
“I was sitting in my office above the bank with my tie loose and my feet up, reading a book called Play of Double Senses: Spenser’s Faerie Queene.”
A Savage Place by Robert B. Parker (1981)
“Alive! Still alive. Alive…again.”
Dawn, by Octavia E. Butler
“Of course,” they told him in all honesty, “you will be a slave.”
Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, by Samuel R. Delaney
Dr Johnson said it was the only book that drew him out of bed on a Sunday morning before he wished to rise and I know exactly what he means. Over a thousand pages of pure unadulterated pleasure, it’s one of the greatest books I’ve ever read, which is why I’m reading it again some 20 years after I first read it.