The father of Admiral Farragut, George Farragut, was of unmixed Spanish descent, having been born there on the 29th of September, 1755, in the island of Minorca, one of the Balearic group, where the family had been prominent for centuries.
–Admiral Farragut A.T. Mahan
I think writers in 1890 could buy phrases wholesale.
“The camera light blinks like a winking red eye, telling me it’s time to start.”
Each Tiny Spark, by Pablo Cartaya
“The first liberals name was Lucifer.” Unholy Trinity by Matt walsh
“Faces hit walls all the time in the movies, but this was different.”
Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative, by Lawrence Weschler
“Elizabeth Anne Holmes knew she wanted to be a successful entrepreneur from a young age.”
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou (2020)
“Don’t shoot guns into the hurricane.”
Naked Came the Florida Man, by Tim Dorsey
“A flower in a weedy field:
make it a poppy.”
Mother Love: Poems, by Rita Dove
“The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats.”
Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer
“Eleanor West was fond of saying–inasmuch as she was fond of saying anything predictable, sensible, or more than once–that her school had no graduates, only students who found somewhere else to do their learning for a time.”
Come Tumbling Down, by Seanan McGuire
“Raylan Givens was holding a federal warrant to serve on a man in the marijuana trade known as Angel Arenas, forty-seven, born in the U.S. but 100 percent of him Hispanic.”
Raylan by Elmore Leonard (2012)
“Fabian was sitting in a cafe, by name Spalteholz, reading the headlines of the evening papers: English Airship Disaster near Beauvais, Strychnine Stored with Lentils, Girl of Nine Jumps from Window, Election of Premier — Another Fiasco, Murder in Lainz Zoo, Scandal of Municipal Purchasing Board, Artificial Voice in Waistcoat Pocket, Ruhr Coal Sales Falling, Elephants on Pavement, Coffee Markets Uncertain, Clara Bow Scandal, Expected Strike of 140,000 Metal Workers, Chicago Underworld Drama, Revolt of Starhemberg Troops. The usual thing. Nothing special.”
— Erich Kastner; Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist (1931)
“The long-term tendencies in American poetry reflect the major influences that went to form the culture as a whole and these in turn the ethnic and national groups who have made up the American people.”
— Kenneth Rexroth; American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (1971)
I cheated a little with the Kastner novel, but the wee second and third sentences are what make the first paragraph so splendid.
"Six years after the fact, Dr. Paul Edward Farmer reminded me, “We met because of a beheading, of all things.”
Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder
I sing of arms and the man, fated to be an exile, who long since left the land of Troy and came to Italy to the shores of Lavinium; and a great pounding he took by land and sea at the hands of the heavenly gods because of the fierce and unforgetting anger of Juno.
The Aeneid, Virgil
“He rode into the dark of the woods and dismounted.”
– The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara
“The redheaded homicide detective stepped through the door at 7:30 A.M. and out into the August head that already had reached 88 degrees.”
Briarpatch, by Ross Thomas
Great book!
One of his best opening chapters, too.
Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice’s Lenten fast in the desert.
A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
“The last gleaming silver of Komarr’s true-sun melted out of sight beyond the low hills on the western horizon.”
—Lois McMaster Bujold, Komarr
“There are certain idiosyncratic notions that you quietly come to accept when you live for a long time in Britain.”
Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson