“Like Holden, I don’t feel like going into all that David Copperfield crap, although in my case, a little about my parents you may find more interesting than reading about me.”
– Apropos of Nothing., by Woody Allen
EDIT: That is not a typo. The period after “Nothing” is part of the title.
“When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.”
Circe, by Madeline Miller
D’oh! :smack: I left out a couple of words. Let me try that again:
“Like Holden, I don’t feel like going into all that David Copperfield kind of crap, although in my case, a little about my parents you may find more interesting than reading about me.”
– Apropos of Nothing., by Woody Allen
“Ocala Police picked up Dale Crowe Junior for weaving, two o’clock in the morning, crossing the center line and having a busted taillight.”
Riding the Rap by Elmore Leonard
“My puppy, a beagle/Labrador mix, is one year old and does everything puppies do.”
Ask Me Anything: A Year of Advice from Dear Annie, by Annie Lang with Courtney Davison
“People are screaming.”
Away with Words: An Irreverent Tour Through the World of Pun Competitions, by Joe Berkowitz.
“The news was everywhere on the River Bank and had been heard as far as the Wild Wood: Sunflower Cottage just above the weir had been taken by two female animals, and it was being set up for quite an extended stay.”
The River Bank: A Sequel to The Wind in the Willows, by Kij Johnson
“My planet fetish began, as best I can recall, in third grade, at age eight–right around the time I learned that Earth had siblings in space, just as I had older brothers in high school and college.”
The Planets, by Dava Sobel
“With a sigh, Father Mikhail dropped onto the rudimentary bench set along the partially-built wall.”
City by the Bay: Stories of Novaya Rossiya, by Walter H. Hunt
“I met Jodi Taylor and her manager for lunch on the Coast Highway in Malibu, not far from Paradise Cove and the Malibu Colony.”
– Voodoo River, by Robert Crais
“It is astonishing how little attention critics have paid to Story considered in itself.”
On Stories and Other Essays on Literature, by C. S. Lewis
“Brother Cadfael was working in the small kitchen garden by the abbot’s fish-ponds when the boy was first brought to him.”
One Corpse Too Many by Ellis Peters (Brother Cadfael series)
“I could not see the street or much of the estate.”
The City & the City, by China Mieville
“America, said Horace, the office temp, was a run-down and demented pimp.”
The Ask by Sam Lipsyte
“Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while.”
– This Side of Paradise, by F Scott Fitzgerald
For about half a league after we came out of the little harbor on Newark Bay at Elizabeth, New Jersey - with its strewn alleys and broken buildings, its pervading aura of collapse, where the mayor himself had met us at the dock and stood before a podium his staff fetched up for him to set his speech on, words to launch us on that Earth Day across the continent as he reminded us of history here, of George Washington on nearly the same date being rowed across to New York City on the last leg of his inaugural journey - and for the half league down the Kill Van Kull (there Henry Hudson lost a sailor to an arrow through the neck), we had to lay in behind a rusting Norwegian freighter heading out to sea with so little cargo that her massive props were no more than half in the water and slapping up a thunderous wake and thrashing such a roil it sent our little teakettle of a boat rolling fore and aft.
–River Horse, by William Least Heat-Moon
“The Purple Sage opened his mouth and moved his tongue and so spake to them and he said: 'The Earth quakes and the Heavens rattle; the beasts of nature flock together and the nations of men flock apart; volcanoes usher up heat while elsewhere water becomes ice and melts; and then on other days it just rains.”
-Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, The Eye In The Pyramid
Wow! Bet he can’t say that in one breath at public readings.
“The debutante ritual flourished roughly from 1780 to 1914–beginning with the first debutante ball in London and ending with the outbreak of World War I.”
The Season: A Social History of the Debutante, by Kristen Richardson
Imagine that a small group of people had invented a fully functioning jet airplane capable of flying long distances at hundreds of miles an hour, decades before the Wright brothers cast their fragile craft into the wind for twelve seconds over North Carolina sand dunes in 1903.
The Friendly Orange Glow by Brian Dear.
The jet in this case being the PLATO system on which we had many of the cyberculture features we’re familiar with today in the early 1970s.
My Star Trek preview column from the first online newspaper gets a few lines. And I found that undergrads at the University of Illinois set their class schedules around the Star Trek schedule I put in it.