Let’s see… (I’m sitting at the kitchen counter reading it as we speak, trying for some escapism to a more optimistic era)
Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #66, cover date January, 1963.
Author and artist:
Generic silver-age “Supes team”
(probably Leo Dorfman and Kurt Schaffenberger)
Thanks!
No problem… made me feel all literate, like I was reading a real book!
“People can’t jump very high.”
How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems, by Randall Munroe
“A strikingly handsome young man in his late twenties swung his big frame down from the stagecoach platform to the wooden sidewalk before Albany’s famed Delevan House.”
Millard Fillmore: Biography of a President, by Robert J. Rayback
“‘Daddy, I’m tired,’ the little girl in the red pants and the green blouse said fretfully. ‘Can’t we stop?’”
Firestarter by Stephen King
“When I was seven, I found a door.”
The Ten Thousand Days of January, by Alix E. Harrow
“The man in the house was going to kill himself.”
– Hostage, by Robert Crais
“His name was Dave Farkus, and he’d recently taken up fly-fishing as a way to meet girls. So far, it hadn’t worked out very well.”
Force of Nature, by C.J. Box. Joe Pickett series #12.
“It was a hot late-summer morning, a month into my first year as a Duke medical student.”
Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor’s Reflections on Race and Medicine, by Damon Tweedy, M.D.
The comet swam out of the dark. Its light bathed the planet ahead, reflecting from a hemisphere that gleamed a lifeless bone-white.
Stone Spring, by Stephen Baxter
(italics in the original)
“Look out!”
The Diploids: Eight Science Fiction Stories by Katherine MacLean (Note that this sentence is the first in the first story, which is “The Diploids”, a/k/a “Six Fingers”.)
“I have two diaries now.”
Shadow Tag, by Louise Erdrich
Once the ice had covered continents. The silence of the world had been profound.
Bronze Summer, by Stephen Baxter
(italics in the original.)
“Gilbert Roberts, a retired British naval officer turned game designer, stepped onto the gangway leading up to the ocean liner, then immediately stopped.”
A Game of Birds and Wolves: The Ingenious Young Women Whose Secret Board Game Helped Win World War II, by Simon Parkin
“The lights go out.”
The Guest List, by Lucy Foley
“Beakman and Trenchard could smell the fire – it was still a mile away, but a sick desert wind carried the promise of Hell.”
– Chasing Darkness, by Robert Crais
“My friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes, while possessed of one of the most vigorous minds of our generation, and while capable of displaying tremendous feats of physical activity when the situation required it, could nevertheless remain in his armchair perfectly motionless longer than any other human being I have ever encountered.”
The Whole Art of Detection: Lost Mysteries of Lyndsay Faye (The sentence is from the first story, “The Case of Colonel Warburton’s Madness”.)
“The rain had just stopped when the convenience store clerk asked the customer not to heat up his urine in the microwave.”
-Tropic of Stupid, Tim Dorsey (Serge Storms #24)
“Washington, D.C., March 4, 1857: A slender man in black suit, wearing black gloves with black crepe wrapped around his silk hat anxiously awaits the signal from the White House doorman that his carriage has arrived.”
-The Expatriation of Franklin Pierce - The Story of a President and the Civil War, by Garry Boulard
“On a trip to Baltimore in 1919 when Pauli Murray was eight, her aunt, namesake, and foster mother, Pauline Fitzgerald Dame, took advantage of being in a big city to buy her a winter outfit.”
Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray, by Rosalind Rosenberg.
From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that—a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.