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"The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended." - Arthur C. Clarke Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies' eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde's Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde's door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof. - Lucy Maud Montgomery All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. - Leo Tolstoy "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York." - Sylvia Plath A squat gray building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and in a shield, the World State's motto, Community, Identity, Stability. - Aldous Huxley The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. - H.P. Lovecraft Nobody was really surprised when it happened, not really, not on the subconscious level where savage things grow. - Stephen King "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth." - J.D. Salinger "Where's Papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast. - E.B. White Alice Walker (An exercise in double (or is that triple) negatives if I ever saw one) Dante Alighieri (Inferno, Canto I) "Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing." - Miguel de Cervantes (trans. Edith Grossman) 3 May. Bistritz. - Left Munich at 8:35 P.M., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but the train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. - Bram Stoker In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul. - Frank Herbert Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. - Jane Austen "A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead." - Graham Greene "riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs." Continues from the book's unfinished closing line. - James Joyce You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. - Mary Shelley To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. - John Steinbeck My father's family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. - Charles Dickens "In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since." - F. Scott Fitzgerald The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there". - Truman Capote It was seven o'clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills when Father Wolf woke up from his day's rest, scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips. - Rudyard Kipling It is a curious thing that at my age, fifty-five last birthday, I should find myself taking up a pen to try and write a history. - H.R. Haggard It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered before the adverse hosts could meet. - James Fenimore Cooper Alain-Fournier; first published, 1913 'Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents,' grumbled Jo, lying on the rug. - Louisa May Alcott "He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull." - Joseph Conrad The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way towards the lagoon. - William Golding We were in the study-hall when the headmaster entered, followed by a new boy not yet in school uniform and by the handyman carrying a large desk. - Gustave Flaubert Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. - Dashiell Hammett "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect." - Franz Kafka A wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea, and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace. - George Eliot "He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish." - Ernest Hemingway Except for the Marabar Caves - and they are twenty miles off - the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary. - E.M. Forster 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. - Charles Dickens Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. - James Joyce It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. - Jane Austen W. Somerset Maugham, 1944 The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. - Stephen Crane "I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho' not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call'd me." - Daniel Defoe "'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die.'" - Salman Rushdie When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. - Frances Hodgson Burnett I went back to the Devon School not long ago, and found it looking oddly newer than when I was a student there fifteen years before. - John Knowles In the days when the spinning-wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses - and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread-lace, had their toy spinning-wheels of polished oak - there might be seen in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race. - George Eliot Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable. - Robert Louis Stevenson It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so. - Charles Dickens On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor. - Thomas Hardy While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton's academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour. - William Makepeace Thackery Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father's house in Beldover, working and talking. - D. H. Lawrence 1801 - I have just returned from a visit to my landlord - the solitary neighbor that I shall be troubled with. - Emily Brontë
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