FIRST LINERS

* For a long time, I went to bed early. —Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, (1913)
* 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 Great Gatsby (1925)

* 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, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

* Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877)
* Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

* This is the saddest story I have ever heard. —Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)
* 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. —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

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, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)



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, David Copperfield (1850)




Mother died today. —Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert)

The moment one learns English, complications set in. —Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990)

Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. —Anita Brookner, The Debut (1981)

To be born again, first you have to die." —Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. —Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)

Where now? Who now? When now? —Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable(1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
 
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. —Jeffrey Eugenides,Middlesex (2002)


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, The End of the Affair (1951)


It was love at first sight. —Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)


I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. —W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge (1944)


Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. —Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001)






If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. —Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)




Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. —GŸnter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959; trans. Ralph Manheim)


The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.  —L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953))


Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. —William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)




Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women. —Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)