‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’
—1984 by George Orwell
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‘Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.’
—Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
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‘As Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.’
—Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
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‘Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again.’
—Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
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‘Happy families are all alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’
—Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
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‘There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I’d been treated by at least six of them.’
—Fear of Flying by Erica Jong
‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’
—A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
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‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.’
—One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
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‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.’
—Ulysses by James Joyce
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‘I’m going to get that bloody bastard if I die in the attempt.’
—King Rat by James Clavell
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‘On top of everything, the cancer wing was number 13.’
—Cancer Ward by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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‘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.’
—The Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger