# Reading > General Literature >  Write down the 4th Sentence on the 23rd page of the book beside your hand

## mathson

Hello folks,

Write down the 4th Sentence on the 23rd page of the book beside your hand. :Yawnb:  

I am the 1st one:

The secrecy of the escapade, the walk through the night forest had been beautiful,out of the ordinary, exciting but not dangerous.

'Narcissus and Goldmund' By Hermann Hesse

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## Jazz_

A little random, but alright then  :Wink: 

"The work was going on." - The Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)

A bit of a boring sentence  :Tongue:

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## Lumiere

"I thought we were gentleman." 

_Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead_, by Tom Stoppard

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## Lulim

Sogar die Kriege sind bei den magischen Völkern von Riten begleitet, ohne die sie in Niederlagen enden würden oder zumindest wirkungslos blieben.
(With magic peoples, even wars are accompanied by rites; without, they would be resulting in defeats, or were, at least, to no purpose.)

-- Staatsideen und politische Programme der Weltgeschichte, ed. by Gaston Bouthoul

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## Red-Headed

Lat *noughte **thi left, half late ne rathe,

*'g' originally 'yogh'

**'th' originally 'thorn'

~ _Piers Plowman_, Langland

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## Kafka's Crow

"The serfs gave thanks to providence."
Pushkin _Eugene Onegin_

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## kiki1982

haha, great topic.  :FRlol: 

Here goes:

"Oh! oh! continua Corneille, comme ces gens sont en colère! Est-ce contre vous? est-ce contre moi?"

("Oh! oh! Cornelis went on, how angr are those people! Is it because of you? Is it because of me?")

_La Tulipe Noire_/_The Black Tulip_, Alexandre Dumas

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## mal4mac

"A shopkeeper's son, he leaves school at fourteen, ignorant, confused, and with a natural curiosity almost stifled." 

- in "Pure Pleasure" John Carey.

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## Dr Jekyll

In many cases we do not know what the aboriginal stock was, and so could not tell whether or not nearly perfect reversion had ensued.
- "The Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin

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## Kassiopeia

"He sighted on the tree, then pulled back on the bowstring."

'World without End' by Ken Follett

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## Emil Miller

If Gerald had been expecting courtroom drama he was to be disappointed, for both prosecution and defence knew the tribunal owed as much to political expediency as to due process of law, and the trials were a strangely muted affair with the accused listening abstractedly to arguments presented in a somewhat desultory way by the legal representatives.


"Pro Bono Publico" by Emil Miller.

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## Whifflingpin

Kind, and gentle, and good to every one who knew "how to behave himself," and dealing to every man full justice - meeted by his own measure - he was liable even to generous acts, after being severe and having his own way.

"Mary Annerley" - R D Blackmore

.

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## Dark Muse

> Naturally from the fruits of the hunt my lord was expected to tithe the priests of Hapi who were the titular shepherds of the goddess's flock of river-cows.


River God by Wilbur Smith

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## WJMuldowney

This was the closest book. . .

Sometimes, he says, he has "felt like the Wizard of Oz, behind the curtain, pulling all those levers."

Conversations with The Dead by David Gans.

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## neilgee

This is a great idea for a thread. I love it!

"The entrance resembled the door of a house and it had a portico which was sparkling as if it had been polished with brasso at all moments".

From "My life in the bush of ghosts" by Amos Tutola

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## Desolation

"Instead of taking her home I went back to the hotel with her old sweetheart.'

- Henry Miller, _The Rosy Crucifixion Part 1: Sexus_.

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## Eryk

> Mais son évanouissement lui avait fait tant de bien qu'il craignit de laisser échapper cette sensation de légèreté. 
> 
> --Le docteur Jivago


But his fainting spell had done him so much good that he feared to lose this feeling of lightness.

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## Homers_child

> 'Not alone,' said Amelia; 'you know, Rebecca, I shall always be your friend, and love you as a sister - indeed I will.'


_Vanity Fair_ by William Makepeace Thackeray.

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## hack

He belongs to the class which German writers...have denominated 'Polymaths'.


The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester

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## Gilliatt Gurgle

Great idea, Mathson. I'll bite:

"After that, perhaps even for a whole year, he did not visit the cemetary."

"The Broyhers Karamazov" - Dostoevsky

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## JuniperWoolf

Technically, the closest to me is The Primal Screamer by Nick Blinko (weird book). 

"A beautiful memory was retrieved: once, he stuck out his tongue and saw tiny, brightly colored people dancing in a circle upon it."

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## Jeremydav

Five or six birches in small clumps raised their skimpy, small-leaved tops here and there. 

-Dead Souls, Gogol

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## Akeldama

"He will only use a sword on this occasion, since wresting singlehanded with a dragon is far too hopeless even for the chivalric spirit."

-The Tolkien Reader by...er, Tolkien

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## Maryd.

Yes, yes, 

Ok, Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte (Penguin Classics edition)

"For a moment I considered it absurd that I should need such a weapon to gain admittance into my own residence."

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## Bastable

"Apparently, a whole day had gone by"

The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster

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## MarkBastable

Fan to Willie Nelson: "I bet you don't remember me."


_Alphabet Juice_, Roy Blount Jr

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## Zeniyama

"Perhaps they drank nothing either."

_The Metamorphosis_ by Franz Kafka.

For some reason, this book of Kafka I have always ends up on the table I'm sitting at.

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## Isitandthink

He would say, "That takes nothing from the poor."

Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

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## DanielBenoit

Oh this looks like so much fun!

"'Then they know about you here and will certainly remember you.'"

The Idiot by Dostoyevsky


"It has been maintained secondly that the concept of 'Being' is indefinable."

Being and Time by Heidigger


(and now since I'm bored, I shall indulge)


"'The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall, / Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.'"

Rhapsody on a Windy Night by T.S. Eliot


"He writes because for him it is a luxury which becomes more agreeable and more evident, the fewer there are who buy and read what he writes."

Fear and Trembling by Kierkegaard


"Go gentle Marcus, to thy nephew Lucius; / Thou shalt inquire him out among the Goths."

Titus Andronicus by Shakespeare


"-There was a battle sir."

Ulysses by James Joyce


"Ich kann nur von ihnen sprechen, sie aussprechen kann ich nicht."

Tractus Logico-Philosophicus by Wittgenstein

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## sixsmith

In truth, the book most fitting of the OP's description is Calvino's 'The Complete Cosmicomics' but the relevant sentence is far too long. Thus:

'Do you think you're angry that he's getting all the attention and the new toys?'

'Mother's Milk' - Edward St Aubyn

I can assure you, the Calvino was better. But 'Mother's Milk' is a fine book nonetheless.

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## kiki1982

I've got another one:

'Sanitation and housing was terrible, in many British slums, up to and including the mid-twentieth century.'

from the introduction of _The Victorians_, A N Wilson

And that concludes my collection.

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## Pensive

Nice idea for a thread! 

'Adeline Armand had had a portrait of herself propped up in what must have been the study.' - Foreign Fruit by Jojo Moyes

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## Eryk

Some of the younger children who had escaped the plague were wandering disconsolately in the abbot's garden, and Li Kao pointed to a small boy.

Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart

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## jstrats

He held out his copybook.

From Ulysses, James Joyce, Gabler Edition, Vintage Books

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## blp

'Good people, that is.' 

From an old Penguin edition of Brecht's _Parables for the Theatre: The Good Woman of Setzuan and The Caucasian Chalk Circle_.

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## Zeniyama

"But I knew them, I must have known them, I had only to find them again and I would sweep, with the clipped wings of necessity, to my mother."

_Molloy_ by Samuel Beckett.

By the way, I'm past section one of this book.

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## jaredalynch

In turn, she disowned them.
- John Irving L_ast Night in Twisted River_

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## tamlynn

"Those who are much admired are, it is held, taken by the Sidhe [faerie], who can use ungoverned feeling for their own ends, so that a father, as an old herb doctor told me once, may give his child into their hands, or a husband his wife." _The Celtic Twilight_ by W.B. Yeats

This is a very interesting collection of Irish folklore that Yeats wrote.

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## neilgee

Story-telling so much of it, which is what men do naturally.

Alan Bennett - The History Boys

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## MarieG

"He never eats dumplings, he don't - he eats nothing but steaks, and likes 'em rare."

-Moby Dick by Herman Melville

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## neilgee

'I don't mean he has said so in so many words to me but it is in his mind; am not a mind-reader but I am sure it is there, Your Excellency...'

Chinua Achebe - Anthills of the Savanna

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## Madame X

_An apostrophe () marks the place where the vowel is elided._

_Greek Grammar_; Herbert Weir Smyth 

 :Biggrin:

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## kiki1982

haha Madame X  :FRlol: 

I have moved on from Dumas now... So I can have another go, can't I? I like this game  :Biggrin: .

'I struggled to get away, and yet did it but faintly neither, and he held me fast, and stll kissed me, till he was almost out of breath, and then, sitting down, saysi, 'Dear Betty, I am in love with you.'

_Moll Flanders_, Daniel Defoe

Still she 'tried' to get away... Shame she didn't, shame on you Moll, you should be a decent girl  :FRlol: . 

Oh my God, no wonder that the book was deemed indecent and banned by the pope! I like it  :Biggrin: . Very indecent  :Tongue: .

I'd like to see the film about it. The actress said she had a great time, lying in the bed all the time and falling asleep between scenes...  :Biggrin:

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## neilgee

> haha Madame X 
> 
> I have moved on from Dumas now... So I can have another go, can't I? I like this game .
> 
> 'I struggled to get away, and yet did it but faintly neither, and he held me fast, and stll kissed me, till he was almost out of breath, and then, sitting down, saysi, 'Dear Betty, I am in love with you.'
> 
> _Moll Flanders_, Daniel Defoe
> 
> Still she 'tried' to get away... Shame she didn't, shame on you Moll, you should be a decent girl . 
> ...


That's got to be one of the best yet. Excellent sentence! I should read more Defoe: how about his biography of Dick Turpin?

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## purpleViolet

My mother stomped off ahead, muttering, 'you're making a rod for your own bleeding backs,' as she attempted to light a cigarette in the stiff june gale.

Adrian Mole - the prostate years

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## kiki1982

> That's got to be one of the best yet. Excellent sentence! I should read more Defoe: how about his biography of Dick Turpin?


If you like that one, how about this? This really made me roll on the floor yesterday (or in my bed anyway). I will spare you the story behind it which is also pretty saucy, but it's about a wedding night:

'Modesty forbids me to reveal the secrets of the marriage bed, but nothing could have happened more suitable to my circumstances than that, as above, my husband was so fuddled when he came to bed, that he could not remember in the morning whether he had had any conversation with me or no, and I was obliged to tell him he had, though in reality he had not, that I might be sure he could make no inquiry about anything else.'

 :FRlol:   :Eek:  So drunk you can't remember that you managed to do it or not?! And that on your wedding night where you are supposed to make sure your wife is a virgin... 

Correction, 'had conversation'  :Tongue: 

That reminds me of a passage in _Lost in Austen_: not 'the night we kissed', but 'the night we... spoke'. 'Conversation' and the like must have been a regular euphemism.

Imagine it:

hubby: 'Hello my dear, did we have (a good) conversation yesterday or not?'
Moll: 'Yes, my darling, a very long one indeed.'

 :FRlol:  Modesty forbids her...

I don't know how _Dick Turpin_ is. This is my first Defoe. I was making myself up for difficult, but I was so surprised to see that the language is pretty easy. The spelling, I think, has been updated, though.

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## Snowqueen

_And the same click in the brain told Adam that his father was not a great man, that he was, indeed, a very strong willed and concentrated little man wearing a huge busby._

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

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## mal4mac

Last time I tried this I came up with a good sentence. And it's happened again! Spooky. The sentence is:

"Please don't equate simplicity with stupidity"

from "The Little Book of Common Sense Investing" by John C. Bogle (A very useful book for literati who want to spend as liitle time as possible in the sewers of investment planning, and want to give away as liitle as possible of their money to greedy and stupid bankers.)

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## DanielBenoit

"All right," Wilson said.

~The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

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## Lokasenna

Because I happen to be on the twenty-third page:

"Jafnan skemmtu þau Helga sér at tafli ok Gunnlaugr." :Biggrin: 

_Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu_.

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## kiki1982

And what does it mean...  :Redface:

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## badtrip

> And what does it mean...


yeah, what does it mean?  :Wink: 

"W akcie miłosnym tkwi wielkie podobieństwo do tortury lub operacji chirurgicznej"

Charles Baudelaire, "My Heart Laid Bare"

it would be something like: "In the act of lovemaking there's a great resemblance to torture or surgery"

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## kiki1982

I was a little bemused about the French, until I saw it was in Polish (the l goves everything away). I was just seeing which words I still knew from my immersion in September when I saw the translation... 

Not a lot, I'm afraid... only 'wielki', 'akcie' (not too difficult), 'operacji chirurgicznej', 'do' and 'w'. I couldn't remember what 'lub' was, but I had heard it often.

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## Lokasenna

> And what does it mean...


Its a bit clunky in English, but it roughly translates to "Helga was always at table (which means playing a board-game similar to chess) with Gunnlaugr."

And they say romance is dead...

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## Dark Muse

From The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl

_As he sat, Manning heard a surprising clicking sound from anteroom._

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## kiki1982

> Its a bit clunky in English, but it roughly translates to "Helga was always at table (which means playing a board-game similar to chess) with Gunnlaugr."
> 
> And they say romance is dead...


aaaahh

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## bouquin

_When I entered the temple, he was asleep on his back, with a brick wrapped in sackcloth under his head as a pillow._ 
- *An Obedient Father* (Akhil Sharma)

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## Jazz_

In this state of her spirits, a letter was delivered to her from the post, which contained a proposal particularly well timed. (Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen)

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## Jazz_

> "Ich kann nur von ihnen sprechen, sie aussprechen kann ich nicht."
> 
> Tractus Logico-Philosophicus by Wittgenstein


My German is a little lacking... something like "Only I can speak, you can't pronounce" ??? Is that close?  :Wink:

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## kiki1982

> My German is a little lacking... something like "Only I can speak, you can't pronounce" ??? Is that close?


Not really...

'I can only speak _of_ you, pronounce you I cannot.'

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## Kafka's Crow

Any lady.

Hilary Mantel _Wolf Hall_

Next sentence is: "Any well-conected pricess whom he thinks might give him a son.

(Yes it is about Henry VIII's time)

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## Jazz_

> Not really...
> 
> 'I can only speak _of_ you, pronounce you I cannot.'


Ah, that makes more sense, thanks  :Smile:

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## Maida

"As I run I tell myself to think of a river."

From What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

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## toni

"Last month, much to Langdon's embarrasment, _Boston Magazine_ had listed him as one of that city's top ten most intriguing people - a dubious honor that made him the brunt of endless ribbing by his Harvard colleagues."

From The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown  :Sick:

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## DanielBenoit

> "Last month, much to Langdon's embarrasment, _Boston Magazine_ had listed him as one of that city's top ten most intriguing people - a dubious honor that made him the brunt of endless ribbing by his Harvard colleagues."
> 
> From The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown


Oh bravo! I admire your bravery. That book is just teeming with little nasty treasures like these.

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## neilgee

More comfortable down below in that thick stew pouring into the Gare St Lazare, the whores in the doorways, seltzer bottles on every table; a thick tide of semen flooding the gutters.

Henry Miller - _Tropic of Cancer_

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## Three Sparrows

Deeply moved with such a generous gift, which included a large shot pouch and finely wrought brass powder flask, Simon promptly-and with Butlers approval-named the weapon Jacob, feeling that in times to come it would stand by him as the miller himself had done.

Allan Eckart, the Frontiersmen

Whew, it just _had_ to be that sentence!

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## cs4jws

"She had this thing where guys would propose to her all the time, which I never understood."

*My Horizontal Life: A Collection Of One-Night Stands* by Chelsea Handler

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## Dark Muse

From Koko by Peter Straub

"Then Poole heard a faint click and rustle, as of some object being pulled from a casing."

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## NickAdams

Angelic Host

Glory to God in the highest,
Heaven and earth do both Him praise,
Who with one Word brought all things into being
And continues to uphold them with His gaze.

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## Jazz_

"When I asked if I could just ride out to the rivermouth with Loonie he shook his head."

Breath by Tim Winton

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## bouquin

_Aubrey was kneeling down, holding one of the baby's legs._

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## IJustMadeThatUp

Marcos sank into a deep depression that lasted two or three days, at the end of which he announced that he would never marry and that he was embarking on a trip around the world.

-The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

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## Koa

The headlines were strangely frightening, with an inhuman cheerfulness and power: [...]

(can't be bothered writing it all, too long  :Biggrin: )

Victor Pelevin, "Omon Ra", trans. by Andrew Bloomfield.

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## Dr Jekyll

This is from _Lecturas Simplificadas: El Sombrero de Tres Picos:_

Garduña se muestra complaciente con el Corregidor. (Verdadero o Falso)

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## wlz

"The Irish ollave's chief interest was the refinement of complex poetic truth to exact statement." - Robert Graves, 'The White Goddess'.

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## bouquin

_He curled his hand round the back of his ear and inclined his head towards each girl to test her voice._

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## Petrarch's Love

_The Complete Works of Shakespeare_, Longman edition:

"Good sir, be patient."

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## Dark Muse

From Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard 

Trying to distract himself from these thoughts, Jim switched on the car radio.

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## wlz

"Be mithfull now, at all your micht" - 'Middle English Poetry.

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## bouquin

_The street swarmed with boys and girls who played in the middle of the street and when a droshky came by waited until the last possible moment to step aside._

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## Jazz_

"With the rhythms and symbols of poetry one can get into a reader - open him up and while he is open introduce things on a [sic] intellectual level which he could not or would not receive unless he were opened up," Steinbeck revealed to Columbia University undergraduate Herbert Sturz in 1953.

The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (Introduction by Robert Demott - where this sentence came from  :Wink: )

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## cgrillo

"First he takes about a double handful of shavings out of his grego pocket, and places them carefully before the idol; then laying a bit of ship biscuit on top and applying the flame from the lamp, he kindled the shavings into a sacrificial blaze."

Moby-Dick, Herman Melville

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## Uberzensch

"He felt that he had chosen the one who was in all respects the superior; and a man naturally likes to look forward to having the best."

Middlemarch - George Eliot

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## Zeniyama

"Didn't the pamphlets claim there was elbow room?"
_Sometimes a Great Notion_ by Ken Kesey.

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## Haricot Very

"D'ailleurs, pour la brosse à dents, la sonnette et le bronze de Barbedienne, monsieur est au courant et il vous répondra aussi bien que moi."

My translation attempt: "Besides, regarding the toothbrush, the bell and the Barbedienne bronze, Monsieur is fully informed and can respond to you as well as myself."

_Huis Clos/No Exit_ by Jean-Paul Sartre

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## sammyuk

The book closest to my hand is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 




> Chance of cardiac arrest; be better, he reflected, if I lived in town where those buildings have a doctor standing by with those electro-spark machines.

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## Katy North

Oooo, I have two books beside my hand right now.

"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul." -- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.

The Gospel of Thomas is thought by some to be the lost source document known by scholars as Q, or the Sayings of Jesus, which lies behind Matthew, Mark, Luke, the Synoptic Gospels; it is probably related to that source. -- A Brief History of Secret Societies by David V. Barret

I have a somewhat ecclectic taste in books.

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## bouquin

_'In fact,' she mused, 'if he'd give himself a closer shave ... by the way, is Hemingway old?'_

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## Eliot Rosewater

_"My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom."_

James Joyce, Dubliners.

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## novelsryou

A little fishing was done in the port, and a quantity of strolling about by night, and looking seaward: particularly at those times when the tide was made, and was near flood.

ATOTC ~ Dickens

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## PoeticPassions

I have two books next to me. The first is from POINT COUNTER POINT by Huxley"

"In the laboratory, at his desk, he was as old as science itself."

THE LOGIC OF VIOLENCE IN CIVIL WAR, by Stathis Kalyvas:
"Unlike civil wars, riots tend to be a predominantly urban phenomenon, lacking significant retaliation, heavily influenced by institutional (often electoral) incentives, and facilitated by crowd anonymity; the ratio of perpetrators to victims tends to be inverse in riots ad civil war: in the former participation is public and the victims are an unlucky few, whereas in the latter a few participate directly in victimizing an unlucky public."

*whew*...

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## wlz

"Each was full of a venomous-green dust." -Herta Muller, 'The Land of Green Plums'.

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## bouquin

_She is on the front doorstep, talking to Joseph, whose caravan is parked with five others by the side of the road, two miles from here._

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## kiki1982

I was eager to finish _Moll Flanders_ so I could put another one into this thread. I know, I'm strange... I like wacko things!  :Biggrin: 

'Er war schon fast ganz umgedreht, als er sich, immer auf dieses Zischen horchend, sogar irrte und sich wieder ein Stück zurückdrehte.'

'He had already almost turned hmself, when he, still listening to this sizzling noise, made a mistake and turned himself back a little.'

_Die Verwandlung_, Franz Kafka.

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## Return Journey

I hung it up in net sacks and although it went green on the outside the middle was good.
My Lively Lady, Sir Alec Rose. 
Story of his single handed circumnavigation of the world.

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## DanielBenoit

Doing the 4th sentence of the 43rd page since I've already quoted this book:

"Tradition takes what it 'transmits' is made so inaccessible, proximally and for the most part, that it rather becomes concealed."
-Being and Time, Martin Heidigger

"It has therefore empirical principles, although, at the same time, it is in so far general, that it applies to the exercise of the understanding, without regard to the difference of objects."
-Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant

"And there was a famine in the land: and Abram went down into Egypt to sojourn there; for the famine _was_ grievous in the land."
-The Bible

"Mathematicians and philosophers had begun to have serious doubts about whether even the most concrete theories, such as the study of whole numbers (number theory), were built upon solid foundations."
-Godel, Escher, Bach , Douglas Hoffstander

"The oven smokes in cheerless October / A BAD COLD HE HAD OF IT JUST THE WORST TIME / JUST THE WORST TIME OF THE YEAR FOR A REVOLUTION / Through the suburbs blooming cement goes / Dr. Zhivago in sorrow / for his wolves / IN THE WINTER SOMETIMES THEY CAME INTO THE VILLAGE AND TORE APART A PEASANT."
-Hamletmachine, Heiner Mueller

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## Jeremydav

Benedictus vinum et unguentum desiderat. 

It's a Beginner's Latin book.

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## Heid

"You will understand that you cannot be permitted to see her, no, not in any circumstances; accordingly I have required her to be positioned behind that sheet."

Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie.

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## neilgee

What! a man who was trying to slip a noose over every neck in the Republic that he might tighten it at his pleasure!

Romola by George Eliot

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## keilj

But the insult felt on both sides was so great that there was no question of reconciliation and the Price, utterly furious, used every possible means to turn the matter to his advantage, which in essence meant only one thing - to deprive his former steward of his last means of subsistence.

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## Dark Muse

He had been working for days on a study of St. John Baptizing the Neophyte and was upset becasue he could not clarify his concept oof Jesues. 

The Agony and the Ecstasy ~ Irving Stone

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## LeavesOfGrass

He wrote a book on natural philosophy in the style of his Ionian predecessors, acknowledging a particular debt to Anaximenes; it was the first such treatise, we are told, to contain diagrams. 

From: A Brief History Of Western Philosophy by Anthony Kenny

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## lyni

'Ye can smell it.'
The Dragon Charmer -Jan Siegel

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## WuWei

But a villainous affair it is, and will one day so blend and confound us all together, that no one shall be able to stand up and swear, "That his own great grand father was the man who did either this or that"

(Laurence Sterne, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman")

first post here, hi everybody!

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## Henry IX

The requirement is imprecise. I don't know whether to start the count with the text of the book, or to include the front matter. And I don't know whether to count a sentence that ends on page 23 but starts on page 22 as the first. So, I will give the resulting sentence using both page-count approaches, and counting a partial sentence as the first.

Nearest book, The Bible: "The Newberry Bible" Large Type Reference Edition.
1. Count front matter: "And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters"
2. Count text: "And Ahimelech said, 'I wot not who hath done this thing: neither didst thou tell me, neither yet heard I of it, but today.'"

Next nearest book: "Dandelion Wine", Ray Bradbury, Bantam Books, 1976 edition, 1985 printing
1. Count front matter: "They fell, thrashed, and rolled."
2. Count text: "Candy-store man samples his own stuff, I should think."

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## Dark Muse

The boys seem very cheerful, and I want to go to them: I want to be with Graham, and watch his friends. 

Villette by Charlotte Bronte

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## BienvenuJDC

He wore blue silk stockings, blue knee pants with blue buckles, a blue ruffled waist and a jacket of bright blue braided with gold.

The Patchwork Girl of Oz ~ L Frank Baum

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## kiz_paws

> He wore blue silk stockings, blue knee pants with blue buckles, a blue ruffled waist and a jacket of bright blue braided with gold.
> 
> The Patchwork Girl of Oz ~ L Frank Baum


Oh I LOVE this book!!!  :Smile: 

_"...It's possible to get the sense you're being toyed with, that Mr. Calvino is fiddling with you and doesn't much care whether Rome is burning or not; that "reality" and "truth" are, for him, categories irrelevant to the hermetic world of art._.."
--taken from MOVING TARGETS, by Margaret Atwood

----------


## bouquin

_Aldous knew how it upset her._

----------


## janesmith

In an alcove, at the turning, standing on an oak coffin stool was a jar.

"The Children's Book"- A.S.Byatt

----------


## kiki1982

Yeah, I can do it again!  :Biggrin:  I didn't do it earlier because this book was slow. 

'A breeze flauntig ever so warmly down the Mall through the thin trees, past the bronze heroes, lifted some flag flying in the British breast of Mr Bowley and he raised his hat as the car approached and let the poor mothers of Pimlico press close to him, and stood very upright.'

_Mrs Dalloway_, Virginia Woolf

Don't know what to think yet  :Goof:

----------


## neilgee

He was baptised on February 5 at St Joseph's Chapel of Ease, Roundtown, now the church of St Joseph, Terenure, by the Reverend John O'Mulloy, CC.

James Joyce by Richard Ellman.

----------


## Snowqueen

Graham did like it very well, and almost always got it. 

Villette by Charlotte Bronte

----------


## kiki1982

And yes, I have started a new book! I don't know why I find this topic so much fun.  :Blush5: 

'Heureusement quelqu'un vint tirer [Gringoir] d'embarras et assumer la responsabilité.'

'Fortunately, someone came to get [Gringoir] out of his predicament and took up the responsibility.'

Victor Hugo, _The Hunchback of Notre Dame_/_Le Notre Dame de Paris_, 1830.

----------


## paradoxical

'He lit the cigarette and nodded, watching me through the smoke.'

_The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction_, R.V. Cassill

(The story is "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin)

----------


## Dark Muse

But they became throat cutters 

The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood

----------


## Dogbrick

One morning Jem and I found a load of stovewood in the backyard.

To Kill A Mockingbird.

----------


## Hurricane

Nice-looking merchandise, the kind a rich promoter would buy in the yard and have somebody paste his bookplate in. 

The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler.

----------


## Mariner

The Hell's Angels had made headlines before, and the Lynch report--based on a survey of old police files--contained little that was new or startling. 

Hell's Angels, A Strange and Terrible Saga - Hunter S. Thompson

----------


## ForKnowledge

Acel brought out his tobacco sack. Hungry Men Edward Anderson

----------


## Mariner

Shasta soon learned, when he heard Bree talking like that, to prepare for a gallop.

The Horse and His Boy -- CS Lewis

----------


## Dark Muse

At that moment Bissett's entery interrupted us. 

The Quincunx, Charles Palliser

----------


## Babak Movahed

"Each relieves his mind of the burden by recourse to his own stimulant and it is at such times as this that the real artist is capable of producing a masterpiece"

The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat

----------


## janesmith

But as soon as their door was shut they rushed headlong through the dark apartment, bumping against the furniture, till they got to the dining-room where Monsieur Josserand was writing by the feeble light of a little lamp.

"Pot-Bouille" (Pot Luck) - Emile Zola

----------


## rive gauche

Floods with no rim or horizon, leewardings wholly free, as though the wind's direction were open forever; these intimate an available female presence beyond flirtation, dangerous because she incarnates the Oedipal trespass.

*The Best Poems of the English Language*
-_From Chaucer Through Robert Frost_-

-Harold Bloom

----------


## bouquin

_I have a lot of protective flesh over it but I carried a bruise there for some time._

----------


## One Gallant

"They hankered after the old familiar Paris of narrow streets and class mixing, where ramshackle workers' housing cluttered up the courtyards of the Louvre and the Tuileries Palace."

From Impressionism:Origins,Practice and Reception by Belinda Thomson.

----------


## Jazz_

"Over the subsequent nine years, she often amazed us, frequently astonished us, always delighted us, and in time evoked in us a sense of wonder that will remain with us for the rest of our lives."

A Big Little Life - Dean Koontz

----------


## Il Dante

I' mi ristrinsi a la fida compagna:

--Purgatorio

----------


## kiz_paws

_..."And I don't really have time for that because I have to push the president, and when I'm not pushing him, I have to sit in my room and look at my phone until somebody somewhere else dials my number and makes it ring...."_

Buying Cigarettes For The Dog
Stories by Stuart Ross

----------


## L.M. The Third

"For two years I have only had insults and outrage from her."

Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

----------


## cgrillo

"So back to the whitewashed library of the monastery--with that liver still in shrieking requisition, as it had been loudly, while they looked at the silent sight they came to see--and there through the merits of the case as summoned up by the Abbot."

Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens

----------


## paradoxical

"They don't think nothing of pulling a shot-tower up by the roots, and belting a Sunday-school superintendent over the head with it--or any other man."
_
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_, Mark Twain

----------


## lyni

Folk believed, generally, that all I did was mix inks, prepare quills and keep the workroom tidy. Hearts Blood by Juliet Marillier.

----------


## jet.thursday

the closest book i found, though it's on top of my comp. desk  :Tongue: 

_Greg took a deep breath and pushed with all his hands._

this may seem odd, it is from R.L Stine Goosebumps "Say Cheese and die"..haha  :Rofl: 
i really enjoyed those books, oh as when i was young  :Bawling:

----------


## Aravona

'Skip the <table> tag for the page layout.'

CSS Manual was the closest book!

----------


## Dark Muse

"The evocation settled the matter."

Lolita~ Vladimir Nabokov

----------


## *Classic*Charm*

"We may hope for a good deal or cruelty and unchastity"

C.S. Lewis- The Screwtape Letters


Seriously.

----------


## BienvenuJDC

"Are you a Munchkin?" asked Dorothy.

_The Wonderful Wizard of Oz_
L. Frank Baum

----------


## bouquin

_In the interior there was a smell of stagnant water, rodents, rotting wood._

----------


## Wilde woman

Neat topic!

From L'Uomo che sapeva contare by Malba Tahan




> L'Uomo Che Contava mostra un metodo originale per contare i cammelli di una grande carovana.


Translation: The Man Who Counts demonstrates an original method for counting the camels from a big caravan.  :Biggrin5:

----------


## chrissy613

the closest book to my hand was a dictionary...lol..let's see the goods  :Smile: 



"afforest: To convert (land) into forest. 

okay.....lol

----------


## Dark Muse

The title seemed suggestive, and he was in the habit of reading something light on his train journey home. 

That Shadow of the Wind ~Carlos Ruiz Zafon

----------


## Bastable

Revelation can be more perilous than revolution.

Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle - Vladimir Nabokov

----------


## Candide

They differ, again, in their length: for Tragedy endeavors, as far as possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun, or but slightly to exceed this limit; whereas the Epic action has no limits of time.

From Criticism: Major Statements 4th edition
Aristotle, The Poetics.

Boring literary criticism textbook! Lemme grab my fun read...

The knife hung beside the dead man's empty leather gun holster, from which Havermeyer had stolen the gun.
From Catch-22

----------


## gruntingslime

A fiendish cloud of feathers and wings arose screaming, and Adela, like a furious maenad protected by the whirlwind of her thyrsus, danced the dance of destruction.

The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz

----------


## Dark Muse

"What do you have in your mouth young man?"

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay ~ Michael Chabon

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

"Ninety-nine point two."

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

----------


## ben.!

"There was no refusing, however inconvenient it might have seemed to fight a war with Meissen porcelain under one arm."

_Atonement_ - Ian McEwan

----------


## bouquin

_'The lettuces are important to me,' she said, looking down at her bracelets and then across to him again._

----------


## Dark Muse

And Why? 

Under the Sun of Satan ~ Georges Bernanos

----------


## bouquin

_Do you?_

----------


## Manalive

She took it, her face pleased, warm, though not very much surprised.

William Faulkner- Light in August

----------


## Dark Muse

You suffer horribly....Ah!

The Picture of Dorian Gray ~ Oscar Wilde

----------


## Olga4real

Actually the book beside my hand is Russian-English dictionary, bur right now I am reading 'Swejk' by Jaroslav Hasek and the sentence is: * Ez a Stendler külonben is borzásztó peches ember volt, már magándetektív korában is.*

Which means 'But even Mr Stendler had awfully bad luck as a private detective.'

----------


## semi-fly

Diez años antes, había una gran cantidad de retratos de lo que parecía una gran pelota rosada con gorros de diferentes colores, pero Dudley Dursley ya no era un niño pequeño, y en aquel momento las fotos mostraban a un chico grande y rubio montando su primera bicicleta, en un tiovivo en la feria, jugando con su padre en el ordenador, besado y abrazado por su madre...

From Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal 
- Practicing Spanish using a well known story

----------


## bouquin

_It used to be a microphone, and you'd take polaroids._

----------


## purplybob

"Yes, sir." _Go Down Moses_ - William Faulkner

----------


## cgrillo

"_World._ Hast thou a Wife and Children?"

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress

I like this thread.  :Smile:

----------


## wokeem

"Lets go play with Quentin and Luster" Faulkner,_ The Sound and The Fury_.

This is such a challenging read for me.

----------


## snowdrop17

"It was all bravado: passionless and therefore unreal." 
_Man and Superman_ - G.B.Shaw

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

"The lower courses of a wall, the dado, orthostates and covering courses, had surfaces projecting slightly from the plane formed by the remainder of the wall, an echo of the contrast between stone footing and mud brick."

Sir Bannister Fletcher's - "A History ofArchitecture"

Gilliatt

----------


## bouquin

_The furniture, with its curves and chipped gilding, so like the former grandeur of a rundown Westwood motel, looks very odd and pretentious to the American eye when you first come to France, until you remember that this is their normal furniture, the Louis were their kings._

----------


## Sirkka

"Abgesehen davon wusste ich vieles - sehr vieles - überhaupt nicht." Sternenschatten - S. Lukianenko

----------


## aliengirl

"I know ye to be cowards, and it is to cowards I speak."

The Adventures of Mowgli -- Rudyard Kipling

----------


## Tarvaa

Suddenly there was a sharp noise.

("The Box Man" by Kobo Abe)

----------


## bouquin

_I took everything out, and, stretching out among the fallen peaches, I rested them across my abdomen._

----------


## David Lurie

Which hand?
I'll go with the left so I'll have the right one left to type.

"The women sought work as typewriters, stenographers, seamstresses, and weavers."

The devil in the white city by Erik Larson

----------


## cgrillo

"Many sensible things banished from high life find an asylum among the mob."

_White-Jacket_, Herman Melville

----------


## Dark Muse

"If the add-a-beads got tacky, what else will as you go along?" 

The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris

----------


## aliengirl

"Let us then once for all drop all nonsense about Joan being cracked, and accept her as at least as sane as Florence Nightingale, who also combined a very simple iconography of religious belief with a mind so exceptionally powerful that it kept her in continual trouble with the medical and military panjandrums of her time. "


'Saint Joan' by G.B. Shaw

----------


## rabid reader

"it is precisely laughter that destroys the epic, and in general destroys any hierarchical (distancing and valorized) distance."

_The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays_, by Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist.

----------


## Leland Gaunt

There was silence for a moment.

Arthur C. Clarke- Childhood's End

----------


## dafydd manton

Brilliant!
"Opening the catalogue - which has been cleverly constructed so as to be operable to both left- and right-handed users - you will notice that each magnificent full-colour life-size page is equipped with its own individual number, expertly chosen to correspond to the page it is on, in elegant time-honoured numerals."

69 for 1, Alan Coren.

----------


## shoutitout1997

"You see Marullo has arthritis, and besides he has other interests."

The Winter of Our Discontent

----------


## semi-fly

'Looks pretty happy to be helping the Empress of Scotland, doesn't he.' from _Doctor Who - The Forgotten Army_

----------


## Dark Muse

When the meat had been removed from the carcass, the women handed them the skin.

Sarum ~ Edward Rutherfurd

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

"And parting summer's lingering blooms delay'd;"

Oliver Goldsmith - "The Deserted Village"

----------


## Cazzasaurus

"There was crackling, something breaking in his brain as the pain swelled and he had just managed to think, with complete certainty - I'm dying."

Handling the Undead - John Ajvide Lindqvist

----------


## Dark Star

"What men, in their egoism, constantly mistake for a deficiency of intelligence in woman is merely an incapacity for mastering that mass of small intellectual tricks, that complex of petty knowledges, that collection of cerebral rubber-stamps, which constitute the chief mental equipment of the average male."

H.L. Mencken -- A Mencken Chrestomathy

----------


## lattywatty

The 23rd page of my book is a picture of a grade card :P

I'll take the 24th page instead, then:

" 'From now on that's all you will be able to do about it.' "

Fairly dull, then. From _Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall_, Spike Milligan. Hilarious book!

----------


## RaoulDuke

_"Those who claim to have the solution are contradicted almost immediately."_

The Coming Insurrection - The Invisible Committee

----------


## bouquin

_What could the rest of the world do for him that could not be done in St. Botolphs?_

----------


## DocHeart

He would tour the local neighbourhood recovering things from bins that others had seen as mere rubbish.

_Outcomes Upper Intermediate Student Book_, Heinle - Cengage Learning

----------


## dafydd manton

Dann sprach er ferner zu ihm; "Ich bin Jehova, der dich aus dem Ur der Chaldaear herausgefuehrt hat, um dir dieses Land zu geben, damit du is in Besitz nimmst

----------


## windup_bird

i was curious as to what would turn up, hoping for a rather impressive piece of writing, but this is what i got

"You aren't sore, are you?"  :Biggrin: 

- Humboldt's Gift - Saul Bellow

----------


## Esoteric_Muse

"No, he could live without us, " Sam agreed.

"The Man who Loved Children" by Christina Stead.

----------


## minstrelbard

"A translation table is a string t of exactly 256 characters: when you pass t as the first argument of a translate method , each character c of the string on which you call the method is translated in the resulting string into the character t[ord(c)]."

- Python Cookbook

OK, OK, I know you guys want something more literary than technical. Here's the sentence from the book on my bed, not the one on my desk:

"Henry has accepted the post of Ship's Doctor & I am no longer friendless in this floating farmyard."

- Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell

----------


## de Renal

"I admit, as not to leave me to judge that what, essentially, made nothing else much signify was simply my charming work."

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

----------


## bouquin

_Of the various supernatural Spentas, this was the duo with whom Lady Spenta Cama felt the most affinity._

----------


## Beautifull

"At other times his heart swelled with pride for her, for the way her love and joy shone with a brilliance that washed her skin clean of the slightest blemish."

-The Martyr's Song-Ted Dekker

----------


## Dodo25

"Enslaving those who score below a certain line on an intelligence test would not - barring extraordinary and implausible beliefs about human nature - be compatible with equal consideration."

Practical Ethics - Peter Singer.

----------


## mikemaster70

"About a hundred paces from the spot where the two friends were sitting sipping their wine the village of the Catalans rose behind a bare hill, exposed to the fierce sun and swept by the biting north-west wind."- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.

----------


## Dodo25

> "About a hundred paces from the spot where the two friends were sitting sipping their wine the village of the Catalans rose behind a bare hill, exposed to the fierce sun and swept by the biting north-west wind."- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.


Funny coincidence, I just watched the movie 'Sleepers' where this book is mentioned centrally.

----------


## mikemaster70

> Funny coincidence, I just watched the movie 'Sleepers' where this book is mentioned centrally.


I've heard of the film before and it sounds very interesting. I'll have to check it out some time  :Smile5:

----------


## neilgee

But here they were, carried over England's green hills, ferried down into narrow green valleys, pulling up in the parking lots of green medieval villages where thick-covered castles threw greenish shadows across their squat Sunbrite coach (they had got over their terror on the left side of the highway with the traffic thundering straight at them).

Carol Shields - "Larry's Party"

----------


## Evaril

"Down there, you can hear every hour."

Marcel Proust, _ The Guermantes Way_

----------


## lyni

When you get your hauberk and gambeson, you will wear them at all times, except when you're asleep, when they go on the stand here, half-unlaced and ready to put on.

To Hold the Bridge: An Old Kingdom Story in Legends of Australian Fantasy.

----------


## PoeticPractice

"What should ail me to harm this misbegotten and miserable babe?"

-Nathaniel Hawthorne; _The Scarlet Letter_

----------


## Dark Muse

At that moment Christina looked up toward my window 

The Angel's Game ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

----------


## bouquin

_Evelyn laughs, then claps as if delighted by Timothy's reluctance to vacate._

----------


## Genocide

^ That sounds interesting.

_Now try the full version of the C and G chords._

----------


## Lynne50

The pink cashmere kerchief stamped with red roses, was slipping to one side over her black and crimped hair.

The Virgin and the Gipsy by D.H. Lawrence

----------


## bouquin

_'Oh, it's not suprising, she's seven you know,' May paused for effect, 'It's a holy number, strange things happen in sevens, look at Elsie Norris.'_

----------


## kiki1982

yeah! I can do it again, after finally finishing Hugo's book...  :Banana: 

'On'y foreign tongues used in the days of the Tower of Babel, when no two families spoke alike.'

_Jude the Obscure_, Thomas Hardy.

----------


## miyako73

"Quiet and fixed on her back, she did not move or change her position, but she was breathing and snoring."

my novel (hehehehe)


Since I'm writing two at the same time, here's the other one:

"The pungent smell of the spices, according to the old medicine man who was always high on hash, could take away the breaths of the feared spirits and invisible creatures and would cause them to nosebleed."

----------


## kiki1982

'Isabella was very sure that he must be a charming young man; and was equally sure that he must have been delighted with her dear Catherine, and would therefore shortly return.' 

_Northanger Abbey_, Jane Austen

----------


## mrv

"Now it is all about politics in the paper, he said."

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , James Joyce

----------


## Sebas. Melmoth

'E. T. A. Hoffmann's words anticipate the phantasmagoria of Wagner's Venusberg.'

--Carl Dahlhaus, _Richard Wagner's Music Dramas_ (Cambridge UP, 1979)

----------


## LMK

"So long as any of the race were to be found, they had been marked out form other men-not strikingly, nor as with a sharp line, but with an effect that was felt rather than sponken of-by an hereditary character of reserve."

_The House of the Seven Gables_, Nathaniel Hawthorne

----------


## neilgee

"Mrs Smiling's hopes were dashed."

_Cold Comfort Farm_ by Stella Gibbons

----------


## SirLew

I shall forget my own name soon, I suppose.

_Persuasion_ by Jane Austen.

----------


## Musaeus

I wonder if this Flying Dutchman will ever be granted a 'redemption' anything like yours?

T Mann - Pro and Contra Wagner

----------


## bouquin

_I had my reservations, of course, but they were about other things, about more general failings, and all the time I was missing the obvious: he's untruthful._

----------


## grotto

We recognize that theories of history belong to a highly speculative and uncertain realm of thought, depending on the dangerous but necessary art of generalization.

----------


## LuggageFan

Besides, recent inpatient studies at John Hopkins showed that grieving people were more responsive to external stimuli during the morning hours.

----------


## dafydd manton

Auto-pilot control **** to OUT (clutches may be left IN), Superchargers to M (low) ratio, Air intakes to COLD and Brake Pressure to a Supply pressure of 250-300 lb./sq. in.

(Researching Avro Lancaster!)

----------


## LMK

"Her majesty always showed a great deal of interest in anything solid, especially if she could wear it-gold, silver, pearls or rare gems-and rewarded Captain Kennington with a knighthood."

----------


## Dark Muse

We always hope calamity will not overtake us in this lifetime, rather like children trying to aviod difficult lessons. 

Gatherer of Clouds ~ Sean Russell

----------


## breathtest

And he did. 

Mr Paradise - Elmore Leonard

----------


## Evaril

Ah! Interesting: there isn't a second let alone fourth sentence on my 23rd page of Sodom and Gomorrah by Proust! The sentence began on page 21 and ended on 24.

----------


## Sapphire

> He knew that the handling of children required a rare skill which was compounded of simplicity and complete honesty.


Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (V.S. Naipaul)

----------


## neilgee

"No, no, Hedgemon," the arrested man said, straining all over in his wish to convince, "there's one with a goatskin parchment who follows me, follows me and keeps writing all the time..."

_The Master and Margarita_ Bulgakov

----------


## bouquin

_Once more I was impressed by Elliott's knowledge and taste._

----------


## woody247

'This respect is owed to both your exploits and your name, although, like mine, your sanity's suspect.'

-Don Quixote

----------


## LMK

Did she still?

----------


## kiki1982

'Presently my mistress touched the bell, and in came a strapping maid-servant, who had let us in.'

_Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure_ - John Cleland

Shame really, there could have been some very saucy stuff, if the pages would only have been bigger  :Biggrin: .

----------


## iamnobody

But in spite of this, each of them--as is often the way with men who have selected careers of different kinds--though in discussion he would even justify the other's career, in his heart despised it. ANNA KARENINA. Is it cheating if the 'book at hand' is what I'm reading on-line?

----------


## PrettyHowTown

"Muslin can never be said to be wasted"

Northanger Abbey. Jane Austen

----------


## neilgee

"Do you like being...an actor?"

- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

----------


## Dark Muse

New Orleans! Not a bad place to spend a year in prison--except in summer.

Lancelot ~ Walker Percy

----------


## kiki1982

'Well ought a preest ensample for to yive
By his clenness how that his sheep shold live.'

Something like 'A priest ought to give example to his sheep how they should live by his cleanliness. (meaning chastity of course)'

Geoffrey Chaucer - _The Canterbury Tales_, General Prologue about the priest.

Hilarious  :Biggrin:

----------


## bouquin

_"Nobody seems to like her, down here, and I'm sure she's the best cat in the world!"_

----------


## fetish

"All is 'sex'."

----------


## EJMathews

"Silas Marner could very likely do as much, and more; and now it was all clear how he should have come from unknown parts, and be so "comical-looking."

----------


## LMK

"But I will only say that you will give yourself unnecessary trouble, for I shall take the matter into my own hands now."

----------


## bouquin

_'I repeat to you, but for the last time, stop pretending that you're a madman, robber,' Pilate said softly and monotonously, 'there's not much written in your record, but what there is is enough to hang you.'_

----------


## AdoreroDio

The Bible :]

Then Jacob made a vow, saying, "If God will be with me and will watch over me on this journey I am taking and will give me food to eat and clothes to wear so that I return safely to my father's house, then the LORD will be my God and this stone that I have set up as a pillar will be God's house, and of all that you give me I will give you a tenth."

----------


## Delta40

The last thirty years seemed to have mellowed him out completely. Red Dwarf

----------


## Jazz_

Not quite a sentence, but it's "Wool socks"  :Wink: 

The Worst Case Scenario Handbook: University

----------


## toni

Notice that the fallacy consists in arguing that if we allow one case of euthanasia to happen, you must allow it also to happen to other cases. 

- Philosophical Analysis, Seventh Edition

----------


## neilgee

He wrote it at the table listening to the woman's stories about Tin Head, slowly emptying his glass until he was nine-times-nine drunk, his gangstery face loosening, the crushed rodeo nose and scar-crossed eyebrows, the stub ear dissolving as he drank.

_Close Range_ by Annie Proulx

----------


## Aragorn Elessar

"We followed the Indian down a sordid and common passage, ill-lit and worse furnished, until he came to a door upon the right, which he threw open."

- The Sign of Four
by Arthur Conan Doyle
(one of the many adventures of Sherlock Holmes)

----------


## LuggageFan

An usher guided her to a reserved seat in the front row, then vanished.

----------


## Patrick_Bateman

"Those instruments that hang there mocking me"

Faust - von Goethe

----------


## Azazael

But I - I have lost everything and cannot begin life anew.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

----------


## LMK

"Soon she came to expect him, just after four o'clock, even in the rain, to which he seemed indifferent."

La's Orchestra...

----------


## Mr. Pedantic

"His commentary, though not lacking in merit, must rank below those of his predecessors."

'The Art of War' by Sun Tzu

Not particularly enthralling.

----------


## asdpok

"Nonsense," Annabel laughed, slapping him on the thigh.

The Devil´s Graveyard - Bourbon Kid

----------


## RaoulDuke

"But my mind is wandering".

Tom Wolfe - The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Not all that earth shattering as it turns out.

----------


## LMK

"Sighing, her stomach twisted into knots, she followed him into that bar, which, in the style of Spanish taverns, lacked windows, its interior hazy with shifting plains of smoke."

Beautiful Maria of My Soul, Oscar Hijuelos (just picked it up today, thought I put a hold on Mambo Kings, right author, wrong novel).

----------


## Patrick_Bateman

"Slight and highly strung, a golden Andalusian, as they call it, with black hair shining like satin, an eye that could flash lightning, and long dark lashes, with the distinction of a duchess in every movement that she made, with a poor girl's modesty and an unassuming grace, as sweet and pretty in her ways as a wild deer."

----------


## Dark Muse

Up you go, Mistress Carey and all of us go up with you.

The Other Boleyn Girl ~ Philippa Gregory

----------


## fetish

Or, as Ambedkar put it with his ingenious wordplay: "There will be outcasts as long as there are castes." - LIVING IN THE END TIMES - Zizek

----------


## bouquin

_"What about exercises?" he said._

----------


## Delta40

I handed her the invoice

----------


## Propter W.

The king consulted with his ministers and concluded that Siddhartha had grown weary of married life and needed diversion.

----------


## kiki1982

"My intention is not to follow the steps of that inimitable author, in describing such total perversion of intellect as misconstrues the objects actually presented to the senses, but that more common aberration from sound judgment, which apprehends occurrences indeed in their reality, but communicates to them a tincture of its own romantic tone and colouring." (few)

_Waverley_ - Sir Walter Scott.

----------


## AdoreroDio

Gilgamesh shouted, "By the life of Ninsun my mother and divine Lugulbanda my father, in the country of the Living, in this land I have discovered you dwelling; my weak arms and my small weapons I have brought to this land against you, and now I will enter your house."

-The Norton Anthology of World Literature Beginning to AD 100 (from the story Gilgamesh)

----------


## bouquin

_I apologize for being articulate._

----------


## Tallefred

He was a verrey parfit practisour.

Geoffrey Chaucer, prologue to The Canterbury Tales.

----------


## Dark Muse

Just then a heavy cloud passed across the face of the moon, so that we were again in darkness. 

Bram Stoker's Dracula

----------


## MadcapLaugher

He'd say *** instead of butt.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

----------


## LuggageFan

"Something of this must have eventually permeated his conversation, for Mr. Gingold shifted in his seat, made no comment whatever on Mr. Sharsted's pressing demands and only said, in another of his softly spoken sentences, 'Do have another sherry, Mr. Sharsted.'" - from short story, "Camera Obscura," written by Basil Cooper, in Alfred Hitchcock's anthology Scream Along with Me.

----------


## bouquin

_They went to school in a horse-drawn rickshaw._

----------


## urb

Already he was thinking of what to do with his new find.


_From Jurassic Park - Michael Crichton_

----------


## strumphyy

I really like this thread!
'Ah,' he said, 'you are not a dove. You are a wild-cat with open eyes, half dreaming on a bough, in a lonely place, as I have seen her. And I ask myself-What are her memories then?'
D. H. Lawrence, The Ladybird

----------


## Wilde woman

Who would assent to my babbling as madmen may ill-starred and ill-chosen words?

Apuleius _The Golden A s s_, Introduction by Jack Lindsay

----------


## sadparadise

I found 19 of the stubborn, mocking machines in the attic of what used to be their inventor's mansion, which in my time was the home of the College President, about a year after I came to work at Tarkington.
Hocus Pocus by Kut Vonnegut

----------


## qwas

I know that.

- Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

----------


## Aragorn Elessar

"He was an old animal, the hair around his muzzle nearly all white, and his head crowned by magnificent antlers."

- Magician, by Raymond E. Feist

----------


## fayalso

"What do you have in your mouth, young man?" said the boys' mother, marking her place with a butter knife.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

----------


## bree

I was the life and soul of that poxy little shindig - man what a square.

Russell Brand - My Booky Wook

----------


## bouquin

_On the green one-cent stamp in the educators group, just above the picture of the Lamp of Knowledge, was Horace Mann; on the red two-cent, Mark Hopkins; on the purple three-cent, Charles W. Eliot; on the blue four-cent, Frances E. Willard; on the brown ten-cent was Booker T. Washington, the first Negro to appear on an American stamp._

----------


## Rmort

Lol

"On that day she asked the librarian to recommend a book."

From "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" by Betty Smith

----------


## Armel P

In the book I'm reading, unfortunately the 4th sentence on the 23rd page is only:
I know that.

----------


## Pensive

"Girls like her were not supposed to have any problems." 

- Blue Bloods

----------


## Nick91

That time he went to Kockums tobaco factory, and there he sat at the tables for two years, first making the cigarr "Les Tres Coronas" for half a year, after that "El Turista" for an entire year and then "Donna Elvira".

From The Road by Harry Martinsson

----------


## WyattGwyon

This congregation admired the Reverend's bearing up, as they called it, under his suffering (though there were an evilly human few who envied him his Providence) and they had never had the full details of the Spanish affair.

----------


## Delta40

Beatlemania is like the frenzied dancing and shouting of voodoo worshippers and the howls and bodily writhings of converts among primitive evangelical sects in the southern states of America.

----------


## L.M. The Third

"My father whom I never knew was an Englishman."

----------


## Robert_Carter

Two descriptions of a father in a row!

"My father is a bootlegger."

- _Herzog_, by Saul Bellow

----------


## andave_ya

"In the first three instances, the distinguishing characteristic of "table," is shape, is retained, and the differentiations are purely a matter of measurement: the range of the shape's measurements is reduced in accordance with the narrower utilitarian function."

-_Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology_ by Ayn Rand.

It's not all THAT boring....

----------


## bouquin

_I want to hear facts._

----------


## Dark Muse

The barman nodded to him. 

Blood Meridian~Cormac McCarthy

----------


## Wilde woman

Don't skin your shoulders with those damnable big olive-branches.  :Hand: 

Lysistrata by Aristophanes, Dudley Fitts translation

This makes me want to read it even more! :Biggrin:

----------


## Patrick_Bateman

Wines, jars of cider and an almanac for 1808 - the old man

----------


## LuggageFan

Humans suffering from a conflict of signals aren't the best people to be holding guns, especially when they've just witnessed a natural childbirth, which definitely looked an un-American way of bringing new citizens into the world.

----------


## Lord Macbeth

Tom heaved a great sigh as she put her foot on the threshold.

-_The Adventures of Tom Sawyer_, Mark Twain

----------


## papayahed

Refer to 1910.399(a)(77) for definition of listed,and 1910.7 for nationally recognized testing laboratory. - 29 CFR 1910

----------


## AdoreroDio

"'Don't snatch,' said Abajai as he handed her a pottery bowl filled halfway, and a spoon."- Empress by Karen Miller

----------


## Sine_lege

"I'm not so sure" said the man slowly.

The Castle by Franz Kafka

----------


## <Trinity>

'He's my son all the same,' she said, smiling.
- A Passage to India by E.M. Forster -

----------


## deltakid

"He argued that everyone needs a secure psychological base from which they can develop."

Understand Psychology (Teach Yourself Series)

----------


## AlfredtheGreat

--"Now it is all about politics in the paper, he said.

_A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_, James Joyce

----------


## RaoulDuke

"A weird sort of contentment in those days".
- Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

I was hoping for something much more lecherous  :Frown: .

----------


## bouquin

_Funny how we dead never eat - yet still, some of us love to serve food._

----------


## DapperDrake

"Even though, of course, they are not such very prominent personae and belong to what is called the secondary or even the tertiary category, and even though the chief actions and mainsprings of this epic are not based upon them, and may concern and implicate them but lightly here an there, yet the author is exceedingly fond of being circumstantial in all things, and even though he himself is a native of Russia, he wishes, in this respect, to be as thoroughgoing as any German."

----------


## athomas911

"Let her come foward." ~Mayor Undersee, The Hunger Games

----------


## Dodo25

Some fail, a handful endure with their lights a little fogged, but most thrive, and many return to work in some form; work -- the ultimate badge of health.

Saturday - Ian McEwan

----------


## bouquin

_Propped outside Chip's apartment was a clear-plastic umbrella that Chip recognized, with relief, as Julia Vrais's._

----------


## Snowqueen

The consequence was that the Moriscos were growing richer and richer, and since they wrer exceedingly prolific were increasing in numbers. 

Catalina - Somerset Maugham

----------


## nikanamy

"You're a thought-criminal!"

(:

----------


## inbetween

All the victimes claimed Plogojowitz had come to their death beds at night and tried to strangle them.

'tis some book 'bout the vampire myth...

----------


## RaoulDuke

"In the slanting beams that streamed through the open doorway the dust danced and was golden." - The Picture of Dorian Gray

----------


## remy3x

His mother kissed him.
James Joyce - A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man

----------


## Gregory Samsa

"But-but-but-let me pull myself together- there is also this vision of him emerging from the bathroom, savagely kneading the back of his neck and sourly swallowing a belch."

Portnoy's Complaint

----------


## Taliesin

"Agnarr läks Grimniri juurde ning andis talle sarvetäie juua, öeldes, et kuningas teeb halvasti, kui laseb teda piinata, asja ees, teist taga."

Poetic Edda, translation from Icelandic to Estonian by Rein Sepp.

----------


## bouquin

_The boy had bitten her._

----------


## Ane

_We are living not only in the Age of America, but also in the Age of the Novel, at a moment when literature of a country without a first-rate epic verse or a memorable verse tragedy has become the model of half the world._

Leslie Fiedler - Love and Death in the American Novel

----------


## Rmort

"'Yeah i don't think i'll put it exactly like that but i'll deal with it." -Paper Towns by John Green

AND

"And now all i ask is a good swift ship and a crew of twenty men to speed me through my passage out and back." The Odyssey by Homer

----------


## Sapphire

I hastened to reply; but I thought of it, after an instant, not opposed to this concession to pursue: "Did she die here?"
_Henry James - The turn of the Screw_

----------


## prendrelemick

n before "hard" c, k, q, x = ng (zinc, u'ncle, tank, banquet,minx)

The Concise Oxford Dictionary.

----------


## Pensive

But I shan't bore you with my studies now - Maya

----------


## bouquin

_I placed my destiny in the hands of this chance encounter, but she passed by like all the others, like the last ones and the next ones, and then I would come down to earth, in a sorrier state than a torn sail drenched by the storm._

----------


## kelby_lake

This should show that you understand the background issues and theories relating to the project.

(Teaching Academic Writing: A Toolkit for Higher Education)

----------


## bohn

"Pity! Why pity me!" Marmeladov suddenly cried out, rising with his hand stretched forth, in decided inspiration, as if he had only been waiting for these words.

----------


## Silas Thorne

'Thus contact between foreigners and Chinese was carried out in the language of the foreigners (usually a pidgin variety of English), with the _compradores_ acting as translators.'

from 'China's English: A History of English in Chinese Education' by Bob Adamson

----------


## bouquin

_No doubt it was a secret thing._

----------


## kiki1982

"Add the chicken pieces and the chopped onion."

_Making the Most of Chicken, Poultry and Game_, John Carrier's Kitchen

(shame of the sentence, he can really write some tasty stuff!)

----------


## Emil Miller

He gave a faint sigh of satisfaction as he breathed in the pine-scented air of the garden and watched a ship making its way under an azure sky towards the port of Salerno.

A Tangled Web by Emil Miller.

----------


## papayahed

With gloss on one end, tuberose and incense on the other, this rollerball is a jetsetter's dream.

Sephora Holiday 2010 Catalog

----------


## MikeK

'Why, look around you: blood is flowing in rivers, and in such a jolly way besides, like champagne.'

- Dostoevsky, 'Notes From underground'

----------


## Greta Kin

"They got company tonight." Versh said.
- Faulkner, _The Sound and The Fury_

----------


## LuggageFan

"Well, then, it must be someone else."

----------


## bohn

"I'm relying on you, my dear friend," Anna Pavlovna said, also softly, "you'll write to her and tell me _comment le pere envisagera la chose. Au revoir."_ And she left the front hall.

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

> With gloss on one end, tuberose and incense on the other, this rollerball is a jetsetter's dream.
> 
> Sephora Holiday 2010 Catalog


Huh ?
I'm picturing a roller ball pen with incense burning at one end (?)
-----------------------

"In the case of hyphens, I have regularized among the selections to the extent of inserting them wherever internal divisions appeared in the form of spacing." 
Frank Hamilton Cushing - "Zuni -Selected Writings"


.

----------


## papayahed

> Huh ?
> I'm picturing a roller ball pen with incense burning at one end (?)
> -----------------------



Lip gloss AND perfume in one stick!!

----------


## hack

The president quickly put away the dumbbells
and opened the door, saying, "I beg your pardon."
-Tolstoy- Resurrection

----------


## callipygias

I found his carcass in my bed this morning.

_Lost in Cat Brain Land_, Cameron Pierce

----------


## weltanschauung

Uma rede CTS formada por uma indutância L e uma resistência R, tem uma constante de tempo dada por t=L/R. (microeletrônica - sedra/smith, 5 edição)

----------


## jaredalynch

I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age.

_The Magus_
John Fowles

----------


## abudabor

jones--therfore do not be alarmed if you should hear of his having been to me.
Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice

----------


## hugh1984

"I'm only going to eat, you to conquer."
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
This Earth Of Mankind

----------


## hack

That my answers are yours? -John Barth-The Floating Opera

----------


## bouquin

_You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege?_

----------


## kiki1982

My former book (I know it's agains the rules, but I am addicted to this topic and just HAVE to do it  :Biggrin: ):

'Er werde gleich die Ehre haben zu erscheinen!' (_Die Marquise von O... und andere Erzählungen_, Heinrich von Kleist)

'He would soon have the honour of appearing!' (_The Marquis of O... and other stories_)

The book I'm reading now (pressie from my father for Christmas):

'Zijn hoofd was zwaar zoals altijd wanneer hij ontwaakte.' (_Tussen Twee Paleizen_, Nagieb Mahfoez)

'His head was heavy like always when he woke up.' (_Palacse Walk_, Naguib Mahfouz)

----------


## Lord Macbeth

"The virtues, then, come neither by nature nor agaisnt nature, but nature gives the capacity for acquiring them, and this is developed by training."

-Aristotle, _Nichomachean Ethics_ (And I'd actually agree a good deal with that sentiment...)

----------


## LuggageFan

The path tends west around small mountains, then climbs toward a village in the pass.

----------


## Snowqueen

"The very picture of him indeed!" cried the mother--and "I should have known her anywhere for his sister!" was repeated by them all, two or three times over.

Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen

----------


## Emil Miller

"Thanks but I'm afraid I have a prior engagement on Wednesday," said Jerome. He had never heard of _Leader of the Pack_ but the title and the names of the stars mentioned by Mr Melrose bespoke the usual juvenile drivel that had been coming out of American studios for the past twenty years.

A Tangled Web by Emil Miller

----------


## VanceAttack

"He was always willing to lend these, and he never asked for them back; similarly, he never returned to its owner a book that he had borrowed." 

Taken from Aleksandr Pushkin's _The Shot_ out of The Portable Nineteenth Century Russian Reader.

----------


## Patrick_Bateman

"Her pride, her freedom, but not freedom's shade"

---- _To Hope_ - John Keats ----

----------


## misterreplicant

Everything he did and said and even _thought_ was wrong.

Shadow of the Giant - Orson Scott Card

----------


## bouquin

_My father could have worked with them; he could have worked with the landlords' mud, but he chose not to._

----------


## lyni

'Ye can smell it. What came tae yon?'
The Dragon Charmer - Jan Siegel

----------


## bouquin

_And Five Properties loved to bring treats, cases of chocolate milk and flouncy giant boxes of candy, bricks of ice-cream and layer cakes._

----------


## bohn

_How then could capitalism do so?_

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - Weber

----------


## Sionn Harrow

One unifying thread in the Bible is its divine authority  :Biggrin: 

~ESV Study Bible

----------


## bree

I agreed with Papa, even before emancipation, that the West Indies would be irreparably ruined if the Emancipation Bill was passed.

Strange Music - Laura Fish

----------


## Big Dante

Missionary congregation 100 francs

Les Misérables - Victor Hugo

----------


## Snowqueen

_Fanny was too much surprised to do more than repeat her aunt's words, "Going to leave you?"_

Mansfield Park - Jane Austen

----------


## Big Dante

"An umpire appeared." - Slaughterhouse 5

One of the longest sentences I have ever seen.

----------


## MystyrMystyry

Dictionary of Modern History - Penguin paperback (A.W. Palmer)

In the last years of his reign, Alexander encouraged the development of Russia's Far Eastern territories, backing the projects of Witte (q.v.) and authorizing construction of the trans-Siberian Railway (q.v.)

(Alexander III, Tsar of Russia)

----------


## Cailin

I came through John F. Kennedy Airport in a long necklace and an Afghan coat, carrying a torn copy of Howl.

Let the Great World Spin Colum McCann

----------


## McKagan

For many years these houses presented first-class plays and were frequented by the aristocracy of the city, but in time, as the character of the street changed and the dives and gangsters made it a byword from coast to coast, they offered blood and thunder thrillers of so distinct a type that they became known as Bowery plays, and could be seen knowhere else.

Phew! From Gangs of New York

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

"They sauntered over to the Cabana Club and climbed the two short flights of stairs to the top deck"
Ian Fleming - "Goldfinger"

----------


## simon239

Going to cheat as I had two, one on top of each other...

Then once again Brendan decided our destiny. - Morality Play, Barry Unsworth

False face must hide what the false heart doth know. - Macbeth at his dissasembled best.

----------


## Ancasta

Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot's character; vanity of person and situation.

Persuasion by Jane Austen

----------


## bouquin

_'Don't look.'_

----------


## harper.rb

"The bleached curl revealed its melanic root; the down turned to prickles on a shaved shin; the mobile moist mouth, no matter how I stuffed it with love, disclosed ignominiously its resemblance to the corresponding part in a treasured portrait of her toadlike dead mama; and presently, instead of a pale little gutter girl, Humbert Humbert had on his hands a large, puffy, short-legged, big-breasted and practically brainless _baba_."

----------


## Olga4real

'His mother was inconsolable and practically out of her mind with grief, and the feeling of guilt at being behind a desk while Clive had fallen in battle...'
Pro Bono Publico The Rise and Rise of a Very Liberal Democracy by Emil Miller
I enjoy it so far.

----------


## Emil Miller

> 'His mother was inconsolable and practically out of her mind with grief, and the feeling of guilt at being behind a desk while Clive had fallen in battle was hard to bear, but fate had in store for him a chance that would mitigate his remorse and change his life forever. 
> Pro Bono Publico The Rise and Rise of a Very Liberal Democracy by Emil Miller
> I enjoy it so far.


I'm glad you're enjoying it Olga and I look forward to your final verdict.

----------


## Whifflingpin

"Any how he had a pair of old Pistolls, and he told me that they were a smuglar's once upon a time."

----------


## Armel P

Unfortunately, the 23rd page of my book doesn't have sentences. If I were to chose an equivalent gathering of words it would be:

Know how it operates--

----------


## bouquin

_The question of our lost opportunity were now always present my mother could not leave it alone my father would sit solid in his chair and quietly rub the belly of his big black cat._

----------


## hazelk

I hope the hotel has a decent bath.

----------


## Mr. Bungle

> Unfortunately, the 23rd page of my book doesn't have sentences. If I were to chose an equivalent gathering of words it would be:
> 
> Know how it operates--


What are you reading? A manual of some sort?




> I hope the hotel has a decent bath.


That made me laugh for no good reason whatsoever.  :Biggrin: 


Mine is very boring. -> "We haven't had time to make up a slide," she said, "so you will have to hand it round."

----------


## Emil Miller

"Well, I spent the morning in my office, and in the afternoon I stood in for the director at a meeting with the Deputy Under Secretary. I'm a civil servant and I work for the Foreign Office."

The Fateful Circle by Emil Miller.

----------


## naphelge

"Old Deacon Gookin was at domestic worship, and the holy words of his prayer were heard through the open window."

----------


## Disagree

"Maybe it was the beer, but the absence of Cyprian was certainly part of it as well."

----------


## Oread

"You've just observed that, and everybody makes the same observation as you, and this machine, the guillotine, was invented for that."

Writing a paper on this book right now. I'm here to procrastinate, of course.

----------


## bouquin

_There were cattle cracking through the undergrowth, and the stillness of wild animals - all not to be seen._

----------


## Magga

"Harry så på ham." - Flaggermusmannen (book title in English: The Bat Man. It is originally a Norwegian book) by Jo Nesbø.

Freely translated: "Harry looked at him."

----------


## ChicagoReader

"His eyes lay dark and tunneled in a caved and haunted face and a foul stench rose from the wells of his boot tops."

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

.

"ALQUIST: For peace of my soul."

From Karel Čapek's play - R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)

Gg

----------


## bouquin

_The white quail stretched a wing backward and smoothed down the feathers with her beak._

----------


## Pensive

"I suppose there's a pleasure in satirizing a failure." - Emily Climbs

----------


## kiki1982

'Men zocht naar een aanleiding voor zijn treurigheid en mevrouw Favrot, die het spel en de spelers door en door kende, begon tragische tonelen eindigende in zelfmoord te ruiken.'

'A cause for his sadness was looked for and Mme Favrot, who knew the game and its players through and through, started to imagine tragic scenes ending in suicide'

(_Monaco, Three Types_, Marcellus Emants, 1878)

From a translation I am making, hopefully to some avail  :Hurray: .

----------


## hazelk

A spoonful for each drinker and one for the pot.

----------


## iamnobody

The natural light was enkindled in him.-Les Miserables

----------


## bouquin

_But the slightest word of real bitterness, which he was infallible in distinguishing from pretended anger, seemed to sink into his heart and poison all his enjoyments, till he became sensible that he was entirely forgiven._

----------


## Calidore

The book right next to me, eh? Okay.

"Pressing the A button with a weapon equipped will attack by firing the gun, swinging the steel pipe, etc."

-- _Deadly Premonition_ instruction manual

----------


## EricW

> If she had lived, John thought, then he would never have been born; his father would never have come North and met his mother.


_Go Tell It on the Mountain_
James Baldwin

----------


## Pensive

> _Go Tell It on the Mountain_
> James Baldwin


Now this is a pretty intriguing sentence! It makes one wonder who the concerned personality might be that has so much influence on the lives of all these people!  :Smile:

----------


## Tournesol

"These financial statements are the responsibility of the company's management."

Auditing and Assurance Services: A Systematic Approach by Messier, Glover, and Prawitt.

- my husband's book. go figure.

----------


## KidGalactic

"He likes to tell them about fireflies."

----------


## bouquin

_"I will go and look for it," said the other gently._

----------


## Lord Macbeth

FRANK: (Rising) Mrs. Warren, I cannot give my Vivie up even for your sake.

-"Mrs. Warren's Profession" from "'Man and Superman' and Three Other Plays" by George Bernard Shaw

----------


## shift decimal

No appointments, no invitations for dinner, no program, no dough.

- From "Tropic of Cancer" by Henry Miller.

----------


## bouquin

_It was this last factor which provided its own solution to the problem of re-settling the migrant populations of the new Earth._

----------


## Pierre Menard

He will be a somebody in the Administration before long.

----------


## Benvenuti

Oh dear. ""The position of guides can be adjusted in the image using the Move tool."

From "Adobe Photoshop CS5 Bible" by Lisa DaNae Dayley and Brad Dayley.

I was actually resting my elbow on it and couldn't resist...

----------


## Emil Miller

The desire not to offend trade union officials took on an almost deferential air, with serious consequences for industrial relations at a time when communist activists were becoming more influential.

Pro Bono Publico by Emil Miller.

----------


## Brock

The methods of teaching most of the subjects in the curriculum have undergone considerable changes and been vastly improved, during the last decade.

_Learning the Teach English in the Secondary School, 3rd edition._ by Jon Davison and Jane Dowson (eds)

----------


## bouquin

_Je ne comprends pas._

(Trans. : _I don't understand._)

----------


## Antares

"Pity! Why pity me!" Marmeladov suddenly cried out, rising with his hand stretched forth, in decided inspiration, as if he had only been waiting for these words. 

From _Crime and Punishment_ by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

----------


## kennings

"Then again, some people might not like the identity of Jack the Ripper discovered." - _Jack_ by Eric M. Black

----------


## optimisticnad

'How did your friend blow the conch?'

Oh dear, trust me to find a line like that.

----------


## kiki1982

'Puis, le soir, au retour du bureau, il courait au bord de la Seine avec sa cousine Thérèse.'

'Then, in the evening, when he had returned from the office, he ran along the banks of the Seine with his cousin Thérèse.'

_Thérèse Raquin_ - Zola

----------


## Sano

"Moreover the triangle ABC is half of the parallelogram EBCA; for the diameter AB bisects it."

37th Proposition of Euclid's Elements

----------


## iamnobody

Last night it was pullulating with women. 

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

----------


## bouquin

_"Nothing as far as I'm concerned."_

----------


## Waldo

"I was suddenly her focus of the general meaninglessness-not for myself, not for any quality of my large, shaggy body or my sly, unatural mind."

_Grendel_ by John Gardner

----------


## kiki1982

"An innocent maiden had thus grown up in the belief that the relations between the genial sailor and her mother were the ordinary ones that they had always appeared to be."

_The myor of Casterbridge_ - Thomas Hardy

----------


## G L Wilson

"It was very kind of you to help me," she said at the door.

Shirley Jackson, "The Daemon Lover"

----------


## Emil Miller

The two officers exchanged glances, and the next question brought a bemused look to the face of the bereaved man when he was asked to account for his own movements that day.

The Fateful Circle by Emil Miller.

----------


## Kundan

While blankets were gathered and tombstones bid farewell to, several women would notice the many inconsistencies in the men's responses and ask either new questions or re-formulate the old ones, only more persistently this time.

The Flea Palace by Elif Shafak

----------


## Mariner

"Bakers have homes, while shepherds sleep out in the open."

-The Alchemist

----------


## Catperson

"And whatever had been true a generation ago when Catherine of Aragon's daughter had brought back the church to Rome, whatever might be true now of the outlying parts of the realm in this twenty-ninth year of the reign of Elizabeth, the heart and strength of England, the southern and eastern counties, the flourishing seaport towns, and the great city of London itself were Protestant."

- 'The Defeat of the Spanish Armada' by Garrett Mattingly

A bit of a long sentence!

----------


## 34maine

"Now find out my name," she said teasingly; and withdrew. 

Far from the Madding Crowd- Thomas Hardy

----------


## lieasleep

Still, if things had gone thus far and no farther, force of habit would doubtless have gained the day, as usual.

_The Plague_ by Albert Camus

----------


## Big Dante

"Coming out he leaned over the bowl and dipped the cup full and they all touched cup edges"

For Whom The Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway

----------


## bouquin

_I told you he wouldn't like it!_

----------


## Nikhar

Dementors _here_, in Little Whinging.

----------


## bouquin

_Catherine's library was select, and its state of dilapidation proved it to have been well used, though not altogether for a legitimate purpose; scarcely one chapter had escaped a pen-and-ink commentary - at least, the appearance of one - covering every morsel of blank that the printer had left._

----------


## m2vihand

In translation:
"I and my wife were keeping vigil almost for the entire night by the side of the little girl."
(In Cold Blood by Truman Capote)

----------


## ChicagoReader

"He felt that his son was long past the point of being influenced by a father's opinions."

Horse Soldiers by Doug Stanton

----------


## Patrick_Bateman

"His pale eyes had a faraway look, to somewhere beyond life itself."


Bruges-la-Morte - Georges Rodenbach

----------


## David Strugnell

called Keith Douglas. _He_ was posh. His middle name was Castellaine

the pregnant widow martin amis

----------


## m2vihand

But there is a factor that can be eliminated almost totally, and this is sodium-chloride (table salt) which is the main cause of high blood pressure.
(Paul C. Bragg and Patricia Bragg: The Miracle of Fasting)

----------


## threecharacters

Lastly he took the bottle of Echols' potion from his coatpicket and pulled the cork and dipped a twig into the bottle and stuck the twig into the ground a foot from the trap and then put the cork back in the bottle and the bottle in his pocket.

----------


## Ser Nevarc

"A boy about a year older stood crying and shaking in a corner; he had evidently just had a whipping"


That's _Crime and Punishment_

----------


## ChicagoReader

"In 1874, when he was 36, he went off to start a branch office in the newly booming cotton port of Norfolk, Virginia."

The Diary of Jack the Ripper

----------


## Stonebolt

Does "fourth sentence" include the sentence that the page starts midway through? I'm assuming no. Anyway:

"The present moment holds the key to liberation." The Power Of Now by Eckhart Tolle. As I mentioned in the philosophy section, it is the most powerful book I've ever read.

----------


## shift decimal

"I was getting all this on camera and, unwilling to let her upstage us, I quickly sapped her so that she fell onto the table in a heap".

----------


## shift decimal

Stonebolt - I read The Power of Now last year upon recommendation by my psychologist. It is quite good but to be honest I haven't kept it's ideas at the forefront of my consciousness. I probably do live life more to in the moment now in hindsight and thank this book for being a factor in this really. What are your thoughts?

----------


## Stonebolt

I don't know, people definitely do have different reactions to it. I think people accept it in different degrees based on their life situation.

----------


## m2vihand

The flags are usually split to yellow and red parts diagonally, and the 2 flags move independently like the 2 hand of a clock.

----------


## TylerDurden

"His father was a marshall now: higher than a magistrate." (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce)

"The things pretended and the phrases new." (Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer)

----------


## Dr.reid_16

"The wall is not a two-dimensional surface but the high-dimensional phenomenal state-space of human Technicolor phenomenology. The Ego Tunnel: The science of the mind and the myth of the self. - Thomas Metzinger

----------


## bouquin

_His feet are bare, his ankles lovely, as are his wrists._

----------


## Snowqueen

_Our Saviour Himself long ago preached liberty and equality._

War and Peace.

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

"Not only did they differ strikingly from one another in facial type and body build, but they spoke quite unrelated languages and evolved completely different ways of life" 
_The RA Expeditions_ - Thor Heyerdahl

.

----------


## iamnobody

We may profit by their experience without paying the price which it cost them.-The Federalist papers by Hamilton, Madison and Jay

----------


## dwdean

it was thus that i was to be taught to associate evil with their prosecution, happiness with their disregard.

frankenstein, mary shelley

----------


## jmnixon95

"And she opened the door of Fräulein Bürnster's room."

----------


## Delta40

Here the light clicks across the white and gray

Corruption Poems by Camille Norton

----------


## bouquin

_There were two stools and two lamps at the workbench for the rare times when the son felt like joining his father, cleaning keys, but generally after breakfast the boy spent the rest of the day sitting behind Drummond in an old Naugahyde recliner, laughing to himself and saying prayers, or wandering out to the sidewalk to smoke a cigarette._

----------


## Jeffercake

She began to go slowly upstairs, with her hand on the bannisters, as if she had left a party, where now this friend that had flashed back her, her voice; had shut the door and gone out and stood alone, a single figure against the appalling night, or rather, to be accurate, against the stare of this matter-of-fact June morning; soft with the glow of rose petals for some, she knew, and felt it, as she paused by the open staircase window which let in blinds flapping, dogs barking, let in, she thought, feeling herself suddenly shrivelled, aged, breastless, the grinding, blowing, flowering of the day, out of doors, out of the window, out of her body and brain which now failed, since Lady Bruton, whose lunch parties were said to be extraordinarily amusing, had not asked her.

----------


## Annie Anthrax

Once, in Texas, I kicked a habit on weed, a pint of paregoric and a few Louis Armstrong records. 

(Junky - Burroughs)

----------


## celestialonion

"Dementors here?"

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix -- JK Rowling, which I've been seriously neglecting in favor of my computer and must read twenty chapters of in order to finish the series by the premiere.

----------


## Cailin

Des femmes de son âge, mariées, divorcées, plus jeunes.

----------


## bouquin

_"Laisse-moi seule."_ 

(Trans. - "Leave me alone.")

----------


## iamnobody

He would be the very Mawworm of bachelors who pretended not to expect it. -Middlemarch by George Eliot

----------


## ally_cat

"So here I am against my will, and yours, I know that; for no one loves the bearer of bad news." 
_Antigone_, Sophocles

----------


## Bessie11

the elderly couple pass by,glance at them and notice nothing wrong.

The WINNER STANDS ALONE by Panlo Coelho .

----------


## libernaut

But I won't say anything.

-demian by hesse

----------


## kiki1982

'_Love me as well as ever_, was my sister's.' 

_Clarissa or the History of a Young Lady_, Samuel Richardson.

I got there in the end  :Biggrin:  and like it too.

----------


## bouquin

_I didn't say anything._

----------


## young foht

"You're English ain't better than what any other refugee talks."

"Rosa" in Cynthia Ozick's _The Shawl_

----------


## bouquin

_After all, I spend so much time there, all of this raising another question, namely: who will be the first person to see me dead?_

----------


## Mr. Bungle

"Nineteen fifty-three, the year of the double helix, will come to be seen not only as the end of mystical and obscurantist views of life; Darwinians will see it as the year their subject went finally digital." ~ River Out Of Eden

----------


## lawpark

"From this point of view, if there is a field of historical studies (as I believe) and not merely a group of several fields, it can be nothing less than the whole body of questions about human cultural development, about human culture in its continuity over time; and here we cannot rule out a potential need to develop relatively dateless generalizations, for instance about what may be possible in cultural change, such generalizations are not simply derivable from any other discipline as such, yet they are necessary for studying what is timelessly important about the dated and placed events of human culture." 

_The Venture of Islam, Conscience and History in a World Civilization. Volume 1, The Classical Age of Islam._ By Marshall G.S. Hodgson

----------


## novelsryou

Uncle Siegfried had a peculiar sense of humor.

_Good Bye To All That_

----------


## AjaxAscendant

"One would guess (but has the subject actually been investigated?) that even so essentially traditionalist an activity as popular institutional religion has found little difficulty in accepting it."

~ _On History_

----------


## Delta40

And in his tyme swich a conquerour

----------


## qimissung

_But it is love for which I seek you now! What misery!_

The Metamorphoses of Ovid

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

"Arrived now at adolescence I burned for all the satisfactions of hell, and I sank to the animal in a succession of dark lusts: my beauty consumed away, and I stank in Thine eyes, yet was pleasing in my own and anxious to please the eyes of men."

_The Confessions of St. Augustine_

----------


## Greta Kin

The drunk just stood there.

----------


## Junglord

"Nope," Metzger said.

----------


## bouquin

_"What do you know about this Lasker?" Shpringer says._

----------


## Hira

"Thou lookest tired and hungry: thou'st been treated ill. Come with me."

The Prince and the Pauper - Mark Twain

----------


## bouquin

_On these occasions our two little ones always read for us, and they were regularly served after we had done._

----------


## Tournesol

"Each movement is designed to scientifically oxygenate, then stretch, then strengthen, and then restretch a particular muscle group."

'The Pilates Pregnancy'
by Mari Winsor with Mark Laska

----------


## Calidore

"We always hope calamity will not overtake us in this lifetime, rather like children trying to avoid difficult lessons."

_Gatherer of Clouds_ by Sean Russell

----------


## G L Wilson

"The widow rushed to prepare for battle."
Collected Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges

----------


## cl154576

Moreover, if _N_ is relatively prime to 10 (that is, is not divisible by 2 or 5), then some multiple of _N_ consists entirely of 1s.

_The USSR Olympiad Problem Book_
D.O. Shklarsky, N.N. Chentzov and I.M. Yaglom

----------


## Panglossian

"Sick minds identified the notion of a Terra planet with that of another world and this 'Other World' got confused not only with the 'Next World' but with the Real World in us and beyond us."

_Ada or Ardor_ - Nabokov.

----------


## scarjo

"Well, what the hell, he can shake hands can't he?"

From "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest" by Ken Kesey.

----------


## bouquin

_A breeze flaunting ever so warmly down the Mall through the thin trees, past the bronze heroes, lifted some flag flying in the British breast of Mr. Bowley and he raised his hat as the car turned into the Mall and held it high as the car approached and let the poor mothers of Pimlico press close to him, and stood very upright._

----------


## mississippidave

"You could say that." Richard Adams "Watership Down"

----------


## bouquin

_"There's no past, present or future outside our own mind."_

----------


## Des Essientes

Against the South wall of the room there was a couch of mother-of-pearl, on which the girls spread an embroidered coverlet and helped the priest to lie down. (From the story A Taoist Priest in the book Taoist Tales edited by Raymond Van Over) The fifth sentence of page 23 is even better though: The priest then pulled the older girl down to share his pillow, and bade the younger one to stand by the couch and scratch him.

----------


## stuntpickle

"A wagtail, like a blue-gray wind, quickstepped across the sand."

"Sounds" from _The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov_

----------


## submg

"Why, Richard often wondered, did his mother hate him so?"

From "Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer" by Philip Carlo

----------


## Dare2Write

"The Warning on Inner Hatch mentioned food, water, and air; and yet surely these were not necessities for the fiends of Hell."

From "A Canticle for Leibowitz" by Walter M. Miller Jr.

----------


## bouquin

_Can't you tell them I'm alright, Mr. Gilbert?_

----------


## G L Wilson

"De bes' way is to res' easy en let de ole man take his own way." Huck Finn, Mark Twain

----------


## iamnobody

If there were any way at all of sheltering from Death's blows-even by crawling under the skin of a calf-I am not the man to recoil from it. -Montaigne's Essays

----------


## outer space

Just as, before her husband's death, she had confided in her friends about her love affair, so she chatted about it after his death, with the arresting sergeant.

----------


## kinesj

And did Mister-r Stuart retur-rn next day, as he said in's note?

Flags in the Dust by William Faulkner

----------


## Rigaud

"To that devout woman, M. Myriel was both her brother and her bishop, her friend in nature and her superior in the Church."

Les Miserables

~Pardon the rather extremem bump. Didn't catch the date till it was too late.

----------


## bouquin

_'We're leaving,' Baba said._

----------


## LizzzyBF

Is not this your son, my Lord?

Shakespeare's King Lear

----------


## kiki1982

"Maar eerst moet hij helemaal bedaard zijn."

(Marcellus Emants, _Liefdeleven_, 1916)

"But first he must be completely calm."

(Marcellus Emants, _Living Love Life_, 1916) As yet untranslated, but I think he would have liked the title.

----------


## bouquin

_All it needs from you is that you take care not to trample on it._

----------


## JazzJazz

"...a ballad about the troubles in our native land." 

James Joyce - Dubliners

----------


## The Ol' Man

'How gloomier is the contrast
(Of human nature there!') 

Queen Mab - Percy Shelley

----------


## cafolini

I'll tell you some truth, just one, for today; far more than the truth.

----------


## cyberbob

Your sheep and goats have not miscarried, nor have I eaten rams from your flocks. - Holy Bible New International Version.

----------


## iamnobody

He discovered that Duer had enthusiasm fot two composers, called Bach and Beethoven, presumably Germans, and that he himself did not yet comprehend all the ways of the world. -Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis

----------


## cafolini

That is, if mere empty words can prove it, it stands proved--and in this way, without committing himself, he gives the reader a chance to infer that there isn't any extant evidence but words, and that he doesn't take much stock in them.

In Defence of Harriet Shelley, by Mark Twain

----------


## literary-device

There is a vanilla cake with blue wax candles. - the five people you meet in heaven

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

"He was already halfway across the square when they saw him, on a big hard ridden roan horse, man and beast looking as though they had been created out of thin air and set down in the bright summer sabbath sunshine in the middle of a tired foxtrot-face and horse that none of them had ever seen before, name that none of them had ever heard, and origin and purpose which none of them were never to learn." ...and that's one of the shorter sentences!

William Faulkner _Absalom; Absalom!_ 

.

----------


## Kayaan

"You have some, Papa"

*The Road* from Cormac McCarthy

----------


## bouquin

_I knew that losing to a taco bender would ruin my local celebrity._

----------


## Teritus

"Many a man, however vindictive, would have abandoned all thought of revenge in the face of such difficulty, but Jefferson Hope never faltered for a moment."

A Study in Scarlet - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

----------


## Drowning Age

"The problem was to find an economically sounder reason for consuming transport than a mere affection for primroses and landscapes."

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

----------


## CarpeNixta

solo los libros pueden hacernos soportable y hasta dichosa una larga noche de invierno 
(Only books can make bearable and even happy a long winter night)

J.W, Goethe Faust

----------


## BlackCat

" He told us about the magic qualities every number has and how number unlock the secrets of the universe"
_The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls_

----------


## kiki1982

'Mr Harding looked blank and annoyed; there was something in the tone of the young man's voice which told him that the interview was intended to be disagreeable, and he shrank back at finding his kindly greeting so repulsed.'

Anthony Trollope, _The Warden_, 1855

It is proving quite a delight  :Smile: , I think I may start on Austen's last now... I have found a substitute  :Banana:

----------


## cacian

Well I have two.

One in Spanish and One in American English.

_''res os pido un poco de flexibilidad e imaginacion, virtu-''_
Lucia Etxebarria, _Ya No Sufro Por Amor_

_''strong as a bull''_
John Steinbeck, _Of Mice and Men_

----------


## goodbadluck

"Now her mother was upstairs with the man who had gotten rid of the only other company she had."

_Beloved_ by Toni Morrison

----------


## Pensive

He was happy to hear that Ruya was no longer wandering through the garden of her memories and was back in the real world with everyone else. - The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk

----------


## iamnobody

"This, also," Luka added, and tore the note to bits under the vulture's cynical beak, "is the letter of a nasty man, trying to make out that he could make my father ill."-Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie

----------


## bouquin

_So said Athene, the daughter of Zeus._

----------


## jake21221

"How many times did you shoot?"

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

----------


## Dark Muse

"It reminded her of the Russian ballet that Madame Medinsky had taken her to at the Victoria Theater last year."

The Russian Concubine by Kate Furnivall

----------


## sickboy

calling on mrs fujiwara aroused in me much the same mixture of feelings; for she had been amongst my mother's closest friends, a kindly woman with hair that was by then turning grey.


a pale view of hills, kazuo ishiguro.

----------


## irishpixieb

"She had taken up a w wrong idea, fancying it was a mother and daughter, a son and a son's wife who all lived together, but when it appeared that Mr. Martin who bore a part in the narrative and was always mentioned with approbation for his great good nature in doing something or other was a single man-that there was no young Mrs. Martin, no wife in that case- she did suspect danger to her poor little friend from all this hospitality and kindness, and that if she were not taken care of, she might be required to sink herself forever."

"Emma" by Jane Austen

----------


## Darcy88

The sun was just down and to the west lay reefs of bloodred clouds up out of which rose little desert nighthawks like fugitives from some great fire at the earth's end. 

From _Blood Meridian._

----------


## Calidore

The house's windows flashed brightly, emitting solid beams of blue-white light which appeared quite dazzling under the scarlet sky.

-- _The Neutronium Alchemist_ by Peter F. Hamilton

----------


## Patrick_Bateman

Thus was a Quaker rais'd to sovereign power.

-Voltaire, _Letters Concerning the English Nation_

----------


## JuniperWoolf

Such thoughts pass through the consciousness so swiftly that they are gone before they can be more than glimpsed, but sometimes like comets trapped at last by a giant sun, they cannot escape and from their stubborn material the mind forges a masterpiece of literatrue, of philosophy or music. 

-The Collective Short Stories of Arthur C Clarke

----------


## ComicBookGirl

" Like a nun withdrawing , or a child explorng a tower, she went, upstairs, paused at the window, came to the bathroom"
-Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

----------


## Scout

When we entered the classroom, Angela went to sit at a black- topped lab table exactly like the ones I was used to.

This is from the book Twilight by Stephenie Meyer.

----------


## Chris1991

"Does she always devour her victims"
The Witcher EE short book - Andrzej Sapkowski

----------


## kiki1982

"Elizabeth said, 'I'm free now, if he would like to come up.'"

(PD James, _Deat Comes to Pemberley_, 2011)

----------


## kiki1982

I think I will have to revive this wonderful topic once again!  :Biggrin: 

"Fanny was too much surprised to do more than repeat her aunt's words, 'Going to leave you?'"

_Mansfield Park_, 1814

----------


## aliengirl

"What do you suppose I have to wear to such a thing as that?"

The Diamond Necklace by Maupassant

----------


## bouquin

_But that's what you risk when you leave here._

----------


## bouquin

_Christ she would crack up!_

----------


## bouquin

_And suddenly, standing there among the fruit barrows and corn-bins, in the middle of the street, it had seemed the most important thing she could do, to use some of the money left from Godmother Fry's gift, spend it extravagantly, like the woman who had poured out the jar of precious ointments._

----------


## Patito de Hule

"His whole power was in his numbers."

_The Prostrate State: South Carolina under Negro Government_ by James S. Pike

----------


## bouquin

_Philip, not averse to such assistance, got his own face into shadow._

----------


## Patrick_Bateman

"In the company of the poet and the scholar he felt himself in a new position, almost, indeed in possession of a new legitimacy."

_The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy_

----------


## aliengirl

"When we landed we watched the discharging of the graceful three-master which we have observed from the other quay."
- An Encounter by Joyce

----------


## ave d

_Wax doll!_

- The Golem (Meyrink)

----------


## bouquin

_True, there were winters when three or four of her two dozen little boarders died._

----------


## bouquin

_On the morning of the 23rd I took the train from Zurich to Lausanne._

----------


## Babyguile

The daring amphibious landing at Incheon of forty thousand US troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur in September reversed the Communist gains.

----------


## RicMisc

"Did you not think, Mr. Darcy, that I expressed myself uncommonly well just now, when I was teasing Colonel Forster to give us a ball at Meryton?"

- Pride and Prejudice

----------


## bouquin

_That was true too; but kings who personify an idea should not, cannot, fall below a certain level for generations; if they do, my dear brother-in-law, the idea suffers too._

----------


## Babyguile

Female slaves, the wives of metics and foreigners, concubines, and courtesans were all excluded from the festival.

----------


## kiki1982

I almost forgot about this topic!  :Eek:  My book took so long this time...

Anyway...

'He was a swimmer, and during the competitive season, he shaved every hair off his his body so he was smooth as plastic.'

(_The Jane Austen Book Club_, 2004)

Prooving a very funny read now I have read all of Austen.

----------


## Markyparky56

"Figure 1.14 Complex search terms in a search engine." - How to pass Standard Grade Computing

Technicaly this was the second book because the first didn't have a fourth sentence.

----------


## TylerDurden

In the slanting beams that streamed through the open doorway the dust danced and was golden. 

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray

----------


## Babyguile

I lay in my basket, and my mother lay in her bed; but Betsey Trotwood Copperfield was forever in the land of dreams and shadows, the tremendous region whence I had so lately travelled; and the light upon the window of our room shone out upon the earthly bourne of all such travellers, and the mound above the ashes and the dust that once was he, without whom I had never been.

----------


## kiki1982

Wow, I have to grudgingly admit that that sentence from Dickens struck me as singularly masterful. I might just check and see whether that novel could pull me onto the Dickens fence and maybe off the other side...

----------


## Babyguile

That line happened to be the last line of the first chapter! I'm halfway through the novel and I know Dickens has given me characters I will find hard to forget.

----------


## hawthorns

What if one sentence takes up the whole page?

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

"The necessary arrangements were made, and Lewinski and his wife were taken by Major Gidson and two other men to Paris, travelling on British diplomatic lassez-passez through Gdynia and Stockholm to avoid Germany." - Anthony Cave Brown _ Bodyguard of Lies Volume I_

----------


## tailor STATELY

Compose an Evening Sky-

----------


## PoeticPassions

"'Lie down, lie down,' said Krug, 'it is getting very late. I must go now. Come, lie down. Quick.'" _Bend Sinister_, Vladimir Nabokov (I know this is more than one sentence, but it made more sense to write the entire line down)

----------


## kiki1982

Maybe not a book, but a magazine...

"Den *Fuss* in dieser Einteilung weiterarb[eiten], 21 (22,5) cm Fusslänge erreicht sind."

(_Sabrina, Socken_)

"Carry on working the foot, until you have reached 21 (22.5) cm in length."

From the German knitting magazine _Sabrina_, the socks booklet with a comprehensive explanation how to do so. I had tried with two books, but could make head nor tale from it... And then came _Sabrina_...

----------


## martunia99

"Feet pushing hard into the sand,intent on keeping my progresssteady and sure, choosing walking over flying since, in my experience anyway, flying in the fog isn't near as much fun as it might seem at first."
("Shimmer" the second book in the Riley Bloom Trology)

----------


## Babyguile

'The Gaint Wistaria' is alive with suggestive implications about unjust patriarchal dogmatism, rebellious and fatally suppressed female sexuality, and the return into the present of what has been culturally repressed in the past.

----------


## RicMisc

'Then he said I hadn't any guts.' - _The Stranger_ by Camus

----------


## suprematist

Christianity was, from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in "another" or "better" life. 

-- The Basic Writings of Nietzsche

----------


## victoriana

I could hardly bear for them to look upon herat all; worse still, I thought I couldn't endure to have them look upon me, as I watched her. 

Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters 

Lots of looking...

----------


## Easter

"The joylessness of the color scheme was matched only by the joylessness of their faces." ~ _Fear of Flying_, Erica Jong

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

"He'll show you the way, sir, and I'se warrant ye'll be weel put up; for they never turn awa naebody frae the door; and ye'll be come in the canny moment, I'm thinking, for the Laird's servant- that's not to say his body servant, but the helper like-rade express by this e'en to fetch the houdie and he just staid the drinking o'twa pints o' tippenny, to tell us how my leddy was ta'en wi' her pains."
Walter Scott _Guy Mannering_

----------


## martunia99

"There were no more internal doors, but one led out to what looked like a lean-to greenhouse, filled with herbs and green."

- "The Amulet of Samarkand", Jonathan Stroud

----------


## msmoonlite

"She thought the time had come to get to know Fay a little better"

- Eudora Welty, "The Optimists Daughter"

----------


## bouquin

_Many rumors like this about Enishte Effendi had begun to fly due to the secrecy of the book he was making and the money he was willing to pay - and because Master Osman, the Head Illuminator, despised him._

----------


## neilgee

Banks later discovered that this dramatic way of expressing grief was universal amongst the Tahitian women, and he saw many who had permanent 'grief scars' on their heads.

_The Age of Wonder_ by Richard Holmes

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

"Not far from me squatted one of the tankmen, a native of Rostov, a tall, melancholy senior lieutenant." Alexander Solzhenitsyn _The Gulag Archipelago_

.

----------


## halfmoon25

"They quarreled over it each time, not because she didn't want you baptized, but because she didn't want you baptized catholic." -Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card

----------


## bouquin

_If the outside world has got on so long without me, it may go on for some time longer._

----------


## kiki1982

"Her voice was gentle and childish, her tread light and soft as that of a cat; but her manners more frequently resembled those of a pretty playful kitten, that is now pert and rogish, now timid and demure; according to its own sweet will."

(Anne Brontë, _The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_, 1848)

----------


## IntravenousJava

"So that if my grandfather wished to attract the attention of the two sisters, he had to resort to some such physical stimuli as alienists adopt in dealing with their distracted patients: to wit, repeated taps on a glass with the blade of a knife, accompanied by a sharp word and a compelling glance, violent methods which these psychiatrists are apt to bring with them into their everyday life among the sane, either from force of professional habit or because they think the whole world a trifle mad."

(Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust)

----------


## suprematist

We must grasp this Idea more concretely, more profoundly, since the emptiness, which clings to the Platonic Idea, no longer satisfies the richer philosophical needs of our spirit today.

--G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on Fine Art I

----------


## Polednice

"And by this means very many be forced to forsake work and to give themselves to idleness."

- _Utopia_ by Thomas More (1516). I'm guessing he's not at the utopian part yet.  :Tongue:

----------


## bouquin

_He had broken the sabbath to do it._

----------


## Germ

"If there were gaps in the writer's sources, they were filled with fantasy, even by echoes of names which were already contained in the lists themselves."

Thompson, The Mythic Past.

----------


## Rebecca1122

"I rested my hand against a pillow or an arm, and felt easy."

-"Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte

----------


## Snowqueen

_He had been a boy along with Morel, so that,while the two disliked each other, they more or less took each other for granted._

_Sons and Lovers_  by D. H. Lawrence

----------


## Gyges

The principality of the sky lightens now, over our green hill, into spring morning larked and crowed and belling.

- Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas

----------


## Buckthorn

Frannie leaned one hand against the warm metal of her car, took off her sneakers, and put on a pair of rubber thongs.

The stand, Stephen King

----------


## The Dilettante

Vomiting in null gravity wouldn't be fun.

Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card.

----------


## Musaeus

I am an old-fashioned man who has stuck by certain romantic notions dear to me, one of which is the highly subjectivizing contrast I feel between the nature of the artist and the nature of the ordinary man.

Thomas Mann - 'Doctor Faustus'

----------


## bouquin

_She turned from the window and dropped her nightgown over her head._

----------


## Babyguile

Here, participants watch and hear people act out unscripted interactions.

----------


## The Kid

"A small flame would be extinguished, but a bright fire rapidly claims as its own all that is heaped on it, devours it all, and leaps up yet higher in consequence."

-_Meditations_, by Marcus Aurelius

Not as good as some of the others here.

----------


## Dina12

The little girl had been offered the oppertunity of laying down a foundation ofknowledge in this establishment; but having spent a sigle day in it, she had protested against its laws and had been allowed to stay at home, where, in the September days, when the windows of the Dutch house were open, she used to hear the hum of childish voices repeating the multiplication table-an indicdent in which the elation of liberty and the pain of exclusion were indistinguishably mingled.

Portait of a Lady - Henry James

----------


## Drnobody901

'People,' Gerald turned his head, 'like to invent monsters and monstrosities.'

The Lash Wish- Andrzej Sapokowski

----------


## Pensive

> 'People,' Gerald turned his head, 'like to invent monsters and monstrosities.'
> 
> The Lash Wish- Andrzej Sapokowski


Good one.

----------


## Mr. Mauve

"And - once this curtain had risen - when on the stage a writing table and a fireplace, in no way out of the ordinary, had indicated that the persons who were about to enter would be, not actors come to recite as I had once seen some of them do at an evening party, but real people, just living their lives at home, on whom I was thus able to spy without their seeing me, my pleasure still endured."

From volume 2 of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, _Within a Budding Grove_. Characteristically long.

----------


## kiki1982

Bl**dy hell, what a great sentence was that! I'll have to pluck up the courage for Proust once!

"Economically - with a dash of love."

_The Moonstone_, Wilkie Collins, 1868

----------


## Oof

"The only true presumption is the rebuttable presumption of law in terms of which an assumption which is demanded by law, must be accepted in the absence of evidence or proof to the contrary." Principles of Evidence 2nd Ed by Schwikkard & Van der Merwe

----------


## bouquin

_"I can't take much more of it, Chango, open it up."_

----------


## neilgee

8 - When Johnny comes marching home ADAM FAITH _Parlophone_

Chart listings. Top 40 charts (UK) introduced by David Mcaleer

----------


## djameson

I wanted her to be a slave so that I could set her free and make her rich.

----------


## hvor_poetisk

And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away.

----------


## neilgee

In the words of Alan Kay, whose 1968 vision of the portable computer, an environment where children could learn by 'making', seemed, at the time, wholly unrealizable: "You can go on working on an impossible project for a long time if it has a lot of romance in it."

*Cultural Babbage* essays edited by Jenny Uglow

----------


## bouquin

_'Ain't nobody been knifed there in a month.'_

----------


## Buckthorn

And someone was goggling through the bars at him: a freckle-faced, red-haired, long-nosed someone.

----------


## bouquin

_Back in the City Room, Duncan, my editor, asks, "Single or double sink?"_

----------


## BitofEndearment

Stopping before a window display she said with great gusto: "je vais m'acheter des bas!" and never may I forget the way her Parisian childish lips exploded on "bas," pronouncing it with an appetite that all but changed the "a" into a brief buoyant bursting "o" as in "bot."

Lolita

----------


## Buckthorn

"Sounds were deadened, shapes blurred." - The woman in black

----------


## bouquin

_On a late afternoon Nanny had called her to come inside the house because she had spied Janie letting Johnny Taylor kiss her over the gatepost._

----------


## Buckthorn

He couldn't offer one a lift without offering all; he wanted the company of none. The Submission - Amy Waldman

----------


## Reverie323

"Everything he said was true and sincere; Finny always said what he happened to be thinking, and if this stunned people then he was surprised." A Separate Peace by John Knowles

----------


## tica57

Page 23, sentence 4:

Far back down time that was, straight though it be.

Knights Gambit by William Faulkner

----------


## Kafka's Crow

"I don't _think_ so," said Rabbit. "It isn't _meant_ to be."
AA Milne: _The Complete Tales and Poems of Winnie-the- Pooh_, pg 23

----------


## neilgee

And feather'd clouds strew flowers round her head.

*The Norton Anthology of English Literature (6th edition, volume 2)*

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

"Figure 7. - First flight engine, 1903: cylinder, valve box, and gear mechanism; below, miscellanoeus parts. (Photos courtesy Science Museum, London, and Louis P. Christman)"

The quoted caption above is from a 1971 Smithsonian Annals of Flight publication on the Wright Brothers' engines and their design desribing two photos on the 23rd page.

----------


## bouquin

_I had spent the night with Sandra._

----------


## Snowqueen

_I think we might have something to eat first, don't you? Said her grandfather._

From_ Heidi_ by Johanna Spyri

----------


## thelastmelon

Your hand again.
- _Chamber_ _Music_ by James Joyce

----------


## bouquin

_Then she placed her hands, vertically, over her eyes and pressed the heels hard, as though to paralyze the optic nerve and drown all images into a voidlike black._

----------


## Emil Miller

The two officers exchanged glances, and the next question brought a bemused look to the face of the bereaved man when he was asked to account for his own movements that day.

----------


## Buckthorn

"There will be no food provided or permitted in the library" - The library book by Alan Bennett et al.

----------


## bouquin

_It was not the first time, nor the second, that I had gone away - as it seemed, permanently - but yet returned, like the bad half-penny; or as if Salem were for me the inevitable centre of the universe._

----------


## bouquin

_They run together toward the open doorway, awkwardly, bumping up against each other, the old Jew's fingers never once letting go of the woman's wrist._

----------


## maxphisher

"You must have a good record, a clean sheet." - Flann O'Brien, _At Swim-Two-Birds_

----------


## Anymodal

"Pero tampoco quise abrir ese día porque no estimo absolutamente a quienes se corrigen demasiado pronto"

"But I didn't want to answer the door that day either because I don't like those who change their minds too quickly"

Giovanni Papini, _Historia completamente absurda_

----------


## bouquin

_There is no boy, there are no footsteps when he leaves._

----------


## bouquin

_It is another, a worse kind of sickness._

----------


## Grimble

_The Knight had not travelled far, when he fancied he heard an effeminate voice complaining in a thicket on his right hand._

----------


## oleanderwood

_At nineteen her fine grey eyes looked challenge, and her warm complexion, her black hair looped up slack, enforced the sensuous folding of her mouth._

----------


## bouquin

_Her legs were too bad._ -- from *Selected Stories* by Nadine Gordimer

----------


## moriniq

He worked with fanatical intensity for twelve or fourteen hours a day, sinking into bed in the evening worn down by the crushing weight of numbers, to sleep dreamlessly. 
Journey Into The Past (Stephan Zweig).

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

"The people were serious minded, and the reader finds scarce humor in their literature."

(My son left his high school British Literature text book on the desk. Talking about the Anglo-Saxon period historical context)

----------


## Tor-Hershman

"Note that the last term has only two significant figures (the zero is significant)."

Essentials Of Applied Physics by John E. Betts

----------


## SkyCetacean

"My first interview with the manager was curious."

-_Heart Of Darkness_, Joseph Conrad

----------


## bouquin

_'What's the matter with you?' he drawled._

----------


## jweyek

"That was very nice," she said and went back to the kitchen.

From the short story "The Barber": The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor

----------


## SkyCetacean

"Mistress, in teaching me the alphabet, had given me the _inch_ and no precaution could prevent me from taking the _ell_."

-_Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass_, Frederick Douglass

----------


## jmnixon95

"The wandering, murderous monster slew him in Heorot; and I do not know where that ghoul, drooling at her feast of flesh and blood, made off afterwards."

English Literature textbook of mine

----------


## dark desire

Among others of this kind was Dr. Blifil, a gentleman who had the misfortune of losing the advantage of great talents by the obstinacy of a father, who would breed him to a profession he disliked.

- Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

----------


## SkyCetacean

"'Not one of them would have stopped her, even that little one almost old enough to be selfish and stone-hearted like the rest of them.'"

-_As I Lay Dying_, William Faulkner

----------


## Snowqueen

Jenny was now summoned to appear in person before Mrs. Deborah, which she immediately did. 

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

----------


## bouquin

_He was more nervous than he had thought and kept turning his head this way and that as if afraid he was being observed by thousands of eyes hidden in the darkness of the aisles between the shelves._

----------


## krishna_lit

At last he could go no farther, and the stone tired him terribly; he dragged himself to the side of a pond, that he might drink some water, and rest a while; so he laid the stone carefully by his side on the bank: but as he stopped down to drink, he forgot it, pushed it a little, and down it went plump into the pond.

"Grimms' Fairy Tales" by Brothers Grimm - Tale: Hans In Luck

----------


## bouquin

_Mrs Nugent was his sister._

----------


## manuscript

"His bald purplish head now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull." from Moby Dick

----------


## kiki1982

"Les plus sensés faisaient observer que monsieur Cruchot de Bonfons avait ses entrées à toute heure au logis, tandis que son rival n'y était reçu que les dimanches."

"The most sensible ones remarked that Mr Cruchot de Bonfons was welcomed in the house at all hours of the day, while his rival was only received there on Sundays."

_Eugénie Grandet_, Honoré de Balzac, 1833

----------


## Stosyl

"He was a remarkably handsome man, dark, aquiline, and moustachedevidently the man of whom I had heard."

"A Scandal In Bohemia" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

----------


## Dark Muse

I've observed him many times presiding over some official ceremony or in the salon of the Nesle sisters, and his demeanor has always been the same: timid, withdrawn, as though his role as king were too much for him. 

Rasero - Francisco Rebolledo

----------


## bouquin

_They could surely be married in six months' time._

----------


## Babyguile

Birds squabbled over the cidery crush milled under by the cartwheels, and winds whisked their burden of scrapping, flying leaves, sharpened by frost off the peaks.

----------


## Ser Nevarc

Which book Babyguile?

----------


## bouquin

_I mentioned what they had said about her, and she laughed, and told me they were impudent fellows who talked nonsense - but I knew it pleased her._

----------


## Babyguile

> Which book Babyguile?


_Ships of Merior_ by Janny Wurts. That line really demonstrates her writing style which is turgid at its worst but vividly descriptive at its best.

----------


## Babyguile

A particularly sharp rise in food prices precipitated the strikes and popular demonstrations of July 1919.

----------


## Babyguile

As Conan Doyle insisted, _Tit-Bits_ and its many imitators deliberately aimed at the audience created by the 1870 Education Act, readers who were "not sufficiently educated to study the deepest and thickest volumes" (quoted in McDonald 1997: 145).

----------


## Snowqueen

Lets go and sit in the gazebo, she continued, and please, until I myself begin to talk with you, dont mentionthat book to me.

Faust by Turgenev

----------


## Acid park

Stopping before a window display she said with great gusto: "je Avis m'acheter des bas!" and never may I forget the way her Parisian childish lips exploded on 'bas', pronouncing it with an appetite that all but the changed 'a' into a brief buoyant bursting 'o' as in 'bot'.

Nabokov displaying his rather annoying tendency to slip into French.

----------


## MeLiKeyClaSsIcS

She drew back, a tremor passing through her.

The Odd Women by George Gissing

----------


## bouquin

_I endeavoured to lift him up, but the moment I touched him I felt sure that he was dead._

----------


## kiki1982

"Neither the gentleman nor the lady found it necessary to enlighten her."

Anthony Trollope, _Barchester Towers_, 1857

----------


## bouquin

_It'll go on till there isn't a cat or a dog left to enlist._

----------


## Babyguile

I did not like to go quite to the front and stare in at the gate; but I paused beside the garden wall, and looked, and saw no change - except in one wing, where the broken windows and dilapidated roof had evidently been repaired, and where a thin wreath of smoke was curling up from the stack of chimneys.

----------


## Phangirl7

"Yes, but she craved approval."

----------


## ashulman

Still more impressive was his tussle with the wallpaper

----------


## kaethe

Would you like to hear the quote in German?
Das heimliche Ausreißen und der Nachtgang durch den Wald, das war schön, das war ungewohnt, erregend, geheimnisvoll und doch nicht gefährlich.
Narziß und Goldmund von Hermann Hesse S.26

----------


## Teetos

"If the add-a-beads got tacky, what else will as you go along?"

----------


## Bustrofedon

"Where are you going when you start writing?"

_Sophie's Choice_- William Styron

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

"10. This article commented on Carnegie's selection for director: 'When he came to select a head for the department of fine arts in his institution Mr. Carnegie might have gone to Europe and chosen a world renowned painter whose standing in the artistic world would have considerable lustre to this branch of the institute's activities."

-Notes from the Introduction to _American Drawings and Watercolors_ Carnegie Institute publication.
I pulled the book to aid in my art thread response.

----------


## bouquin

_- Le service militaire, m'expliqua-t-il, ne convenait pas à ma délicate constitution._

----------


## bouquin

_Accordingly, they were traveling through the world in quest of this beauty; and, after successively rejecting the Queen of Golconda, the Princess of Trebizond, the daughter of the great Khan of Tartary, and many others, Labor and Clergy, Nobility and Trade had come to rest themselves on the marble table of the Palace of Justice, at the same time bestowing on the honest audience as many maxims and aphorisms as could in those days have been picked up at the Faculty of Arts, in the examinations; there were sophisms, arguments, figures of speech, and other wordplay by which masters acquired their caps and their degrees._

----------


## maxphisher

"Then why didn't she go alive?" I said.

----------


## Snowqueen

''There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'' 

_Hamlet_ by William Shakespeare

----------


## Babyguile

He came, it would seem, from a highly cultivated home with a great knowledge of literatue, which meant at that time Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and the lyric poets, in general the great Ionian tradition, together with the first fifty years or so of Attic tragedy.

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

"Turn to the photographs in the group labeled 'Tree Clinging Birds"

From Audubon Society-_Field Guide to North American Birds (Eastern Region)_

----------


## T.C. Seiko

Which I did a few times, followed, of course, by a Malcom Lowry-like hangover.

----------


## Snowqueen

''It is a story, therefore, that can be read, understood and interpreted at two levels (and in some cases at three or four levels).'' 

_The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory_ by J. A. Cuddon

----------


## Babyguile

Enlightenment rationalism displaced religion as the authoritative mode of explaining the universe and altered conceptions of the relations between individuals and natural, supernatural, and social worlds.

*_yawn_*

----------


## bouquin

_Our ever-insufficient knowledge of the future opposes it: and this is called, in the one instance, hope, and in the other, uncertainty of the following day._

----------


## kiki1982

"'Who's that singing in the drawing room?'"

_Vanity Fair_, William Makepiece Thackeray, 1847

----------


## Vota

The objects of oriental traffic were splendid and trifling; silk, a pound of which was esteemed not inferior in value to a pound of gold; precious stones, among which the pearl claimed the first rank after the diamond; and a variety of aromatics, that were consumed in religious worship and the pomp of funerals.

Gibbon, Edward. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

"The expedition, headed by Lt. Colonel John M. Washington, commander of the Ninth Military Department, Santa Fe, had its primary mission "to make a movement against the Navajo Indians," who had lately been troublesome to new settlements along the Rio Grande."

From _People of Chaco-A Canyon and Its Culture_ by Kendrick Frazier
(not reading it - son left it on desk)

----------


## mikejohnk

Very Nice Discussion. this is knowledgeable Discussion.

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

"I guess Marullo's got them shaved as close as they'll shave."
From Steinbeck's _The Winter of Our Discontent_ 

(not reading - pulled the book for another thread response)

----------


## LadyStardust

He understood that she was in need of a dwelling; and though the house he now offered her was merely a cottage, he assured her that every thing should be done to it what she might think necessary, if the situation pleased her.

From Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen.

----------


## Snowqueen

And I, poor fellow, said the cattle drover; Im so old and cant get there yet. 

_The Little Mermaid_ by Hans Christian Andersen.

----------


## bouquin

_I can now hear words that we never spoke._

----------


## Snowqueen

"Dont you love watching the different ways people have of entering a restaurant?"

Taken from _The Complete Saki._

----------


## Scardanelli

_But he would not be a world-historical figure; his influence would be nothing like what it has been -it would be as if Shakespeare had died at thirty-seven, in 1601_.

Taken from _Basic writings of Nietzsche_ (Introduction by Peter Gay).

----------


## Babyguile

Only in the South and in New England would the portfolio genre be preserved in its full purity, because only in these tight enclaves would the fashions popular in Victoria's reign escape the rapid metamorphoses of Victorian culture.

----------


## hannah_arendt

"This evaluation, though quite correct in the description of a surface phenomenon, overlooks the most serious paradox embodied in the curious political history of the Jews".

H. Arendt, "The origins of Totalitarism"

----------


## PeaceLoveAndTea

-And twopence, he said, for a pint.
"Ulysses" by James Joyce

----------


## bouquin

_Maybe I should have stayed with her._

----------


## hypatia_

"I realize, too, that the less I preach, the more likely I am to be heard."

----------


## Snowqueen

_Years went over, and the Giant grew very old and feeble._ 

The Complete Short Stories of Oscar Wild

----------


## symphony

"This process would start with Regius."

_Descartes' Bones_ by Russell Shorto

----------


## bouquin

_Hold on, listen to this._

----------


## Melanie

His face was tight as a clenched fist, and he reeked of liquor,underarm sweat, and three-day-old foul mood.

----------


## NordicFrost

''Do you know anything about Pyrrhus?''- Ulysses

----------


## coeus

"Bow, but look straight through them as if they did not exist." - The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick

----------


## bouquin

_Bref, l'argent était à lui..._

----------


## Chilly

To have him notice, speak to me as if I really mattered in his life, after twelve years with him, that's all I want or need.---As for me and my house by Sinclair Ross

----------


## Snowqueen

Laying beside me is a collection of poems by Iqbal.

Here is the translation.

_Your peaks are matching with the Pleiades in elegance
Though you are standing on earth your abode is sky’s expanse_

_Bang-e-Dra (The Himalayas)_ by Allama Iqbal

----------


## mande2013

"Vers la fin du premier mois, cette fille, obligée de garder la maison un dimanche, entama la conversation avec César."

-Cesar Birotteau, Honore de Balzac

----------


## Mathor

"And it is not like her to choose a catspaw who would make such a royal botch of the killing." - George R. R. Martin, A Storm of Swords

----------


## bookowskee

Lennox looks out into the street and sees a white van, brilliant magnesium sunlight reflecting from it as it pauses at traffic lights.


_Crime,_ Irvine Welsh

----------


## bouquin

_Only don't look anywhere else._

----------


## Snowqueen

"I went to my table, looking straight before me, and immediately paid penalty of gaucherie by knocking over the vase of stiff anemones as I unfolded my napkin."

_Rebecca_ by Daphne du Maurier

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

_In the Noone of night,
till the firedrake hath oregon you._

From Ben Jonson - _Two Gypsy Songs_

----------


## KingMarley

"Well, and how is your Zemstvo getting on?" - Anna Karenina

----------


## coeus

"Afterward the pilot flew north and received a medal." - _Inside Out & Back Again_ - Thanhha Lai

----------


## Snowqueen

''Even Okonkwo himself became very fond of the boy - inwardly of course.''



_Things Fall Apart_ by Chinua Achebe

----------


## *Classic*Charm*

"And Lord Henry flung himself down on the divan, and opened his cigarette-case"

- Wilde's _The Picture of Dorian Gray_

----------


## bookowskee

Edith kept reassuring her youngest child that the Vonneguts would rise to the top again, and would resume his "proper place in society" when the bad times ended and "would swim with members of other leading families at the Indianapolis Athletic Club, would play tennis and golf with them at the Woodstock Golf and Country Club."

_And So It Goes Kurt Vonnegut: A Life_ by Charles J. Shields

----------


## LiraelG

"I was holding my breath.' - _Life of Pi_, Yann Martel

----------


## papillondemai

No one has a sense of humor.

----------


## *Classic*Charm*

> No one has a sense of humor.


Perhaps if something were funny...

----------


## Pen Name

"For the war that was seen to be coming Wollweber was assigned the task of sabotaging Germany's sea-borne supplies." 

Struggle in the Dark, (How Russian and other Iron curtain spies operate) J. Bernard Hutton, 1969, Pub. George Harrap.

And to the above postings.

Even funny books would be unlikely to have a humerous point at a specific place, namely page 23 sentence 4.

----------


## papillondemai

> Perhaps if something were funny...


Ouch!

----------


## Pensive

'To dine alone or to sit alone after dinner was flat rebellion to be fought with every weapon of underhand stealth or of open appeal.' - Night and Day by Virginia Woolf

----------


## bouquin

_'C'est entendu, Monsieur,' the patronne said._

----------


## papayahed

Then we talked about the name of the magazine, which I thought was brilliant. - The Savage Detective by Robert Bolano

----------


## Justin Dielmann

It had a peculiar attraction for this immoral wretch, who had before this admired only the coarser types of feminine beauty.

----------


## Ainsley

"Lucid veterans learn to test reality in two ways; pain and gravity."

~ The Lucid Dreamer by Malcolm Godwin

----------


## Snowqueen

_He would have filled his glass, but there was no drink left._ 


_Crime and Punishment_ by Dostoyevsky

----------


## bouquin

_ K turned to his mother._

----------


## bouquin

_The opening of the cell door brought me awake._

----------


## mal4mac

"He had heard that women often love unattractive, simple people, but he did not believe it, because he judged by himself, and he only loved beautiful, mysterious and special women." Tolstoy, Anna K

----------


## Snowqueen

_It is sensibly planned, with a redbrick club on its brow, and farther back a grocer's and a cemetery, and the bungalows are disposed along roads that intersect at right angles._

_A passage to India_ by E. M. Forster

----------


## tailor STATELY

"The mighty merchant smiled." .............. Emily Dickinson, _Collected Poems_

Ta ! _(short for tarradiddle)_,
tailor STATELY

----------


## YSiobhan

haha "He walked into the room with caution."

----------


## Gregory Samsa

"We can't ever be friends again." - John Fowles, The Magus.

----------


## coeus

"All of the clocks in the room had wound down - the tambours and carriage clocks on the mantel, the banjo and mirror and Viennese regulator on the walls, the Chelsea ship's bells on the rolltop desk, the ogee on the end table, and the seven-foot walnut-cased Stevenson grandfather's clock, made in Nottingham in 1801, with its moon-phase window on the dial and pair of robins threading flowery buntings around the Roman numerals." - _Tinkers_ by Paul Harding

Wow, a long one.  :Smile:

----------


## EllieMorse

"Deborah's complexion was mottling with red."

"An American Dream" by Norman Mailer

----------


## bouquin

_ I said nothing._

----------


## kiki1982

"Do the Mammoth publish you too?"

PG Wodehouse, _Something New/Fresh_, 1915

I believe what ensues between these two people who met 2 minute ago because she laughed at him doing Larsen Exercise 1, is summig up Facebook way ahead of time:

" - ...Why, we are comrades in misfortune - fellow serfs. We should be friends. Shall we be friends?
- I should be delighted.
- Shall we shake hands, sit down and talk about ourselves a little?
- But I am keeping you from your work.
- An errand of mercy."

That could be Facebook, couldn't it. Oh, we're colleagues, we have to be friends on Facebook... Even down to the 'I'm keeping you from your work.' PG Wodehouse was such an observant man he could even see into the future...  :Biggrin:

----------


## chirpy

I then reflected - and the thought made me shiver that the creature whom I had left in my apartment might still be there - alive and walking about.
-Mary Shelley, Frankenstien

----------


## Vota

At first the Lacedaemonians trusted the words of Themistocles, through their friendship for him; but when others arrived, all distinctly declaring that the work was going on and already attaining some elevation, they did not know how to disbelieve it.

Thucydides: The History of the Peloponnesian War

----------


## Snowqueen

"O Conspiracy,
Shamst thou to show thy dangrous brow by night,
When evils are most free?" 

_Julius Caesar_ by Shakespeare

----------


## Oedipus

"At the same time, we tend to take pleasure in the notion that great men are, in various ways, human, all too human"

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Pg. 23 is in the Introduction)

----------


## bouquin

_'What do you mean?' asked Gerstäcker uncomprehendingly, but without waiting for an answer he spoke to the horse and they moved on again._

----------


## EvoWarrior5

"In his working clothes, Joe was a well-knit characteristic-looking blacksmith; in his holiday clothes, he was more like a scarecrow in good circumstances, than anything else."

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations.

----------


## Snowqueen

"They were called criminals, and the outraged law, like the bursting shells had to come to them, an insoluble mystery from the sea." 

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

----------


## Morrighan

What a fabulous thread to stumble upon, right after registration! Also Hi everyone :-)

"They were the only group that consistently refused to acknowledge the gods of their neighbours, send gifts to their temples or participate in festivals honouring these gods."

From - A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism by Harold Evans and Phyllis Goldstein

----------


## kiki1982

I know, great thread, isn't it.

Welcome  :Wave:

----------


## bouquin

_I pay my taxes and insurance myself._

----------


## kiki1982

'He loved to consort with low people.'

_Doctor Thorne_, Anthony Trollope, 1858

----------


## Babyguile

She learned circumspection, judgement, the need for strict self-control and the virtues of silence - but also the necessity to speak out for herself, with all her courage and eloquence, when the occasion demanded.

----------


## Calidore

Bit of synchronicity here:

"The cold was bitter; he guessed several degrees of frost already, and the worst of the night was still to come." -- _Pavane_ by Keith Roberts.

----------


## 108 fountains

They don't believe in God, but they pretend to because their charges, they think, need this belief.

The Problem of the Soul, Owen Flanagan, 2002

One thing that makes this a great thread is the great writing it contains, proof that great writers make every sentence, every word, count.

----------


## Delta40

...then rolled a joint, lit up the dollar/franc debate.

Having Fled the Cite Universitaire - Robert Graves

----------


## Victoria Laza

_I looked like I wasn't at a cocktail party but an airport, waiting for my life to take off._

----------


## bouquin

_"Interpreter, this is Lavonnya over at Triple A."_

----------


## bouquin

_Here, indeed, was a map of a kind, presumptuous where it was not a blank._

----------


## bouquin

_Il fit sensation._

----------


## DATo

Can anyone here please explain to me why this thread is so popular? What possible significance does "the 4th sentence on the 23rd page of the book beside my hand" have to do with anything? What is the importance of its revelation to anyone living or dead? What insights or contribution does it make to the world of literature or anything else? Why would anyone take the time to look up and then post "the 4th Sentence on the 23rd page of the book beside his or her hand?

I realize I'm getting old but has the world changed so much in my lifetime that people in the present would consider taking the time to look up and post " the 4th Sentence on the 23rd page of the book beside their hand"? Is anyone actually and seriously interested in what "the 4th Sentence on the 23rd page of the book beside anyone's hand" actually says?

----------


## Buckthorn

I think its just a random game/thread that gets members talking and also encourages people to discuss what they are reading at the moment.

Its not particularly sensible but I have never been a fan of being sensible  :Smile5:

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

> Can anyone here please explain to me why this thread is so popular? What possible significance does "the 4th sentence on the 23rd page of the book beside my hand" have to do with anything? What is the importance of its revelation to anyone living or dead? What insights or contribution does it make to the world of literature or anything else? Why would anyone take the time to look up and then post "the 4th Sentence on the 23rd page of the book beside his or her hand?
> 
> I realize I'm getting old but has the world changed so much in my lifetime that people in the present would consider taking the time to look up and post " the 4th Sentence on the 23rd page of the book beside their hand"? Is anyone actually and seriously interested in what "the 4th Sentence on the 23rd page of the book beside anyone's hand" actually says?


Good Sunday morning DATo and welcome. This thread caught my eye sometime back to the point that Ive been compelled to contribute from time to time. Below I offered my thoughts to your questions.

1..Can anyone here please explain to me why this thread is so popular? 

R: Its a catchy, random little respite from the more heady threads out there. 
Think of it as a perpetual double dutch jump rope game taking place in the alley. There you are out on the forum bogged down in a scrum against Joyce, Plato, Tolstoy, etc., suddenly you desire to break out for a brief moment of mindless fun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Isx1Q5wyJZg

2..What possible significance does "the 4th sentence on the 23rd page of the book beside my hand" have to do with anything?

R:..No more than the 8th sentence on the 46th page, but again; its the randomness at play here. 

3..What is the importance of its revelation to anyone living or dead? 

R:..For the living, a glimpse into the life of the poster such as their reading interests, trends. Maybe spark interest toward a book or author for a young reader that happens by. 
For the dead, authors at least, the name lives on. Can we name the 23rd Spartan out of 300? (Heres where Calidor will jump in with the name), but we know damn well who wrote Hamlet. (or do we?...duhn, duhn, duhhhn). My post below, brings back fond memories of my deceased father.

4..What insights or contribution does it make to the world of literature or anything else? 

R:..See number 3 response for the living, particularly the young reader.

5..Why would anyone take the time to look up and then post "the 4th Sentence on the 23rd page of the book beside his or her hand?

R:..See response to number 1 above. Ill add that given the stipulation that the book is readily available beside the hand, the time to find the sentence is drastically reduced versus, lets say, having to go the library and find the book beside your hand.

6..I realize I'm getting old but has the world changed so much in my lifetime that people in the present would consider taking the time to look up and post " the 4th Sentence on the 23rd page of the book beside their hand"?

R:..For us old timers, (Im 51 can I consider myself OT?) I actually admire those people of the present, presuming you are referring to younger people, who take time to disconnect from the Gagas, gadgets and post Goldsmith.

7Is anyone actually and seriously interested in what "the 4th Sentence on the 23rd page of the book beside anyone's hand" actually says?

R:..Lets thank God on this beautiful Sunday morning, we have a few, albeit endangered species left, who would still take interest in the 4th sentence on the 23rd page

Consider the large chunk of society, that invasive species, who would rather spend time _Keeping Up With the Kardashians_

------------

Whewokay heres what I found by my hand

(click on thumbnail for larger image)

Page 23 turned out to be a table showing the performance of the 4th stage Altair motor.






My father was a literal rocket scientist who, for most of his career, was guidance systems engineer for the Scout missile program. I happened to have a stack of mementos on the desk, including this^ manual on Scout published by NASA in 1960.

----------


## MajorLordRoxbro

> Can anyone here please explain to me why this thread is so popular? What possible significance does "the 4th sentence on the 23rd page of the book beside my hand" have to do with anything?


You mean to say you don't know that everything points to 23!
I thought everyone did?!

----------


## DATo

> You mean to say you don't know that everything points to 23!
> I thought everyone did?!


According to Douglas Adams it points to 42 *LOL*

----------


## MajorLordRoxbro

> According to Douglas Adams it points to 42 *LOL*


That's Life, the Universe and Everything, not, 
The Number 23 is a 2007 American psychological thriller film written by Fernley Phillips and directed by Joel Schumacher. The film starred Jim Carrey. It was subsequently released on DVD on July 24, 2007 (23 July in the UK), and premiered on HBO on Saturday April 19, 2008.

----------


## bouquin

_"You go to hell," José Arcadio Buendia shouted at him._

----------


## Calidore

After a long time, forever and ever, she found herself safe among the lions. -- _The Chalk Girl_ by Carol O'Connell

----------


## R.F. Schiller

"What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?" (Walt Whitman - Crossing Brooklyn Ferry) - Norton Anthology of American Literature, Seventh Edition, Volume C.

----------


## Ruben Meijerink

As yet, the cautious critic may well regard the one as a fantastic experiment of "mental philosophy," and the other as a mere fashion in logic and epistemology. 

Susanne Langer - Philosophy in a New Key

----------


## Calidore

They call it reaction time. -- The Inner Wheel by Keith Roberts

----------


## Whosis

Fourth complete sentence?...

There's a college off in the distance and there are roads you are now free to travel.

Eighteen In Cross-country Odyssey by Benjamin Anderson

Only book beside me.

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

"*apple-pie order* has little to do with the culinary arts." 

From _Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins_
The entry continues on with describing etymology and what not, behind the phrase.

----------


## bouquin

_When one journeys from one homestead to the next nothing seems more likely than that they all bear the same name and that the same man and the same woman work them all; yet that is not so._

----------


## terra mick

Most of us grew up speaking a language that encourages us to label, compare, demand, and pronounce judgements rather than to be aware of what we are feeling and needing.
Non-Violent Communication: A Language o Life, Marshall B. Rosenberg

----------


## bouquin

_And because no one answered or cared and a conversation went on without her, she felt profoundly lonely, suspecting once more for herself a particular doom of exclusion._

----------


## bouquin

_She was referring to an old-fashioned bicycle of Mama's that I sometimes used._

----------


## bouquin

_She is not one of us; she is not like us._

----------


## figurered

_Le substitut du procureur s ecria, d un ton narquois._

----------


## bouquin

_This result of her long and persistent economy seemed gigantic._

----------


## qimissung

"Chuck takes one step, grabs Derek by the upper arm and lifts him off the floor like a stick." No good comes of this, of course.

----------


## bouquin

_It was not in the room known at the red house as Mr. Royall's "office" that he received his infrequent clients._

----------


## bouquin

_She knocked, and a woman put her head out of a door on the other side of the courtyard and said that Mademoiselle had gone to London._

----------


## chevalierdelame

The ancient priests had said, "Thus far and no further.We set the limits to thought".

----------


## bouquin

_What other future could Augusta possibly have expected?_

----------


## Sido

She sounded dazed and vaguely surprised.  :Smile:

----------


## lemonorange

Since I'm reading with my smartphone, the page might be different... 

"There were only Creoles that summer at Lebrun's."

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

----------


## bouquin

_She was clever at her job._

----------


## bouquin

_He never gets rattled._

----------


## Pope of Eruke

_The earth below us, ripe and fresh with blood_

Credo in Unam, The complete works of Arthur Rimbaud

----------


## Lemonade

Lies he not bed-rid? and again does nothing but what he did being childish?

The winter's tale, Shakespeare. Act IV, scene III, Polixenes, king of Bohemia.

----------


## Buckthorn

"It's not his real name" she says. "Not one that he's carried with him always. Its one he wears like his hat. So he can take it off if he wants. Like Prospero is for you"

The night circus by Eric Morgrnstern

----------


## bouquin

_ He'd gone straight out and killed it, or so he thought, intending to dissect it at Bart's._

----------


## Marbles

<I'll have been paid. You watch.>

_Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird. Published Arrow Books 1997

Wow, it's portentous, or just meaningless?

----------


## bouquin

_So she had five minutes of a kind of wild, open freedom during which anything might happen._

----------


## Snowqueen

_His name had been talked about, his practice had increased; and moreover he could go to Les Bertaux just as he liked. 

__Madame Bovary_ by Gustave Flaubert

----------


## perhapsican

"Ashley noticed that the bottle was half empty, while Cade already appeared to be more than half full." From Revenge (aka The Stars' Tennis Balls) by Stephen Fry.

----------


## bouquin

_When I stood close to the canvas, I noticed that parts of her body were covered with a fine hair._

----------


## bouquin

_"Is there somewhere we can go to use the restroom?"_

----------


## Sido

The little mermaid stood still for a minute looking at this horrible wood ; her heart beat with fear, and she would certainly have returned without attaining her object, had she not remembered the prince--and immortality.

*-Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales-*

----------


## LadyDedlock

"Our mission was strictly conventional, opium and hash, the primary export crop of terrorists around the world."

World War Z by Max Brooks.

----------


## Marbles

"It is not out of the quesiton; you have been absent-[minded lately].

Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being

----------


## bouquin

_She expects it; she feels the touch in advance, as birds feel shadow._

----------


## Sido

Alighting at Sixty-Ninth Street, he braced himself with a visible effort and started the long climb up the four flights of stairs.

- *Young Men in Spats by P.G. Wodehouse* -

----------


## Bengt Mettyl

Gosh, I fished vigorously around for a copy of this book that was so late in release anyway, but when I finally got it and started it I found it tough going. I put it aside until I was 'ready for it' so not to spoil my enjoyment. I have still to re-pick it up. I've read most of Ken Follett's stuff and of course he is a terrific writer. I vaguely wondered if this sequel was a 'we need 20,000 words by a week next Friday' kind of project. I do admire the way he applies himself to such painstaking research into his subjects. 
Sorry, I have to go - there's a fruit-fly on my screen.

----------


## neilgee

They dream about fine thread

From Clouded Sky: poems by Miklos Radnoti

----------


## Quietudity

I was about to rush off and search the garden, when my mother told me that I must have some breakfast first.

----------


## Carmilla

Hi,

But now she had entered into a new current of feeling.

'Adam Bede' by George Eliot

----------


## Sido

Don Quixote begged of her to do him the favour to add hereafter the title of Lady to her name, and for his sake to be called from that time the Lady Tolosa; which she promised to do. 
_- Don Quixote by Cervantes -_

----------


## Calidore

His pursuers were slowing now.

_Judas Unchained_ by Peter F. Hamilton

----------


## Sido

She fell silent and one of the young girls sang a song in the Greek tongue which Sharkan did not understand.
*- The Book of THE THOUSAND NIGHTS and ONE NIGHT, Rendered from the literal and complete version of Dr. J. C. Mardrus; and collated with other sources; by E. Powys Mathers -*

----------


## bouquin

_She had been stunned at finding that a passionate love-affair was not, as her marriage had led her to believe, a prescription for general happiness._

----------


## Jancarlo

"They know nothing of the death and destruction which is near them, so that in one day they shall all perish."
*-Homer's Odyssey - Signet Classics version*

----------


## uiscebeatha

Bhí sé ina chónaí leis féin i detach beag ceanntuí in ascall an gleanna.

Well, the thread asked me to do it! Didn't say it was English Literature or English only! It's Irish - 'he lived by himself in a small, thatched house in a corner of the glen

----------


## bouquin

_ He scrambled up, and ran on, and this time, the crow only hovered above, though not very high up, and still following him, but silently, and no longer attempting to swoop down._

----------


## Spotted Fever

The only sailor whose eyes could have been called green was a tall man who amused the crowd on the quay by calling out cheerfully every time the planks fell: "All right! All right!".

~ James Joyce- Dubliners ~

----------


## Buckthorn

Love was much more nebulous than stains on linen rags - The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton

----------


## Sido

But in the spring he succeeds in winning it back.
*- Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder -*

----------


## bouquin

_So that, frequently, when, after much trouble and toil, I had, at length, succeeded in bringing her down, the breakfast was nearly half over; and black looks from 'mamma,' and testy observations from 'papa,' spoken at me, if not to me, were sure to be my meed: for few things irritated the latter so much as want of punctuality at meal times._

----------


## romeoindespair

No doubt the most exclusive drawing room, the leading house in the Faubourg SaintGermain was little or nothing after all those other mansions of which in turn I had dreamed.

the guermantes way marcel proust

----------


## bouquin

_It fluttered a little, and began to move towards the window, dangerously close to the passengers' feet._

----------


## bouquin

_By the report which he hastened over to Kellynch to make, Admiral Croft was a native of Somersetshire, who having acquired a very handsome fortune, was wishing to settle in his own country, and had come down to Taunton in order to look at some advertised places in that immediate neighbourhood, which, however, had not suited him; that accidentally hearing - (it was just as he had foretold, Mr. Shepherd observed, Sir Walter's concerns could not be kept a secret,) - accidentally hearing of the possibility of Kellynch Hall being to let, and understanding his (Mr. Shepherd's) connection with the owner, he had introduced himself to him in order to make particular inquiries, and had, in the course of a pretty long conference, expressed as strong an inclination for the place as a man who knew it only by description, could feel; and given Mr. Shephered, in his explicit account of himself, every proof of his being a most responsible, eligible tenant._

----------


## Härt Noiz

In the closing chapter of the first volume of The History of Sexuality and in his brief but significiant introduction to Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Journals of a Nineteenth-Century Hermaphrodite, Foucault suggests that the category of sex, prior to any categorization of sexual difference, is itself constructed through a historically specific mode of sexuality.

Gender Trouble, Judith Butler

----------


## bouquin

_I wanted to run after her and tell her I had nothing to do with Doreen, because she looked stern and hard-working and moral as an old-style European immigrant and reminded me of my Austrian grandmother._

----------


## Vota

When we reached Rome, I put myself under a master who was known as Il Firenzuola.

----------


## bouquin

_I only saw it from the car as I drove past, you know; I was misled by the way it was folded as it hung in the window._

----------


## Pompey Bum

Among them were whites dressed all in leather who had made their living driving the herds of the “colonels,” the owners of great cattle ranches; full- blooded Indians with reddish skins whose great- great- grandfathers had gone about half naked and eaten the hearts of their enemies; mestizos who had been farm overseers, tinsmiths, blacksmiths, cobblers, or carpenters; and mulattoes and blacks who had been runaways from the sugarcane plantations on the coast and from the rack, the stocks, the floggings with bull pizzles and the brine thrown on the raw lash marks, and other punishments invented for slaves in the sugar factories.

----------


## bouquin

_"Mrs. Mancini," she says, "needs a feeding tube."_

----------


## Calidore

Third sentence included for context:

He gave her the firm-bordering-on-exasperation look. Because that made so much difference when you've been married for eleven years.

_The Great North Road_ by Peter F. Hamilton

----------


## Pompey Bum

_Me enforce for the Jamaica Labour Party in green, and Shotta Sherrif control for the Peoples National Party in orange, but them new boys enforce for the party in them back pocket._

----------


## 108 fountains

After Heisenberg gave quantum theory its fully developed mathematical formalism with his Uncertainty Principle, he and other physicists began to question the nature of a physical or objective reality.

_Mysticism and the New Physics_ by Michael Talbot

----------


## NikolaiI

I love Talbot- at least, he was very fascinating. . I've been trying to remember the name of one physicist. . Okay it was David Bohm. Very interesting stuff.

----------


## 108 fountains

Fascinating for sure, but I don't accept many of his ideas even though a part of me wants to.

----------


## bouquin

_I fiddled around Dad's desk, working out a couple of problems in calculus just for the hell of it._

----------


## bouquin

_I fiddled around Dad's desk, working out a couple of problems in calculus just for the hell of it._

----------


## WordsWillCome

Wallace witnessed the worst impact of sin on humanity as he saw the violence of the Civil War and the Wild West.

Our Daily Bread by varied authors

----------


## Sido

Without giving us a name or names at this juncture, what do you feel you can tell us about Hong Kong?
*- The BOURNE ULTIMATUM by Robert Ludlum-*

----------


## bouquin

_The furniture was quite in harmony with the room, consisting of three rickety old chairs, a painted table in one corner, on which lay books and papers thick with dust (showing how long it was since they had been touched), and, finally a large and very ugly sofa with ragged covers._

----------


## bouquin

_"Look out of the window in about ten minutes and you'll see," the woman answered._

----------


## Jalhan

"We met in another long look."
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Turned out to be a relatively short sentence for this book.

----------


## bouquin

_ 'There's going to be a fourth soon, I believe.'_

----------


## HalInc

Brown never made it out of Harpers Ferry, nor did he even appear to have a plan for escaping, let alone arming hundreds of thousands of slaves.

----------


## Sido

From her grove, Sarai could also see a large part of the city and, towering over it like a mountain, the ziggurat, the Sublime Platform.
*- Sarah by Marek Halter -*

----------


## gREGewILKINS

"After reading these descriptions, passage from the Book of Mormon jumped out at me and took on new significance."
Taken from: What's on the Other Side: by Brent L. Top

----------


## Fahmida

"And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind"
From "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower" by Dylan Thomas

----------


## Carmilla

'And there was much to encourage trust in her husband's authority.'

_Daniel Deronda_ by George Eliot

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

"No sooner had there eyes fallen on the ladies than they were themselves espied of them; whereupon quoth Pampinea, smiling, "See, fortune favorable to our beginnings and hath thrown in our way young men of worth and discretion, who will gladly be to us both guides and servitors, an we disdain not accept of them in that capacity".
Giovanni Boccaccio _The Decameron_

----------


## Diggory Venn

"His reward and his time had now come."

Barchester Towers (1857) by Anthony Trollope

----------


## Francis92

I lost count of the pages i was just reading

----------


## M3ll155x

"It was as though the sister whom I had never laid eyes on, who before I was born had vanished into the stronghold of an ogre or a djinn, was now to return through a dispensation of one day only, to the world which she had quitted, and I a child of three, waked early for the occasion, dressed and curled as if for Christmas, for an occasion more serious than Christmas even, since now and at last this ogre or djinn had agreed for the sake of the wife and the children to come to church, to permit them at least to approach the vicinity of salvation, to at least give Ellen one chance to struggle with him for those children’s souls on a battleground where she could be supported not only by Heaven but by her own family and people of her own kind; yes, even for the moment submitting himself to redemption, or lacking that, at least chivalrous for the instant even though still unregenerate."

God......

Absalom, Absalom! (1936) by William Faulkner

----------


## isabellet91

"She was annoyed with me for going down to the landing by myself, but she didn't make a big deal about it, it being my birthday and all."

_The Time Traveler's Wife_ by Audrey Niffenegger

----------


## Diggory Venn

"Your slave, John Graham Bretton."

Villette (1853) by Charlotte Bronte.

----------


## Whifflingpin

"And seldom was a snood amid such wild luxuriant ringlets hid, whose glossy black to shame might bring the plumage of a raven's wing; and seldom o'er a breast so fair, mantled a plaid with modest care, and never brooch the folds combined above a heart more good and kind."

The Lady of the Lake - Scott

----------


## North Star

> What prompted his comment "without force" is clearly his preference for the sustained heroic level of the _Iliad_ over what he terms the _Odyssey_'s presentation of "the fabulous and incredible" as well as the realistic description of life in the farms and palace of Odysseus' domain, which, he says, "forms a kind of of comedy of manners."


From *Bernard Knox*'s Introduction to _The Odyssey_ (*Robert Fagles*' translation).

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

"They told the Spaniards that the colossal monuments that stood deserted about the the landscape were erected by a race of white gods which had lived there before the Incas themselves became rulers"

Thor Heyerdahl _Kon-Tiki_

----------


## Dunechka

"Yes," she thought, "he is happy and content, but what of me?..." 
-Anna Karenina

----------


## Dunechka

> haha, great topic. 
> 
> Here goes:
> 
> "Oh! oh! continua Corneille, comme ces gens sont en colère! Est-ce contre vous? est-ce contre moi?"
> 
> ("Oh! oh! Cornelis went on, how angr are those people! Is it because of you? Is it because of me?")
> 
> _La Tulipe Noire_/_The Black Tulip_, Alexandre Dumas


I LOVE THAT BOOK. *sigh*

----------


## Sido

She slid it over her head, then carried all her treasures back to Port where she arranged them on the central table.
- The Slow Regard of Silent Things - Patrick Rothfuss -

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

"The commissary knocked thrice, every blow seeming to Dantes as if struck on his heart"
Dumas; _The Count on Monte Cristo_

----------


## EmptySeraph

''Adesea sunt tentat să-mi plăsmuiesc o altă genealogie, să-mi schimb strămoșii, să mi-i aleg dintre aceia care, la vremea lor, au știut să semene doliul printre popoare, la antipodul străbunilor mei, alor noștri, umiliți și loviți, copleșiți de mizerii, amestecați cu țărână și gemând sub blestemul veacurilor.''

''I'm often tempted to forge myself another genealogy, to change my ancestors, to choose them from those who, at their time, knew to sow the mourning throughout peoples, at the antipode of my forefathers, of ours, humiliated and hit, overwhelmed by miseries, mixed with dust, and moaning under the curse of the ages.''

E.M. Cioran, _Istorie și Utopie / History and Utopia_

----------


## Danik 2016

"Medieval Jewish sholars put the date of the Creation at 3760 BC."-_ Good Omens_, Terry Pratched & Neil Gaiman

----------


## Sido

Greg's family owned two neurotic cats that were always screeching when they got under his feet or sending his heart into overdrive when they rocketed out from under his bed.
- The Sell House - Linda Newbery -

----------


## tailor STATELY

"about your aunt or cousin who died" -

_All the Brilliant Ideas I've Ever Had_
poems
Justin Evans

----------


## Zoey141

Haha, interesting. Just realized that the 23rd page just has

PART THREE


SEPTEMBER,
TWO MONTHS LATER


It's a popular book though. Does anyone want to take a random guess?

----------


## Whifflingpin

Without checking, is it Tristram Shandy?


For me - "All traces of the paintings of saints on the lower panels have vanished."

_Some old Devon Churches_ - John Stabb
By coincidence, the church in question was the one in which I was baptised, about threescore & twelve years ago. I don't remember seeing the lower panels.

----------


## Jim Joyce

"English girls don't know about fireflies, which is about all Slothrop knows for sure about English girls."

_Gravity's Rainbow_, Thomas Pynchon.

----------

