"If you're going to read this, don't bother."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

"Women have always been spies."
— Harriet Rubin (The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women)

"You think you know how this story is going to end, but you don't."
— Christopher Moore (Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal)

"Christmas crept into Pine Cove like a creeping Christmas thing: dragging garland, ribbon, and sleigh bells, oozing eggnog, reeking of pine, and threatening festive doom like a cold sore under the mistletoe."
— Christopher Moore (The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror, Version 2.0)

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."
— George Orwell (1984)

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."
— Franz Kafka (The Metamorphosis)

"The answer is that we don't choose our freaks, they choose us."
— Steve Almond (Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America)

"Happy endings aren't for cowards."
— Jill A. Davis (Girls' Poker Night)

"Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

"When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing."
— Katherine Dunn (Geek Love: A Novel)

"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"The truly revolutionary promise of our nation's founding document is the freedom to pursue happiness-with-a-capital-H. "
— Dan Savage (Skipping Towards Gomorrah)

"When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"Marley was dead: to begin with."
— Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol)

"Sometimes when you work in advertising you'll get a product that's really garbage and you have to make it seem fantastic, something that is essential to the continued quality of life."
— Augusten Burroughs (Dry: A Memoir)

"A screaming comes across the sky."
— Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)

"Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress."
— George Eliot (Middlemarch)

"Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge."
— Margaret Atwood (The Blind Assassin)

"At school I was careful not to look like I watched everything, but I did. "
— Amanda Davis (Wonder When You'll Miss Me: A Novel)

"This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

"The first I heard of the beach was in Bangkok, on the Ko Sanh Road."
— Alex Garland (The Beach)

"'Quite like old times,' the room says."
— Jean Rhys (Good Morning, Midnight)

"Celestina Giuliani learned the word "slander" at her cousin's baptism."
— Mary Doria Russell (Children of God)

"At first, the new owner pretends he never looked at the living room floor."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Lullaby)

"I was very young and lived with my grandparents in a villa with white walls in the Calle Ocharan, in Miraflores."
— Mario Vargas Llosa (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter: A Novel)

""Baby," groaned the guy-Ted? Tad?-something like that-and crushed his lips against the side of her neck, shoving her face against the wall of the toilet stall."
— Jennifer Weiner (In Her Shoes)

"They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did."
— Jean Rhys (Wide Sargasso Sea)

"The Rue du Coq d'Or, Paris, seven in the morning."
— George Orwell (Down and Out in Paris and London)

"My lifelong involvement with Mrs Dempster began at 5:58 o'clock p.m. on 27 December 1908, at which time I was ten years and seven months old."
— Robertson Davies (Fifth Business)

"On December 7, 2059, Emilio Sandoz was released from the isolation ward of Salvator Mundi Hospital in the middle of the night and transported in a bread van to the Jesuit residence at Number 5 Borgo Santo Spirito, a few minutes' walk across St. Peter's Square from the Vatican."
— Mary Doria Russell (The Sparrow)

"Toward the end of February 1954, James Beard was at work in his Greenwich Village kitchen doing what he most loved to do: cooking delicious meals."
— Laura Shapiro (Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America)

"We slept in what had once been the gymnasium."
— Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)

"Lord Peter Wimsey stretched himself luxuriously between the sheets provided by the Hotel Meurice."
— Dorothy L. Sayers (Clouds of Witness)

"That night Flora wanted to eat watermelon."
— Dorit Rabinyan (Persian Brides: A Novel)

"Amy called the whale punkin."
— Christopher Moore (Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings)

"The amber light came on."
— José Saramago

"Hapscomb's Texaco sat on Number 93 just north of Arnette, a pissant four-street burg about 110 miles from Houston."
— Stephen King (The Stand)

"I know what you want to hear, doctor, but I'm sorry, you're not going to pry some sordid confession out of me."
— Barbara Mujica (Frida)

"When my nose finally stops bleeding and I've disposed of the bloody paper towels, Teddy Barnes insists on driving me home in his ancient Honda Civic, a car that refuses to die and that Teddy, cheap as he is, refuses to trade in."
— Richard Russo (Straight Man: A Novel)

"Early spring, yes. It's one of those cautiously hopeful days at the beginning of April, after the clocks have made their great leap forward but before the weather or the more suspicious trees have quite had the courage to follow them, and Kate and I are traveling north in a car crammed with food and books and old saucepans and spare pieces of furniture."
— Michael Frayn (Headlong)

"As the ordinary violence of dawn sweeps across the lower Coromandel coast, a sprawling village comes into view."
— David Davidar (The House of Blue Mangoes: A Novel)

"In the midst of a thick forest, there was a castle that gave shelter to all travelers overtaken by night on their journey: lords and ladies, royalty and their retinue, humble wayfarers."
— Italo Calvino (The Castle of Crossed Destinies)

"From above, start with the privileged view. "
— Maureen Howard (Natural History: A Novel)

"Stavia saw herself as in a picture, from the outside, a darkly cloaked figure moving along a cobbled street, the stones sheened with a soft, early spring rain."
— Sheri S. Tepper (The Gate to Women's Country)

"Jerrie Cobb reached down and pulled the heavy layers of arctic clothing over her navy blue linen dress. "
— Martha Ackmann (The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight)

"I held her feet in my hands."
— Geoff Nicholson (Footsucker)

"On my first evening in the back country, I skipped down the porch steps of the farmhouse-leaving my father inside and the radio playing and my small suitcase decorated with neon flower stickers unpacked-and wandered towards the upside-down school bus I'd spied from an upstairs window."
— Mitch Cullin (Tideland)

"From the air Anguilla looked narrow, flat, and scrubby, but that was only part of the picture."
— Melinda Blanchard (A Trip to the Beach: Living on Island Time in the Caribbean)

"All right, don't scoff, mock or disbelieve: we live in mortal fear of not-quite-twins."
— Kamila Shamsie (Salt and Saffron)