"My gosh, if you’re going away, we got a million things to talk about! All the things we would’ve talked about next month, the month after! Praying mantises, zeppelins, acrobats, sword swallowers!"
— Ray Bradbury (Dandelion Wine)

"They were adored by the Germans, who thought they were exactly what Englishmen ought to be. They made war look stylish and reasonable, and fun...
They were dressed half for battle, half for tennis or croquet.
"
— Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five)

"And it was that self-same summer—June 5th, if precision is your watchword—that I first set eyes on a stringy southern hemisphere home-boy, a man-boy, a prankish puck by the name of La Roux (with very bad skin and even worse instincts), who sailed into the slow-beating heart of our half-arsed, high-strung, low-bred family, then casually capsized himself, but left us all drowning (now they don’t teach you that at the Sea Scouts, do they?)."
— Nicola Barker (Five Miles from Outer Hope)

"The Swedish he knew was mostly from Bergman films. He had learned it as a college student, matching the subtitles to the sounds. In Swedish, he could only converse on the darkest of subjects."
— Ann Patchett (Bel Canto)

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita (Penguin Modern Classics))