Best First Lines
- Description
- Novels that have excellent or memorable first lines. Started from American Book Review's 100 Best First Lines from Novels (http://americanbookreview.org/100bestlines.asp)
1
35,528 membres
541 critiques
3.8
Rang global 16
Score 6.07
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 12:07 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Call me Ishmael.
2
de Jane Austen
80,524 membres
1,366 critiques
½ 4.4
Rang global 1
Score 16.02
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 12:07 PM
- 5 Members
- Aquila, merrystar, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
3
10,740 membres
142 critiques
4.1
Rang global 66
Score 3.04
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 12:08 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: A screaming comes across the sky.
4
44,379 membres
689 critiques
4.2
Rang global 14
Score 6.7
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 12:08 PM
- 3 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
5
31,687 membres
559 critiques
4.1
Rang global 44
Score 4.32
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 12:09 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
6
de Leo Tolstoy
38,410 membres
623 critiques
4.1
Rang global 15
Score 6.21
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 12:09 PM
- 3 Members
- Aquila, hipdeep, aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
7
de James Joyce
5,330 membres
58 critiques
3.9
Rang global 47
Score 4.09
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 12:09 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
8
81,840 membres
1,268 critiques
4.2
Rang global 5
Score 11.2
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 12:10 PM
- 5 Members
- Aquila, hipdeep, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
9
36,609 membres
456 critiques
3.9
Rang global 6
Score 10.98
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 12:10 PM
- 5 Members
- Aquila, hipdeep, merrystar, aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
10
16,358 membres
212 critiques
4
Rang global 48
Score 4.04
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 12:11 PM
- 2 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: I am an invisible man.
11
774 membres
33 critiques
½ 3.4
Rang global 46
Score 4.23
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:09 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard.
12
de Mark Twain
42,913 membres
518 critiques
3.9
Rang global 10
Score 8.53
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:09 PM
- 4 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.
13
de Franz Kafka
19,864 membres
237 critiques
4
Rang global 50
Score 3.79
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:10 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
14
12,508 membres
257 critiques
4.1
Rang global 53
Score 3.67
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:11 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
15
1,659 membres
25 critiques
3.8
Rang global 81
Score 2.03
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:11 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
16
69,486 membres
1,078 critiques
3.8
Rang global 18
Score 5.97
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:11 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
17
de James Joyce
21,191 membres
217 critiques
½ 3.7
Rang global 23
Score 5.67
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:12 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.
18
4,780 membres
113 critiques
3.8
Rang global 29
Score 5.31
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:12 PM
- 2 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
19
7,663 membres
112 critiques
3.9
Rang global 21
Score 5.75
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:13 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.
20
20,658 membres
274 critiques
4.1
Rang global 24
Score 5.61
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:14 PM
- 3 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
21
de James Joyce
24,083 membres
377 critiques
4
Rang global 58
Score 3.44
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:14 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
22
100 membres
1 critique
4
Rang global 85
Score 1.85
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:15 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
23
10,981 membres
194 critiques
½ 3.7
Rang global 57
Score 3.46
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:15 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.
24
de Paul Auster
1,448 membres
35 critiques
½ 3.7
Rang global 60
Score 3.37
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:16 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
25
17,275 membres
226 critiques
4
Rang global 61
Score 3.34
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:16 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
26
22,802 membres
405 critiques
3.9
Rang global 26
Score 5.49
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:17 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: 124 was spiteful.
27
30,475 membres
449 critiques
4.1
Rang global 25
Score 5.52
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:17 PM
- 3 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.
28
de Albert Camus
35,465 membres
501 critiques
3.9
Rang global 28
Score 5.34
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:17 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Mother died today.
29
de Ha Jin
4,060 membres
81 critiques
½ 3.6
Rang global 86
Score 1.72
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:18 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.
30
23,044 membres
379 critiques
3.9
Rang global 42
Score 4.54
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:18 PM
- 2 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
31
12,519 membres
155 critiques
4.1
Rang global 87
Score 1.7
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:18 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man.
32
578 membres
10 critiques
3.9
Rang global 88
Score 1.68
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:19 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Where now? Who now? When now?
33
445 membres
3 critiques
3.1
Rang global 90
Score 1.67
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:19 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. "Stop!" cried the groaning old man at last, "Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree."
34
de John Barth
620 membres
11 critiques
½ 3.6
Rang global 91
Score 1.66
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:20 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: In a sense, I am Jacob Horner.
35
1,329 membres
28 critiques
3.8
Rang global 92
Score 1.65
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:20 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: It was like so, but wasn't.
36
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: —Money . . . in a voice that rustled.
37
20,604 membres
329 critiques
3.9
Rang global 36
Score 5.03
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:21 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
38
43,970 membres
704 critiques
4.1
Rang global 11
Score 8.07
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:21 PM
- 4 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: All this happened, more or less.
39
4,886 membres
49 critiques
3.8
Rang global 94
Score 1.6
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:22 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: They shoot the white girl first.
40
11,117 membres
182 critiques
4.2
Rang global 64
Score 3.21
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:22 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: For a long time, I went to bed early.
41
de Felipe Alfau
193 membres
2 critiques
½ 3.4
Rang global 95
Score 1.58
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:23 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: The moment one learns English, complications set in.
42
558 membres
18 critiques
½ 3.5
Rang global 55
Score 3.57
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:23 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.
43
7,928 membres
139 critiques
4.2
Rang global 96
Score 1.56
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:24 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane;
44
19,084 membres
345 critiques
4
Rang global 13
Score 7.51
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:24 PM
- 4 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.
45
9,491 membres
214 critiques
½ 3.6
Rang global 31
Score 5.21
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:24 PM
- 3 Members
- Aquila, aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
46
de Walter Abish
239 membres
6 critiques
½ 3.6
Rang global 97
Score 1.54
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:25 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation.
47
de C. S. Lewis
25,337 membres
256 critiques
4
Rang global 2
Score 14.23
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:25 PM
- 6 Members
- Aquila, hipdeep, merrystar, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it
48
30,692 membres
505 critiques
3.8
Rang global 65
Score 3.05
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:26 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
49
de Iain Banks
3,206 membres
60 critiques
4
Rang global 98
Score 1.51
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:26 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: It was the day my grandmother exploded.
50
27,125 membres
630 critiques
4.1
Rang global 68
Score 3.02
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:26 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
51
1,536 membres
44 critiques
4
Rang global 99
Score 1.5
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:27 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Elmer Gantry was drunk.
52
2,183 membres
37 critiques
3.9
Rang global 100
Score 1.49
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:27 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
53
de Ray Bradbury
53,813 membres
994 critiques
4
Rang global 7
Score 10.35
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:28 PM
- 5 Members
- hipdeep, merrystar, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: It was a pleasure to burn.
54
6,520 membres
171 critiques
3.9
Rang global 38
Score 4.94
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:28 PM
- 3 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
55
3,273 membres
63 critiques
3.9
Rang global 101
Score 1.47
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:28 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression.
56
de Daniel Defoe
24,841 membres
321 critiques
½ 3.6
Rang global 39
Score 4.9
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:29 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho' not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call'd me.
57
1,520 membres
35 critiques
3.9
Rang global 102
Score 1.46
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:29 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.
58
de George Eliot
17,698 membres
330 critiques
4.2
Rang global 40
Score 4.86
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:30 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
59
39,996 membres
525 critiques
4.1
Rang global 103
Score 1.44
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:30 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: It was love at first sight.
60
220 membres
7 critiques
4
Rang global 104
Score 1.44
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:30 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?
61
6,218 membres
115 critiques
4.1
Rang global 37
Score 4.97
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:31 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.
62
de Anne Tyler
3,661 membres
63 critiques
½ 3.5
Rang global 105
Score 1.43
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:31 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.
63
1,124 membres
16 critiques
½ 3.7
Rang global 106
Score 1.42
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:32 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.
64
72,052 membres
1,165 critiques
3.8
Rang global 22
Score 5.71
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:37 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
65
de Alice Walker
19,695 membres
334 critiques
4.1
Rang global 35
Score 5.07
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:37 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: You better not never tell nobody but God.
66
12,035 membres
138 critiques
½ 3.7
Rang global 41
Score 4.67
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:37 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die."
67
de Sylvia Plath
28,063 membres
500 critiques
4
Rang global 19
Score 5.92
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:38 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
68
2,931 membres
62 critiques
½ 3.6
Rang global 107
Score 1.39
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:38 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.
69
de Saul Bellow
5,194 membres
62 critiques
½ 3.7
Rang global 108
Score 1.39
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:39 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
70
1,771 membres
45 critiques
4
Rang global 109
Score 1.38
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:40 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.
71
de Günter Grass
7,586 membres
93 critiques
4
Rang global 110
Score 1.38
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:40 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.
72
181 membres
2 critiques
½ 3.3
Rang global 111
Score 1.37
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:41 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson.
73
296 membres
5 critiques
3.8
Rang global 112
Score 1.37
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:41 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World.
74
de Henry James
3,396 membres
40 critiques
½ 3.7
Rang global 113
Score 1.36
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:42 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him.
75
22,377 membres
243 critiques
½ 3.7
Rang global 114
Score 1.36
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:42 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.
76
1,262 membres
37 critiques
3.8
Rang global 115
Score 1.36
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:43 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: "Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.
77
9,024 membres
115 critiques
½ 3.7
Rang global 69
Score 2.94
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:43 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.
78
2,327 membres
38 critiques
4
Rang global 54
Score 3.6
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:44 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
79
1,335 membres
25 critiques
4.2
Rang global 116
Score 1.34
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:44 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.
80
1,126 membres
11 critiques
½ 3.7
Rang global 117
Score 1.34
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:45 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.
81
3,544 membres
77 critiques
½ 3.5
Rang global 118
Score 1.33
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:45 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash.
82
de Dodie Smith
9,188 membres
294 critiques
4.1
Rang global 4
Score 11.75
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:45 PM
- 5 Members
- Aquila, merrystar, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
83
6,138 membres
162 critiques
4
Rang global 119
Score 1.33
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:46 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: "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."
84
de John Barth
2,097 membres
39 critiques
4.2
Rang global 120
Score 1.32
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:46 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.
85
1,008 membres
34 critiques
3.9
Rang global 121
Score 1.32
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:47 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
86
2,080 membres
32 critiques
3.9
Rang global 122
Score 1.31
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:47 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man.
87
9,173 membres
168 critiques
4.2
Rang global 123
Score 1.31
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:48 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot," or "That Claudius," or "Claudius the Stammerer," or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius," am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled.
88
1,391 membres
16 critiques
3.8
Rang global 124
Score 1.31
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:49 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women.
89
de Saul Bellow
3,847 membres
73 critiques
3.8
Rang global 125
Score 1.3
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:49 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.
90
5,053 membres
96 critiques
½ 3.7
Rang global 126
Score 1.3
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:50 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods.
91
de John Hawkes
305 membres
2 critiques
½ 3.7
Rang global 127
Score 1.3
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:50 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl's underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self.
92
1,742 membres
55 critiques
4
Rang global 43
Score 4.33
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:51 PM
- 2 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
93
26 membres
3
Rang global 128
Score 1.29
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:51 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Psychics can see the color of time it's blue.
94
10,706 membres
243 critiques
4
Rang global 33
Score 5.19
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:52 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together.
95
112 membres
1 critique
3.9
Rang global 129
Score 1.28
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:52 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen.
96
9,106 membres
162 critiques
3.9
Rang global 130
Score 1.28
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:53 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space
97
10,592 membres
174 critiques
3.9
Rang global 59
Score 3.38
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:53 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.
98
de David Lodge
1,932 membres
36 critiques
½ 3.7
Rang global 131
Score 1.27
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:54 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.
99
de Jean Rhys
8,445 membres
254 critiques
½ 3.5
Rang global 30
Score 5.25
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:54 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.
100
11,141 membres
128 critiques
½ 3.4
Rang global 132
Score 1.27
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:55 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.