Best First Lines
- Beschrijving
- 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
door Herman Melville
35,548 leden
540 besprekingen
3.8
Algemene Rangorde 16
Score 6.07
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 12:07 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: Call me Ishmael.
2
door Jane Austen
80,602 leden
1,369 besprekingen
½ 4.4
Algemene Rangorde 1
Score 16.02
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 12:07 PM
- 5 Members
- Aquila, merrystar, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Thomas Pynchon
10,751 leden
142 besprekingen
4.1
Algemene Rangorde 66
Score 3.04
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 12:08 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: A screaming comes across the sky.
4
44,428 leden
694 besprekingen
4.2
Algemene Rangorde 14
Score 6.7
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 12:08 PM
- 3 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Vladimir Nabokov
31,703 leden
563 besprekingen
4.1
Algemene Rangorde 44
Score 4.32
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 12:09 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
6
door Leo Tolstoy
38,459 leden
627 besprekingen
4.1
Algemene Rangorde 15
Score 6.21
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 12:09 PM
- 3 Members
- Aquila, hipdeep, aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
7
door James Joyce
5,334 leden
58 besprekingen
3.9
Algemene Rangorde 47
Score 4.09
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 12:09 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Verklaringen
- 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
door George Orwell
81,940 leden
1,271 besprekingen
4.2
Algemene Rangorde 5
Score 11.2
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 12:10 PM
- 5 Members
- Aquila, hipdeep, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
9
door Charles Dickens
36,645 leden
456 besprekingen
3.9
Algemene Rangorde 6
Score 10.98
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 12:10 PM
- 5 Members
- Aquila, hipdeep, merrystar, aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Ralph Ellison
16,167 leden
212 besprekingen
4
Algemene Rangorde 48
Score 4.04
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 12:11 PM
- 2 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: I am an invisible man.
11
door Nathanael West
774 leden
33 besprekingen
½ 3.4
Algemene Rangorde 46
Score 4.23
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:09 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Mark Twain
42,950 leden
518 besprekingen
3.9
Algemene Rangorde 10
Score 8.53
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:09 PM
- 4 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Franz Kafka
19,884 leden
237 besprekingen
4
Algemene Rangorde 50
Score 3.79
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:10 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
14
door Italo Calvino
12,518 leden
258 besprekingen
4.1
Algemene Rangorde 53
Score 3.67
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:11 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
15
door Samuel Beckett
1,659 leden
25 besprekingen
3.8
Algemene Rangorde 86
Score 2.03
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:11 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
16
door J. D. Salinger
69,534 leden
1,079 besprekingen
3.8
Algemene Rangorde 18
Score 5.97
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:11 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- 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
door James Joyce
21,205 leden
217 besprekingen
½ 3.7
Algemene Rangorde 23
Score 5.67
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:12 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Ford Madox Ford
4,783 leden
114 besprekingen
3.8
Algemene Rangorde 29
Score 5.31
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:12 PM
- 2 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
19
door Laurence Sterne
7,665 leden
113 besprekingen
3.9
Algemene Rangorde 21
Score 5.75
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:13 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Charles Dickens
20,669 leden
275 besprekingen
4.1
Algemene Rangorde 24
Score 5.61
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:14 PM
- 3 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Verklaringen
- 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
door James Joyce
24,072 leden
377 besprekingen
4
Algemene Rangorde 58
Score 3.44
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:14 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Verklaringen
- 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 leden
1 bespreking
4
Algemene Rangorde 90
Score 1.85
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:15 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Thomas Pynchon
10,993 leden
194 besprekingen
½ 3.7
Algemene Rangorde 57
Score 3.46
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:15 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Paul Auster
1,450 leden
35 besprekingen
½ 3.7
Algemene Rangorde 60
Score 3.37
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:16 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Verklaringen
- 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
door William Faulkner
17,271 leden
226 besprekingen
4
Algemene Rangorde 61
Score 3.34
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:16 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
26
door Toni Morrison
22,827 leden
406 besprekingen
3.9
Algemene Rangorde 26
Score 5.49
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:17 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: 124 was spiteful.
27
30,512 leden
449 besprekingen
4.1
Algemene Rangorde 25
Score 5.52
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:17 PM
- 3 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Albert Camus
35,516 leden
507 besprekingen
3.9
Algemene Rangorde 28
Score 5.34
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:17 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: Mother died today.
29
door Ha Jin
4,061 leden
81 besprekingen
½ 3.6
Algemene Rangorde 91
Score 1.72
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:18 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.
30
door William Gibson
23,058 leden
379 besprekingen
3.9
Algemene Rangorde 42
Score 4.54
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:18 PM
- 2 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
31
door Fyodor Dostoevsky
12,519 leden
156 besprekingen
4.1
Algemene Rangorde 92
Score 1.7
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:18 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man.
32
door Samuel Beckett
579 leden
10 besprekingen
3.9
Algemene Rangorde 93
Score 1.68
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:19 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: Where now? Who now? When now?
33
door Gertrude Stein
445 leden
3 besprekingen
3.1
Algemene Rangorde 95
Score 1.67
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:19 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- 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
door John Barth
620 leden
11 besprekingen
½ 3.6
Algemene Rangorde 96
Score 1.66
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:20 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: In a sense, I am Jacob Horner.
35
door Richard Powers
1,330 leden
28 besprekingen
3.8
Algemene Rangorde 97
Score 1.65
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:20 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: It was like so, but wasn't.
36
door William Gaddis
1,374 leden
19 besprekingen
4.2
Algemene Rangorde 98
Score 1.63
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:21 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: —Money . . . in a voice that rustled.
37
door Virginia Woolf
20,627 leden
330 besprekingen
3.9
Algemene Rangorde 36
Score 5.03
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:21 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
38
door Kurt Vonnegut
44,009 leden
704 besprekingen
4.1
Algemene Rangorde 11
Score 8.07
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:21 PM
- 4 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: All this happened, more or less.
39
door Toni Morrison
4,889 leden
49 besprekingen
3.8
Algemene Rangorde 99
Score 1.6
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:22 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: They shoot the white girl first.
40
door Marcel Proust
11,130 leden
183 besprekingen
4.2
Algemene Rangorde 64
Score 3.21
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:22 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: For a long time, I went to bed early.
41
door Felipe Alfau
193 leden
2 besprekingen
½ 3.4
Algemene Rangorde 100
Score 1.58
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:23 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: The moment one learns English, complications set in.
42
door Anita Brookner
558 leden
18 besprekingen
½ 3.5
Algemene Rangorde 55
Score 3.57
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:23 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.
43
door Vladimir Nabokov
7,942 leden
139 besprekingen
4.2
Algemene Rangorde 101
Score 1.56
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:24 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane;
44
door Zora Neale Hurston
19,112 leden
346 besprekingen
4
Algemene Rangorde 13
Score 7.51
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:24 PM
- 4 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.
45
door Edith Wharton
9,494 leden
214 besprekingen
½ 3.6
Algemene Rangorde 31
Score 5.21
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:24 PM
- 3 Members
- Aquila, aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Walter Abish
240 leden
6 besprekingen
½ 3.6
Algemene Rangorde 102
Score 1.54
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:25 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- 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
door C. S. Lewis
25,381 leden
257 besprekingen
4
Algemene Rangorde 2
Score 14.23
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:25 PM
- 6 Members
- Aquila, hipdeep, merrystar, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it
48
door Ernest Hemingway
30,708 leden
505 besprekingen
3.8
Algemene Rangorde 65
Score 3.05
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:26 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Iain Banks
3,209 leden
60 besprekingen
4
Algemene Rangorde 103
Score 1.51
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:26 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: It was the day my grandmother exploded.
50
door Jeffrey Eugenides
27,141 leden
631 besprekingen
4.1
Algemene Rangorde 68
Score 3.02
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:26 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Sinclair Lewis
1,537 leden
44 besprekingen
4
Algemene Rangorde 104
Score 1.5
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:27 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: Elmer Gantry was drunk.
52
door Louise Erdrich
2,186 leden
37 besprekingen
3.9
Algemene Rangorde 105
Score 1.49
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:27 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
53
door Ray Bradbury
53,894 leden
998 besprekingen
4
Algemene Rangorde 7
Score 10.35
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:28 PM
- 5 Members
- hipdeep, merrystar, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: It was a pleasure to burn.
54
door Graham Greene
6,521 leden
171 besprekingen
3.9
Algemene Rangorde 38
Score 4.94
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:28 PM
- 3 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Flann O'Brien
3,273 leden
63 besprekingen
3.9
Algemene Rangorde 106
Score 1.47
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:28 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Daniel Defoe
24,866 leden
322 besprekingen
½ 3.6
Algemene Rangorde 39
Score 4.9
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:29 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- 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
door David Markson
1,521 leden
35 besprekingen
3.9
Algemene Rangorde 107
Score 1.46
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:29 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.
58
door George Eliot
17,712 leden
330 besprekingen
4.2
Algemene Rangorde 40
Score 4.86
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:30 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
59
door Joseph Heller
39,995 leden
525 besprekingen
4.1
Algemene Rangorde 108
Score 1.44
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:30 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: It was love at first sight.
60
door Gilbert Sorrentino
220 leden
7 besprekingen
4
Algemene Rangorde 109
Score 1.44
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:30 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- 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
door W. Somerset Maugham
6,222 leden
115 besprekingen
4.1
Algemene Rangorde 37
Score 4.97
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:31 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.
62
door Anne Tyler
3,663 leden
63 besprekingen
½ 3.5
Algemene Rangorde 110
Score 1.43
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:31 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.
63
door G.K. Chesterton
1,124 leden
16 besprekingen
½ 3.7
Algemene Rangorde 111
Score 1.42
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:32 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- 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
door F. Scott Fitzgerald
72,184 leden
1,170 besprekingen
3.8
Algemene Rangorde 22
Score 5.71
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:37 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Alice Walker
19,718 leden
336 besprekingen
4.1
Algemene Rangorde 35
Score 5.07
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:37 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: You better not never tell nobody but God.
66
door Salman Rushdie
12,038 leden
138 besprekingen
½ 3.7
Algemene Rangorde 41
Score 4.67
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:37 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die."
67
door Sylvia Plath
28,104 leden
502 besprekingen
4
Algemene Rangorde 19
Score 5.92
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:38 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- 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
door David Foster Wallace
2,935 leden
62 besprekingen
½ 3.6
Algemene Rangorde 112
Score 1.39
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:38 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.
69
door Saul Bellow
5,200 leden
62 besprekingen
½ 3.7
Algemene Rangorde 113
Score 1.39
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:39 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
70
door Flannery O'Connor
1,773 leden
45 besprekingen
4
Algemene Rangorde 114
Score 1.38
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:40 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Günter Grass
7,590 leden
93 besprekingen
4
Algemene Rangorde 115
Score 1.38
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:40 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Stanley Elkin
181 leden
2 besprekingen
½ 3.3
Algemene Rangorde 116
Score 1.37
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:41 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson.
73
door Robert Coover
296 leden
5 besprekingen
3.8
Algemene Rangorde 117
Score 1.37
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:41 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Henry James
3,400 leden
40 besprekingen
½ 3.7
Algemene Rangorde 118
Score 1.36
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:42 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Ernest Hemingway
22,396 leden
243 besprekingen
½ 3.7
Algemene Rangorde 70
Score 2.87
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:42 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Rose Macaulay
1,264 leden
37 besprekingen
3.8
Algemene Rangorde 119
Score 1.36
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:43 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: "Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.
77
door Joseph Conrad
9,031 leden
115 besprekingen
½ 3.7
Algemene Rangorde 69
Score 2.94
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:43 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- 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
door L. P. Hartley
2,329 leden
38 besprekingen
4
Algemene Rangorde 54
Score 3.6
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:44 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
79
door Russell Hoban
1,335 leden
25 besprekingen
4.2
Algemene Rangorde 120
Score 1.34
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:44 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- 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
door William Gaddis
1,125 leden
11 besprekingen
½ 3.7
Algemene Rangorde 121
Score 1.34
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:45 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.
81
door J. G. Ballard
3,545 leden
77 besprekingen
½ 3.5
Algemene Rangorde 71
Score 2.84
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:45 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash.
82
door Dodie Smith
9,200 leden
294 besprekingen
4.1
Algemene Rangorde 4
Score 11.75
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:45 PM
- 5 Members
- Aquila, merrystar, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
83
door Katherine Dunn
6,144 leden
162 besprekingen
4
Algemene Rangorde 122
Score 1.33
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:46 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- 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
door John Barth
2,099 leden
40 besprekingen
4.2
Algemene Rangorde 123
Score 1.32
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:46 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- 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
door James Crumley
1,010 leden
34 besprekingen
3.9
Algemene Rangorde 124
Score 1.32
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:47 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- 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
door William Faulkner
2,081 leden
32 besprekingen
3.9
Algemene Rangorde 125
Score 1.31
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:47 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Robert Graves
9,177 leden
168 besprekingen
4.2
Algemene Rangorde 73
Score 2.81
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:48 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Charles Johnson
1,392 leden
16 besprekingen
3.8
Algemene Rangorde 126
Score 1.31
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:49 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women.
89
door Saul Bellow
3,853 leden
73 besprekingen
3.8
Algemene Rangorde 127
Score 1.3
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:49 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Sinclair Lewis
5,058 leden
96 besprekingen
½ 3.7
Algemene Rangorde 128
Score 1.3
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:50 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- 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
door John Hawkes
305 leden
2 besprekingen
½ 3.7
Algemene Rangorde 129
Score 1.3
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:50 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Rafael Sabatini
1,744 leden
55 besprekingen
4
Algemene Rangorde 43
Score 4.33
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:51 PM
- 2 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
93
door Ronald Sukenick
26 leden
3
Algemene Rangorde 130
Score 1.29
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:51 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: Psychics can see the color of time it's blue.
94
door Carson McCullers
10,718 leden
243 besprekingen
4
Algemene Rangorde 33
Score 5.19
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:52 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together.
95
door Raymond Federman
112 leden
1 bespreking
3.9
Algemene Rangorde 131
Score 1.28
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:52 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Margaret Atwood
9,110 leden
163 besprekingen
3.9
Algemene Rangorde 74
Score 2.77
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:53 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space
97
door Virginia Woolf
10,607 leden
175 besprekingen
3.9
Algemene Rangorde 59
Score 3.38
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:53 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- 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
door David Lodge
1,932 leden
36 besprekingen
½ 3.7
Algemene Rangorde 132
Score 1.27
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:54 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Verklaringen
- 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
door Jean Rhys
8,455 leden
254 besprekingen
½ 3.5
Algemene Rangorde 30
Score 5.25
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:54 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.
100
door Stephen Crane
11,145 leden
128 besprekingen
½ 3.4
Algemene Rangorde 75
Score 2.75
Toegevoegd 2022-06-15, 01:55 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Verklaringen
- aethercowboy: The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.