Enter the first sentence of a novel.
Call me Ishmael.
The student wouldn't stop doing her homework, and it was going to kill her.
To become the caretaker of Elaragnia, the Alezrani must give up part of their soul so they may interact with the universe at its deepest levels
The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.
I have made my decision, Bacchus. 
The fetch is one of the most feared and least understood figures in Faerie.
The day the earth shook and a stranger fell from the sky, was the same day that Peregrine “Peri” Smythe was stuck in a tree.
As the clock ticked down on her senior year in high school, Laurel McBane learned one indisputable fact.
Smoke and the cloying scent of chems hung thick in the air. 
Sylvie skipped along to the tune spilling from her Pip Boy, hopping from one side of the train tracks to the other. 
It was nearing dark when they passed the ruins of a Red Rocket Station and the boss eagerly picked up the pace.
Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood.
The boss squinted through the binoculars and the clumps of stiff, brown grass at the towering tangle of roads. 
It's quiet for several small moments.
Some things start before other things.
Zombies were eating someone's brain on the screen of Grandad's old TV.
It's true, I work with explosives.
Sometimes, it's more than a bit of a tragedy that real life can't be structured like a film.
Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents' divorce.
You stand on your tiptoes, arm stretched up towards a book that looks sort of like the one you want. 
Not more than five days after she had despatched an urgent missive to her brother, the Most Honourable the Marquis of Alverstoke, requesting him to visit her at his earliest convenience, the widowed Lady Buxted was relieved to learn from her youngest daughter that Uncle Vernon had just driven up to the house, wearing a coat with dozens of capes, and looking as fine as fivepence.
"Our land is alive, Esperanza," said Papa, taking her small hand as they walked through the gentle slopes of the vineyard.
Phillip,” she said, “this is crazy."
All of this happened, more or less.
Through my binoculars, I could see this nice forty-something-foot cabin cruiser anchored a few hundred yards offshore.
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.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Rain beat against the windows of the bus so hard one could barely see out.
Directly ahead, the star was  a marble-sized yellow-orange ball, it's intensity moderated by its distance and by the viewports automatic sunscreens.
Gestures are all that I have;  sometimes they must be grand in nature. 
The Giacano family had locked up the action in Orleans and Jefferson Parishes back in Prohibition.
Imo set out one day to catch some fish, but there was no sea.
On the day his destiny returned to claim him, Ted Mundy was sporting a bowler hat and balancing on a soapbox in one of Mad King Ludwig’s castles in Bavaria.
There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass.'
He'd stopped trying to bring her back.
Gliding through the blackness of deep space, the Imperial Star Dedtroyer Chimaera pointed its mighty arrowhead shape toward the dim star of its target system, three thousandths of a light-year away.
The Nac Mac Feegle are the most dangerous of the fairy races, particularly when drunk.
That was when I saw the Pendulum.
The Scopuli had been taken eight days ago, and Julie Mao was finally ready to be shot.
Some years in Portland, Oregon, winter is a bully, spitting sleet and spewing snow in fits and starts as it violently wrestles days from spring, claiming some archaic right to remain king of the seasons - ultimately the vain attempt of another pretender.
In retrospect, there had been omens and portents.
Friday.
Few wished to breach the Temple-Guild's border unauthorized.
I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull.
According to the First Scroll of Wen the Eternally Surprised, Wen stepped out of the cave where he had received enlightenment and into the dawning light of the first day of the rest of his life.
There is a pile of clothing on the side of the train tracks.
The starlines collapsed into stars, and the Imperial Star Destroyer Dominator had arrived.
The body lay naked and facedown, a deathly gray, spatters of blood staining the snow around it.
BEFORE ANYONE SAYS SOMETHING BAD ABOUT OCs...  This story only contains a single OC through the whole fic. Don't THINK this OC came out of nowhere because there is a prequel to this fic so my OC and Lucario could be developed (if you want to read it)
Within the practice and protocol of the Los Angeles Police Department a two-six call is the one that draws the most immediate response while striking the most fear behind the bulletproof vest.
The library is cool and smells like carpet cleaner, although all I can see is marble.
The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got nothing much to say.
The old man's breath was uneven; sometimes difficult and shallow, sometimes deep but slow.
It was two thirty in the morning, and raining. In the City, it was always two thirty in the morning and raining.
The town was in flames.
Wind howled through the night, carrying a scent that would change the world.
You will criticize me, reader, for writing in a style six hundred years removed from the events I describe, but you came to me for explanation of those days of transformation which left your world the world it is, and since it was the philosophy of the Eighteenth Century, heavy with optimism and ambition, whose abrupt revival birthed the recent revolution, so it is only in the language of the Enlightenment, rich with opinion and sentiment, that those days can be described.
The great gray beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.
The Heart was cold.
The songs of the dead are the lamentations of the living.
Martha Snattleby decided she was going to eat bugs, and that was that.
Ned Mathey hung up his hat as he came back into his chambers from the square outside, and his clerk Miss Cordelia Frost looked up from her desk with an expression of mild curiosity.
Picture the woods above Shimboku, the early afternoon sun a white smear in the clouds.
About thirty years ago Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet’s lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income.
To wound the autumnal city.
The first conscious shock after the coronary was staring down at my own body huddled on the floor by the piano.
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
The naked child ran out of the hide-covered lean-to toward the rocky beach at the bend in the small river.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
The Morris dance is common to all inhabited worlds in the multiverse.
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
Pidge's phone whistled in her pocket, a familiar riff that never failed to make her smile every time one of her dancing friends texted her. 
Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. 
Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while.
I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train ...
The primroses were over.
Elijah Brody was being attacked by butterflies.
At three-thirty A.M. on the night of June 5, 1992, the top telepath in the Sol System fell off the map in the offices of Runciter Associates in New York City.
The worst thing about knowing that Gary Fairchild had been dead for a month was seeing him every day at work.
It seemed like half the band was already at Keith’s house -- or at least they were all in the back yard when Hunk followed the paper lanterns and spooky soundtrack down the path around the side of the house.
Jeeves—my man, you know—is really a most extraordinary chap.
The month of June was growing old.
Love is a fickle companion.
Today, Mother died.
Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvellous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it.
Rebecca and I are the only ones in the comp sci lounge on this particular Wednesday afternoon, having tea while we wait for our code to finish compiling before we go home for the day.
There was once a little princess whose father was king over a great country full of mountains and valleys.
I remember the cries of Caesar's war-horns chasing us over the darkened fields of Latium - their yearning, keening howls, like animals on heat - and how when they stopped there was only the slither of our shoes on the icy road and the urgent panting of our breath.
The carriage gave another lurch, and Maria Merryweather, Miss Heliotrope, and Wiggins once more fell into each other's arms, sighed, gasped, righted themselves, and fixed their attention upon those objects which were for each of them at this trying moment the source of courage and strength.
A-hind of hill, ways off to sun-set-down, is sky come like as fire, and walk I up in way of this, all hard of breath, where is grass colding on I's feet and wetting they.
It was the morning of the day on which I was  slated to pop down to my Aunt Agatha's place  at Woollam Chersey in the county of Herts for  a visit of three solid weeks; and. as I seated myself  at the breakfast table, I don't mind confessing that the heart was singularly heavy.
There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made.
The city sprawled like roadkill, spreading more with each new pressure.
Everything is music.
"We should start back," Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them.
The home office telegraphy department always smelled of tea.
Aimée Leduc smoothed her vintage Lanvin blue silk blouse, a flea market find.
I'd just flicked a spider off the desk, sighed and prepared to rise when the shadow of someone's head and shoulders appeared on the floor like the edge of a jigsaw piece.
Six crows sit in our greengage tree.
M y attention was drawn to the spots on my chest when I was in my bath, singing, if Iremember rightly, the Toreador song from the opera Carmen.
I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why.
Now consider the tortoise and the eagle.
"Mush!" the hunter cried into the wind.
Here's the whole story of how Fain the Gardener became Fain the Sorcerer.
Snowman wakes before dawn.
I had wanted to see the ship before we boarded; it wasn’t as though I got on a colonial cruiser every week. 
Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we?
In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market town or rural port, which by some is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly known by the name of Tarry Town.
“Will,” said Henry Collings, laying his hand lightly on my shoulder, a habit of his that I despised. 
Regina Sparks flew over a lion-coloured desert in a monoplane of clear glass.
It was a beautiful morning at the end of November.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice ‘without pictures or conversations?’
When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along to an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.
The canyon stank of rot and gore, a sweltering abattoir in the desert heat.
The girl was surgeon and singing bird, deadly queen of sharps.
They order, said I, this matter better in France.
“Third one this evening,” the cashier said. 
I’m sitting on the couch in the living room of my house in the Hollywood Hills. It’s a clear, crisp January day, and from my vantage point, I can see the beautiful expanse known as the San Fernando Valley.
Then, it was as though everything was stripped away: sensation, memory, self, even the notion of existence that underlies reality - all seemed to have vanished utterly, their passing marked only by the realisation that they had disappeared, before that too ceased to have any meaning, and for an indefinite, infinite instant, there was only the awareness of something; something that possessed no mind, no purpose and no thought, except the knowledge that it was.
I believe the question, then,” says Vasily Yaroslav, “is one of intent.
It seemed like he must have been walking for days, but it might have been weeks or hours or minutes.
There was always more in there than you thought, in the optimistic, can-do spirit that led you to do something as stupid as move to a new house. 
This is a story about magic and where it goes and perhaps more importantly where it comes from and why, although it doesn't pretend to answer all or any of these questions.
The heavy clouds blowing in from the sea held tight onto their water.
CAN there, my good Sir, be any thing more painful to a friendly mind, than a necessity of communicating disagreeable intelligence?
Everything I’m going to tell you is absolutely true. 
Pulp science fiction author Jeff Lint loomed large as an influence on my own work since I found a scarred copy of "I Blame Ferns" in a Charing Cross basement, an apparently baffled chef staring from the cover.
Alive!
The studio was filled with the rich odor of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
Jack watched Chad wipe the sweat away from his forehead and look down at the laptop, then back up at the large image glowing on the boardroom screen. 
Look at this Ronald!'
Hazel Motes sat a a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car.
“It’s a video game,” Mick said, leaning back in his seat and rolling his eyes almost into the back of his head.
Like many fathers, mine could occasionally be prevailed on for a spot of "airplane."
IT was about the Beginning of September 1664, that I, among the Rest of my Neighbours, heard in ordinary Discourse, that the Plague was return’d again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Roterdam, in the Year 1663, whither they say, it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant among some Goods, which were brought home by their Turkey Fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus. It matter’d not, from whence it come; but all agreed, it was come into Holland again.
Dante Cubit pushed into the bank, thinking about A. A. Milne.
Prod and pull,' the old woman was saying, ''tis the way of the Empress, as like the gods themselves.'
The stubborn ground clung to the last of the cold, but clear skies and crisp air marked mid-Mersa and the timely arrival of spring.
Ista leaned forward between the crenellations atop the gate tower, the stone gritty beneath her pale hands, and watched in numb exhaustion as the final mourning party cleared the castle gate below.
My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood.
It's hot as hell in Martirio, but the papers on the porch are icy with the news.
The body lay naked and facedown, a deathly gray, spatters of blood staining the snow around it.
The first time Kite saw R. Levy’s face was the day she watched her set off the fire alarm.
 One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.
Serena Campbell stood in the doorway, looking at her new office.
Cazaril heard the mounted horsemen on the road before he saw them.
THE DECK OF the French ship was slippery with blood, heaving in the choppy sea; a stroke might as easily bring down the man making it as the intended target.
My mother and father fell hopelessly in love, eloped to Italy, had me, and then promptly died, which was considered a great inconvenience by everyone involved.
When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean’s Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country. 
I am extremely concerned, my dearest friend, for the disturbances that have happened in your family.
Dragon Day used to be my favourite day of the year.
On Christmas Eve, the children of Doctor Stahlbaum were not allowed into the family room, let alone the adjoining living room. 
The rain poured down on London so hard that it seemed that it was dancing spray, every raindrop contending with its fellow for supremacy in the air and waiting to splash down.
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression "as pretty as an airport".
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
Once upon a time there was a king of a small kingdom called Luscona who had three beautiful daughters.
I should have known things were going to go wrong when the car exploded on the motorway.
“Okay, I think that’s everything,” Kelly said as they shut the back hatch to their car and patted it on the roof.
A sea of mist drifted through the cloud forest: soft, grey, luminescent.
The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got nothing much to say.
The air, moments ago filled with shouts of outrage, now hung with silence, an entire crowd anticipating screams.
As I cross the courtyard to the execution shed I pass a tangle of bloody feathers.
I was surprised to see a white man walk into Joppy's bar.
The best remedy for a bruised heart is not, as so many people seem to think, repose upon a manly bosom.
he sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. 
Light bled through the darkness.
“I can get you a cheaper ticket if you let me amputate your legs: I can even take your thighs as a deposit,” said the travel agent.”
Harriet Vane sat at her writing-table and stared out into Mecklenburg Square.
At about five thirty in the morning, he could no longer bear to lie in bed with his eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling.
It wasn’t the first time Kylie had watched her parents break into a government facility, but it never got any easier.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
The old swordsman was kneeling in the dirt, blowing on the embers of last night's fire when he saw the boy approaching.
Steel[ We should probably introduce their telepathy in this scene] bars rattled in their sockets as the wagon jolted up the mountain road. 
Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
The sky was the colour of a television, tuned to a dead channel
If you were to look for the little island of Tana Masa on a map you would find it right on the equator slightly to the west of Sumatra
Not a day goes by that the post does not bring me at least one letter from a young person (or sometimes one not so young) who wishes to follow in my footsteps and become a dragon naturalist.
The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.
In his dreams, he saw a world unlike anything he’s ever seen before.
In the prison under the castle Allaze, in the dark, moldy cells where the greatest criminals in Mellinor spent the remainder of their lives counting rocks to stave off madness, Eli Monpress was trying to wake up a door.
The sky above the port was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel.
Not everyone believes in mountains, yet there they are, in plain sight.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Out of all the people you’d commonly expect to steal a dragon, my sister was not one.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun
"Where is Leovinus?" demanded the Gat of Blerontis, Chief Quantity Surveyor of the entire North Eastern Gas District of the planet of Blerontin.
High in the forested hills where no one went, there stood a stone tower.
If you were ever planning on trying to uncover an alien conspiracy-- forget it. It’s not worth it. Trust me.
"You already have heirs." I said.
The moonlight is shining on the foot of my bed, lying there like a large, bright, flat stone.
At Kel Academy, an instructor had explained to Cheris's class that the threshold winnower was a weapon of last resort, and not just for its notorious connotations.
At nine o’clock in the morning, towards the end of November, the Warsaw train was approaching Petersburg at full steam. 
The great hall of the Shapers had been flung open to let in the wounded.
One moment asleep.
Sixty years after she got her first job in codebreaking, when Elizebeth was an old woman, the National Security Agency sent a female representative to her apartment in Washington, D.C.
You don't know about me without you have read a book called "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," but that ain't no matter.
Hi my name is Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way and I have long ebony black hair (that’s how I got my name) with purple streaks and red tips that reaches my mid-back and icy blue eyes like limpid tears and a lot of people tell me I look like Amy Lee (AN: if u don’t know who she is get da hell out of here!).
In my time I have been called many things: sister, lover, priestess, wise-woman, queen.
ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn't seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, "Be My Baby" on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.
According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly.
"Considering the circumstances, you could use another lieutenant."
Outside the lighthouse, the wind was howling, and the sea roared, but in the golden warmth of the living room, nobody was paying much attention to the noise of the storm.
Tall Mr Hughes, short Mr Hughes and Mr Puw were standing at the bar of The Anchor.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Richard Gansey III had forgotten how many times he had been told he was destined for greatness.
Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes.
RIGHT HERE AND NOW, as an old friend used to say, we are in the fluid present, where clear-sightedness never guarantees perfect vision.
The body lay naked and facedown, a deathly gray, spatters of blood staining the snow around it.
The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault.
Persephone stood on the mountaintop, her ruffled ivory dress whipping around her legs, her masses of white-blond curls streaming behind her.
What’s the best way to keep microbiologists happy? Put them in a warm, dark place and feed them decomposing matter. This old joke is, of course, a terrible misrepresentation—most microbiologists I’ve polled prefer moderate lighting with fresh donuts and coffee—but the other half of the analogy works perfectly.
Ba-room, ba-room, ba-room, baripity, baripity, baripity, baripity--Good.
The words were written in pencil on a piece of paper placed on top of the body.
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
It was love at first sight. 
A secret is a strange thing.
I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.
“When your mama was the geek, my dear 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.”
If you're going to read this, don't bother.
It was the day my grandmother exploded.
Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.
Quentin rode a gray horse with white socks named Dauntless.
Beep beep!
Despair could never touch a morning like this.
It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton.
"It wouldn't really be graverobbing, " Nicolin was explaining.
An abandoned auto court in the San Berdoo foothills; Buzz Meeks checked in with ninety-four thousand dollars, eighteen pounds of high-grade heroin, a 10-gauge pump, a .38 special, a .45 automatic and a switchblade he'd bought off a pachuco at the border - right before he spotted the car parked across the line: Mickey Cohen goons in an LAPD unmarked, Tijuana cops standing by to bootjack a piece of his goodies, dump his body in the San Ysidro River.
This morning on planet Earth, there are one thousand, six hundred, and eighty-six enhanced, gifted, or otherwise-superpowered persons.
They found the corpse on the eighth of July just after three o'clock in the afternoon.
The body lay naked and facedown, a deathly gray, spatters of blood staining the snow around it.
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
"I don't understand."
The first carabiniere to enter the room slipped on the blood and fell to his knees.
A tram was coming, squealing metal against metal, throwing blue-white sparks into the winter dark.
They didn’t think Flynne’s brother had PTSD, but that sometimes the haptics glitched him.
Tara Abernathy’s first job as in-house counsel for the Church of Kos was to hide a body.
Polly cut off her hair in front of the mirror, feeling slightly guilty about not feeling very guilty about doing so.
For false gods, they cast long shadows.
The goddess leaned over the card table and whispered, “Go all in.”
Sam Vimes sighed when he heard the scream, but he finished shaving before he did anything about it. 
Robert came to Wells because Wells was where one came to heal if one could ostensibly be considered upper class, and as an invalided Captain he rather thought he could, though he was far from the first person to suggest that Wells was Wells simply because the wealthy required somewhere to throw their money away and one well was as good as another when all was said and done.
The idol would drown that night.
It is an author’s privilege to alter the details of a story in service to the broader narrative.
‘So now get up.’
The air in the Garden holds the smell of salt and starlight and dark earth made soft with water. 
Lolita. Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.
The Opera Ghost really existed.
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.
All this happened, more or less.
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
On a certain day in June, 19--, a young man was making his way northward from the great City to a town or place called Edgewood, that he had been told of but had never visited.
William Anthony Cozzano's office was a scandal.
The temperature of the room dropped fast.
My friendship with Lila began the day we decided to go up the dark stairs that led, step after step, flight after flight, to the door of Don Achille’s apartment.
Make it stop!
I was late for my appointment with a dead man.
The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.
On the corner of 16th Street and Hieratica a factory sings and sighs.
As soon as they let him, John goes back to the flat.
"Decisions, decisions."
On a narrow, winding road, high near the summit of a snowy mountaintop, a boy named Iai walked steadily upwards, leaning into the blurry whiteness of a relentless snowstorm.
I sit and I hear the words.
The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.
Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls.
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. 
Thorin Oakenshield, King Under the Mountain, came awake with a sudden start and a strangled shout of alarm.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. 
If he hadn’t already been keenly aware of it, Sherlock Holmes would have known that his career was sliding slowly into oblivion by the way other people acted toward him as he walked through to his agent’s office.
Titus is seven.
All children, except one, grow up.
Light troops — an Eleven-Bravo light infantryman, according the United States Army's MOS (military occupational specialty) system—are supposed to be "pretty" spit-and-polish troops with spotless uniforms and clean-shaven faces, but First Sergeant Sam Driscoll wasn't one of those anymore, and hadn't been for some time.
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
All children, except one, grow up.
To north, south, east or west, turning at will, it was not long before his landmarks fled him.
After the thing was all over, when peril had ceased to loom and happy endings had been distributed in heaping handfuls and we were driving home with our hats on the side of our heads, having shaken the dust of Steeple Bumpleigh from our tyres, I confessed to Jeeves that there had been moments during the recent proceedings when Bertram Wooster, though no weakling, had come very near to despair.
When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.
All this happened, more or less.
It was in that year when the fashion in cruelty demanded not only the crucifixion of peasant children, but a similar fate for their household animals, that I first met Lucifer and was transported into Hell; for the Prince of Darkness wished to strike a bargain with me.
Clare: It’s hard being left behind. I wait for Henry, not knowing where he is, wondering if he’s okay.
On the day that his Grannie was killed by the English, Sir William Scott the Younger of Beccleuch was at Melrose Abbey, marrying his aunt.
Gehn's bootprints lay heavy around the tiny pool, the lush, well-tended green churned to mud.
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
It was a dumb thing to do but it wasn't that dumb.
It began one day in summer about thirty years ago, and it happened to four children.
His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god.
No matter what anyone tells you, being agonizingly crushed to death does not concentrate the mind in any way.
Gram is worried about me.
The sounding capsule was embedded in the rock face like a giant crystal, its occupants sealed within the translucent, soundproof cone.
This is how it all begins.
Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians.
When Menolly, daughter of Yanus Sea Holder, arrived at the Harper Craft Hall, she came in style, aboard a bronze dragon.
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. 
Sea birds are aloft again, a tattered few.
Stone Mountain is the only truly rough peak in the Peconics.
So now get up.
The cavern was silent.
The rumble-thud-boom of the big drums answering a message from the east roused Piemur.
Everyone knew a dead barmaid was buried in the courtyard.
The sea lay in simmering quiet, a slate-green gumbo seasoned with warm mud.
At the time I first realized I might be fictional, my weekdays were spent at a publicly funded institution on the north side of Indianapolis called White River High School, where I was required to eat lunch at a particular time—between 12:37 P.M. and 1:14 P.M.—by forces so much larger than myself that I couldn't even being to identify them.
It was the day my grandmother exploded.
High atop a snow-covered hill, the Wyatt mansion perched like a regal crown, its Gothic stone spires pointing skyward, its stained-glass windows glowing like jewels.
To most of my clients, bifocal glasses are asthma.
The animals know.
Almost as if the elements, too, mourned the death of the gentle old Harper, a southeaster blew for three days, locking even the burial barge in the safety of the Dock Cavern.
Let the fairy tale begin on a winter’s morning, then, with one drop of blood new-fallen on the ivory snow: a drop as bright as a clear-cut ruby, red as the single spot of claret on the lace cuff.
We wrote to you recently to tell you that your next eye examination was due.
Atticus was almost home when the state trooper pulled him over.
High over Kirtesk, the prince's city, a falcon sported in the clear sky - a falcon like no other, glinting bright in the sun, silver in the morning light.
Two nights ago, at 10:44 Greenwich time on the Earth, Simone Tiasso Wakefield greeted the universe.
In the dying days of the Gzilt civilisation, before its long-prepared-for elevation to something better and the celebrations to mark this momentous but joyful occasion, one of its last surviving ships encountered an alien vessel whose sole task was to deliver a very special party-goer to the festivities.
It was the day my Grandmother exploded.
Now that is was too late, she knew how wrong she had been.
"This one might be trouble."
Hand over the entire internet now and nobody gets hurt.
You have come again.
Antuniet looked up from the ruined crucible on the workbench and swore softly.
It was the spring of the year 1894 that all London was interested, and the fashionable world dismayed, by the murder of the Honorable Ronald Adair under most unusual and inexplicable circumstances.
A light breeze produced a dry rattling sound from some nearby bushes.
And then, after walking all day through a golden haze of humid warmth that gathered about him like fine wet fleece, Valentine came to a great ridge of outcropping white stone overlooking the city of Pidruid.
Rain fell like tiny silver teardrops from the tired sky.
The stars, like all man’s other ventures, were an obvious impracticality, as rash and improbable an ambition as the first venture of man onto Earth’s own great oceans, or into the air, or into space.
Tell me, what is happiness?'
"From the point of view of the criminal expert," said Mr. Sherlock Holmes, "London has become a singularly uninteresting city since the death of the late lamented Professor Moriarty."
A way a lone a last a loved a long the 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.
It was a dazzling four-sun afternoon.
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
Through the curtained windows of the furnished flat which Mrs. Horace Hignett had rented for her stay inNew York, rays of golden sunlight peeped in like the foremost spies of some advancing army.
Holmes had been seated for some hours in silence with his long, thin back curved over a chemical vessel in which he was brewing a particularly malodorous product.
I am a very old man; how old I do not know.
Imagine a vast ocean, uncontrollable, swept by storms, wracked with treacherous currents and inhabited by the deadliest predators.
Never trust a god.
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
There were five of us — Caruthers and the new recruit and myself, and Mr. Spivens and the verger.
From the years 1894 to 1901 inclusive, Mr. Sherlock Holmes was a very busy man.
The mowing machine’s whirring sounded cheerfully from the old buffalo wallow south of the claim shanty, where bluestem grass stood thick and tall and Pa was cutting it for hay.
I am an invisible man.
The air was still and cold, biting into the young boy like a million needle teeth.
Oghi slowly opened his eyes.
I heard the mailman approach my office door, half an hour earlier than usual.
We have had some dramatic entrances and exits upon our small stage at Baker Street, but I cannot recollect anything more sudden and startling than the first appearance of Thorneycroft Huxtable, M.A., Ph.D., etc.
I never used to keep close track of the phases of the moon.
Listen, Paula, I am going to tell you a story so that when you wake up you will not feel so lost. 
I was there the day Horus killed the Emperor
It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.
There are reasons I hate to drive fast.
Sing, goddess, of the anger of Achilleus, son of Peleus, the accursed anger which brought uncounted anguish on the Achaians and hurled down to Hades many mighty souls of heroes, making their bodies the prey to dogs and the birds' feasting: and this was the working of Zeus' will. 
It was the pivotal teaching of Pluthero Quexos, the most celebrated dramatist of the Second Dominion, that in any fiction, no matter how ambitious its scope or profound its theme, there was only ever room for three players.
At Kel Academy, an instructor had explained to Cheris’s class that the threshold winnower was a weapon of last resort, and not just for its notorious connotations.
It rained toads the day the White Council came to town.
I have never known my friend to be in better form, both mental and physical, than in the year '95.
In June, the book club was at Zoe's house, which meant that Elizabeth had to carry her heavy ceramic bowl of spinach salad with walnuts and bits of crumbled goat cheese a grand total of half a block.
Freya woke early and lay for a while in the dark, feeling her city shiver and sway beneath her as its powerful engines sent it skimming across the ice.
Alive!
Some things just aren't meant to go together.
The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault.
There were deer all over the road.
On the whole, we're a murderous race.
It is years since the incidents of which I speak took place, and yet it is with diffidence that I allude to them.
Once upon a time, there was a boy born with frost in his eyes and frost in his heart.
Blood leaves no stain on a Warden's grey cloak.
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
Many things are not as they seem: The worst things in life never are.
It was midmorning on a Monday when magic walked into my life wearing a beige Ann Taylor suit and sensible flats.
At first there was nothing.
Winter came early that year; it should have been a tip-off.
We wanted more.
Vellitt Boe was dreaming  of a highway and ten million birds in an empty sky of featureless blue.
HE SEEMED INCAPABLE of creating such chaos, but much of what he saw below could be blamed on him.
"I can't go on," his brother said.
The summer sun was busy broiling the asphalt from Chicago's streets, the agony in my head had kept me horizontal for half a day, and some idiot was pounding on my apartment door.
She slices through the water, imagining herself a deadly beam of black light.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
It was no very unusual thing for Mr. Lestrade, of Scotland Yard, to look in upon us of an evening, and his visits were welcome to Sherlock Holmes, for they enabled him to keep in touch with all that was going on at the police headquarters.
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
I answered the phone, and Susan Rodriguez said, "They've taken our daughter."
Lessa woke, cold.
Life is hard.
It started at one thirty on a cold Tuesday morning in January when Martin Turner, street performer and, in his own words, apprentice gigolo, tripped over a body in front of the West Portico of St. Paul’s at Covent Garden.
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
A hotel room in São Paulo is the third worst place in the world in which to go into cardiac arrest.
Mab, the Queen of Air and Darkness, monarch of the Winter Court of the Sidhe, has unique ideas regarding physical therapy.
Who is John Galt?
First of all, it seemed to us that you were very handsome.
Theo had been climbing since dawn; first on the steep roads and paths and sheep-tracks behind the city, then across slopes of shifting scree, and up at last on to the bare mountainside, keeping where he could to corries and crevices where the blue shadows pooled.
There was a ticking time bomb inside my head and the one person I trusted to go in and get it out hadn't shown up or spoken to me for more than a year.
For the fifty-first time (according to his laptop), Oscar studied the riot video from Worcester.
When Patricia was six years old, she found a wounded bird.
Cranes keep landing as night falls.
You will criticize me, reader, for writing in a style six hundred years removed from the events I describe, but you came to me for explanation of those days of transformation which left your world the world it is, and since it was the philosophy of the Eighteenth Century, heavy with optimism and ambition, whose abrupt revival birthed the recent revolution, so it is only in the language of the Enlightenment, rich with opinion and sentiment, that those days can be described.
On Dreamer’s Plain, the gathering of delegations from the Twelve Crowns of Raine for the coronation of the Queen of Raine looked like an invading army.
It was in the year '95 that a combination of events, into which I need not enter, caused Mr. Sherlock Holmes and myself to spend some weeks in one of our great university towns, and it was during this time that the small but instructive adventure which I am about to relate befell us.
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
God wasn’t answering tonight.
That morning they were making paper boys.
It is almost pleasant, at first, to be Falling.
It was one of those super-duper-cold Saturdays.
The stuttering rain slipped down the windshield of the Impala. 
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
Something was upsetting the angels.
When he woke in the wood in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.
The meeting of the Royal Society of Unnatural Philosophers was well under way, and the entrance hall was almost empty.
He forded the river as the daylight died and blundered into thick undergrowth between the birches on the far bank.
Trade season came around again.
When I look at the massive manuscript volumes which contain our work for the year 1894, I confess that it is very difficult for me, out of such a wealth of material, to select the cases which are most interesting in themselves, and at the same time most conducive to a display of those peculiar powers for which my friend was famous.
My mother selected her wings as early morning light reached through our balcony shutters.
I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.
Lisette Toutournier sighed.
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
The girls were never present for the entrance interviews. 
"I believe the question, then," says Vasily Yaroslav, "is one of intent."
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.
Kell wore a very peculiar coat.
Dear You,  The body you are wearing used to be mine.
For a long time I would go to bed early.
 In some ways they were lucky, the latrine emptiers in South Africa is the largest shantytown
We were fairly accustomed to receive wierd telegrams at Baker Street, but I have a particular recollection of one which reached us on a gloomy February morning, some seven or eight years ago, and gave Mr. Sherlock Holmes a puzzled quarter of an hour.
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.
Once upon a time, more than a hundred years ago, a little girl named Sara lived on the space station AF54G91-Fortitude, near a planet that is now called Abundance.
People who move to New York always make the same mistake.
I shut the door of the old Victorian behind me, and the stuffy atmosphere closed in: overheated, dry, and redolent of mothballs.
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.
To their surprise, it had been Brandon first, only in their early 60s did it happen.
The following are excerpts from logs written by various people associated with Stephens Island, compiled after a ship’s crew made the return voyage to New Zealand from the island.
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.
It was a bitterly cold night and frosty morning, towards the end of the winter of '97, that I was awakened by a tugging at my shoulder.
The party had been held in the smallest of their houses this year.
What's surprised me most about seeing my sister dead is the lingering smirk on her face.
There was no hope for him this time; it was the third stroke.
I stood on the docks, looking out at the ship that would take me away from everything I’d ever known.
Annabeth had been tossing and turning in bed for hours, watching through blurry vision as the numbers on the digital clock next to the bed flipped slowly towards three am.
You ain’t gonna like what I have to tell you, but I’m gonna tell you anyway.
All this happened, more or less.
Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.
I had intended "The Adventure of the Abbey Grange" to be the last of those exploits of my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, which I should ever communicate to the public.
David was three weeks into his junior year at Deercreek University. 
We were a family of three girls.
"I am afraid, Watson, that I shall have to go," said Holmes as we sat down together to our breakfast one morning.
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.
Damen came back to himself in stages, his drugged limbs heavy against the silk cushions, the gold cuffs on his wrists like lead weights.
“Arlo!” Arlo!” called the birds, soaring over the surf.
The building was on fire and it wasn't my fault.
Sherlock Holmes was a man who seldom took exercise for exercise's sake.
They shoot the white girl first.
They put the behemoths in the hold along with the rhinos, the hippos and the elephants.
It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton.
Shortly after my marriage I had bought a connection in the Paddington district.
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. 
Wind howled through the night, carrying a scent that would change the world.
For a long time, I went to bed early.
My father had a face that could stop a clock.
The songs of the dead are the lamentations of the living.
The moment one learns English, complications set in.
Quentin did a magic trick.
"I have some papers here," said my friend Sherlock Holmes as we sat one winters's night on either side of the fire, "which I really think, Watson, that it would be worth your while to glance over."
Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.
I am old.
Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.
Eragon stood at the dark tower of stone wherein hid the monsters who had murdered his uncle, Garrow.
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.
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.
An anomaly which often struck me in the character of my friend Sherlock Holmes was that, although in his methods of thought he was the neatest and most methodical of mankind, and although also he affected a certain quiet primness of dress, he was none the less in his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever drove a fellow-lodger to distraction.
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 consider'd 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.
They heard the caterwaul of sirens, and saw the dust rising underneath the ambulance wheels at the far end of the driveway, and soon the darkening garden was a wash of flashing blue lights.
His name was Bilbo, and he was about as high as a hedgerow – not a large hedgerow, though, mind you.
This book is largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history.
Joshua was malcontent.
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.
“Neither here nor there,” she whispered, “but everywhere.”
Elmer Gantry was drunk.
We made love in the light of the moon.
It was some time before the health of my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes recovered from the strain caused by his immense exertions in the spring of '87.
We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
It was a pleasure to burn.
One summer night, a few months after my marriage, I was seated by my own hearth smoking a last pipe and nodding over a novel, for my day's work had been an exhausting one.
According to the First Scroll of Wen the Eternally Surprised, Wen stepped out of the cave where he had received enlightenment and into the dawning light of the first day of the rest of his life.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
In glancing over the somewhat incoherent series of Memoirs with which I have endeavoured to illustrate a few of the mental peculiarities of my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I have been struck by the difficulty which I have experienced in picking out examples which shall in every way answer my purpose.
Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a special iron bar.
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.
All was quiet.
During my long and intimate aquaintance with Mr. Sherlock Holmes I had never heard him refer to his relations, and hardly ever to his own early life.
In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.
“Captain Pellaeon?” a voice called down the portside crew pit through the hum of background conversation.”
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?
Brrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinng!
The July which immediately succeeded my marriage was made memorable by three cases of interest, in which I had the privilege of being associated with Sherlock Holmes and of studying his methods.
Turjan sat in his workroom, legs sprawled out from the stool, back against and elbows on the bench.
Basically, I'm in it for the money," Aramis Anderson said.
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.
“Andrea! Andrea, come inside when you’re done!”
"To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die."
"Later!" The word, the voice, the attitude.
IF YOU HAPPEN to have read another book about Christopher Robin, you may remember that he once had a swan (or the swan had Christopher Robin, I don’t know which) and that he used to call this swan Pooh.
You're good, Corran, but you're no Luke Skywalker.
It is with a heavy heart that I take up my pen to write these the last words by which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes was distinguished.
The Browns have become illustrious by the pen of Thackeray and the pencil of Doyle within the memory of the young gentlemen who are now matriculating at the Universities.
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.
A little more than one hundred days into the fortieth year of her confinement, Dajeil Gelian was visiting I her lonely tower overlooking the sea by the avatar of the great ship that was her home.
If we are to understand what happened, which is vital if we would avoid repeated and worse tragedies in the future, we must begin by dismissing all accusations.
“Have you talked to your brother today?” Bettan asked.
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.
Szeth-son-son-Vallano, Truthless of Shinovar, wore white on the day he was to kill a king.
Aramis Anderson flinched as a bullet cracked past his head.
During the Federal War in the United States, a new and influential club was founded in the city of Baltimore, Maryland.
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.
The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.
“You wanna get out of this shithole?”
Shadow had done three years in prison.
I was the only person on the island of Manhattan who hated Fridays.
When I think of my wife, I always think of her head.
In the nighttime heart of Beirut, in one of a row of general-address transfer booths, Louis Wu flicked into reality.
No one saw him slip from the boat in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe as it sank into the sacred mud, and yet within days there was no one who did not know that the taciturn man had come there from the South, and that his homeland was one of those infinite villages that lie upriver, on the violent flank of the mountain, where the language of the Zend is uncontaminated by Greek and where leprosy is uncommon.
It was taking too long, much longer than he had expected.
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.
The night that Deputy Joe Bucklet got disemboweled by a werewolf had started normally enough.
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.
On an afternoon in September 1964, the ears of the inhabitants of Algiers were unpleasantly assaulted by an uproar from the skies.
Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians.
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.
One cloudy but luminous day, towards four in the afternoon on April the first, 192– (a foreign critic once remarked that while many novels, most German ones for example, begin with a date, it is only Russian authors who, in keeping with the honesty peculiar to our literature, omit the final digit) a moving van, very long and very yellow, hitched to a tractor that was also yellow, with hypertrophied rear wheels and a shamelessly exposed anatomy, pulled up in front of Number Seven Tannenberg Street, in the west part of Berlin.
To begin with, the art of jigsaw puzzles seems of little substance, easily exhausted, wholly dealt with by a basic introduction to Gestalt: the perceived object – we may be dealing with a perceptual act, the acquisition of a skill, a physiological system, or , as in the present case, a wood jigsaw puzzle – is not a sum of elements to be distinguished from each other and analysed discretely, but a pattern, that is to say a form, a structure: the element’s existence does not precede the existence of the whole, it comes neither before nor after it, for the parts do not determine the pattern, but the pattern determines the parts: knowledge of the pattern and of its laws, of the set and its structure, could not possibly be derived from discrete knowledge of the elements that compose it.
It was less than a year ago that the illusion shattered and I got my welcome to the real world.
I was on a train, travelling by day, but it was winter-time – late December, the very depths – and to add to it the train was heading north – to Leningrad – so it was quickly darkening on the other side of the windows – bright lights of Moscow stations flashing into view and vanishing again behind me like the scattering of some invisible hand – each snow-veiled suburban platform with its fleeting row of lamps melting into one fiery ribbon – the dull drone of a station rushing past, as if the train were roaring over a bridge – the sound muffled by the double-glazed windows with frames not quite hermetically sealed into fogged-up, half-frozen panes of glass – pierced even so by the station-lights forcefully etching their line of fire – and beyond, the sense of boundless snowy wastes – and the violent sway of the carriage from side to side – pitching and rolling – especially in the end corridor – and outside, once complete darkness had fallen and only the hazy whiteness of the snow was visible and the suburban dachas had come to an end and in the window along with me was the reflection of the carriage with its ceiling-lights and seated passengers, I took from the suitcase in the rack above me a book I had already started to read in Moscow and which I had brought especially for the journey to Leningrad, and I opened it at the page held by a bookmark decorated with Chinese characters and a delicate oriental drawing – and in my heart of hearts I had no intention of returning the book borrowed from my aunt who possessed a large library, and because it was very flimsy and almost falling apart, I had taken it to a binder who trimmed the pages so that they lay together evenly and enclosed the whole thing in a strong cover on which he pasted the book’s original title-page – the Diary of Anna Grigor’yevna Dostoyevskaya produced by some liberal publishing-house still possible at that time – either ‘Landmarks’, or ‘New Life’, or one of those – with dates given in both Old Style and New Style and words and whole phrases in German or French without translation and the de rigueur ‘Mme’ added will all the diligence of a grammar-school pupil – a transliteration of the shorthand notes which she had taken during the summer following her marriage abroad.
Ticker Troon emerged from his final interview filled with an emulsion of astonishment, elation, respect, and conviction that he needed refreshment.
The farewell was beautiful.
It begins, as most things begin, with a song.
Alex Marlow acknowledged that he was one of the best bodyguards in the galaxy.
It was in the spring of the year that Matthew reached twelve that I first became aware of Chocky.
The question I find most difficult to answer; the one which always crops up sooner or later when the subject is mentioned, is, approximately: 'But how on earth did you come to get yourself mixed up in a crazy affair like this, anyway?'
once upon a time, a girl named September had a secret.
When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.
As she woke up in the pod, she remembered three things.
One winter shortly before the Six Weeks War my tomcat, Petronius the Arbiter, and I lived in an old farmhouse in Connecticut.
In the late winter of 1928, when she was sixteen years old, my mother's mother Magdalena Schön journeyed alone by train from the Black Rock district of Buffalo, New York, five hundred miles eastward to the seaport of Edmunston, Massachusetts.
The great horn sounded.
There was a wall.
The ticking of the conference room's antique clock was deafening as the Hereditary President of the People's Republic of Haven stared at his military cabinet.
Almost free. Almost.
Got a problem here, Skipper.
"Yes, I found the place," said Arpad. "It's a queer sort of place, pretty much as the legends describe it."
I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. 
I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one.
Winslow Remington Houndstooth was not a hero.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel
Dear Dorothy, This is the last time I intend ever to write to you.
The ions stopped exploding off the surface of the ship as it emerged from ultra-drive and the rift in space sealed behind it.
for many days we had been tempest-tossed
Ysabel would not stop crying
I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through the Dumpster.
The Starship had no name; it didnt have a serial number or even a marque.
Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did.
The beach was empty; people don't like to walk their dogs so far down the strand, especially after that woman was murdered.
My sister saved my life when I was just a baby.
One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it: it was the black kittens fault entirely.
The spaceship landed on a cool night in August, in a field that wasn't being used for anything in particular.
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt.
Master was a little crazy; he had spent too many years reading books overseas, talked to himself in his office, did not always return greetings, and had too much hair.
Through this evening's tide of faces unregistered, unrecognized, amid hurrying black shoes, furled umbrellas, the crowd descending like a single organism into the station's airless heart, comes Shinya Yamazaki, his notebook clasped beneath his arm like the egg case of some modest but moderately successful marine species.
Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion and Papa flung his heavy missal across the room and broke the figurines on the étagére.
A screaming comes across the sky
The daily recital of the rosary was over.
Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately overpriced shops, and the quiet, abiding air of earned grace, it was this, the lack of a smell, that most appealed to her, perhaps because the other American cities she knew well had all smelled distinctly.
"Rausch," said the voice in Hollis Henry's cell.
I have read that the period of upheaval that journalists have begun to refer to as "the Apocalypse" or more commonly, more bitterly, "the Pox" lasted from 2015 through 2030--a decade and a half of chaos.
Isaac's mother was dead five years but he hadn't stopped thinking about her.
None of the four women and men assembled in the octagonal conference room were present when the chamber below the southwestern flanks of Arsia Mons, more than one hundred meters below the extinct caldera, was opened.
It was prophesied I would live to see one hundred and having achieved that age see no reason to doubt it.
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
Inchmale hailed a cab for her, the kind that had always been black, when she'd first known this city.
On the 24th of may, 1863, my uncle, professor Liedenbrock, rushed into his little house, No. 19 Köningstrasse, one of the oldest streets in the oldest portion of the city of Hamburg.
The events surrounding the death of Eugenia Clarke are mired in obscurity and speculation.
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.
To be the skipper of the only boat on the Moon was a distinction that Pat Harris enjoyed.
I had my recurring dream last night.
On a snow-swept winter evening of 1991, Jonathan Pine, the English night manager of the Hotel Meister Palace in Zurich, forsook his office behind the reception desk and, in the grip of feelings he had not known before, took up his position in the lobby as a prelude to extending his hotel's welcome to a distinguished late arrival.
He is a boat sink deep in the sea of dream, sailed by thin, faceless creatures, barely visible through the undulations of the waves.
Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.
Tonight we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.'
His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a country boy who had never seen Trantor before.
It was a warm and clear morning, and the sun shone white in the deep blue sky.
For all the family he had watched go down to the sea, Anson had never before seen anyone trying to drown.
Bel Riose traveled without escort, which is not what court etiquette prescribes for the head of a fleet stationed in a yet-sullen stellar system on the Marches of the Galactic Empire.
Look - there - rising over the Hand of God.
I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station.
God wasn’t answering tonight.
Molly Moon looked down on her frecled pink legs
There is much more that the Encyclopedia has to say on the subject of the Mule and his Empire but almost all of it is not germane to the issue at immediate hand, and most of it is considerably too dry for our purposes in any case.
Horselover Fat's nervous breakdown began the day he got the phonecall from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals.
I’m pretty much fucked
Sometimes she wakes up at night, smelling that gunpowder smell.
His job, as always, bored him.
Uh, hi, yeah, is this the Let's Talk Hotline for... mental health issues, and stuff?
Though the evening breeze had chilled his back on the way across, it hadn’t yet begun its nightly job of sweeping out from among the island’s clustered vines and palm boles the humid air that the day had left behind, and Benjamin Hurwood’s face was gleaming with sweat before the black man had led him even a dozen yards into the jungle.
Davina Nuttel sat in the back seat of a limousine with a driver and read about herself in a magazine. 
The sun, high in early afternoon, sparkled on still water.
WHEN PATRICIA WAS six years old, she found a wounded bird.
The sky above is impossibly blue, striped with bright bands of clouds tinged pink and orange with the coming sunrise.
In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.
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.
 The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. 
Mr Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes
I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. 
the old temple priest bent and slowly filled milk in the waterlily shaped bowls
Knock on door.
Who's there?'
Muad'dib's Imperial reign generated more historians than any other era in human history.
A spot of light appeared on the deep red rug which covered the raw rock of the cave floor.
I was born in the city of Bombay...once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. The time matters, too.
They didn't come back on Tuesday or Wednesday, or even Thursday, which had been set as the final deadline.
"What is the size of a god?" McClellan asked, his hand firmly on his scotch, one leg behind him.
Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed sub-category.
The mushroom jiggled on its stalk, bobbed behind two men, then popped back into view.
"But names are important!" the nursemaid protested.
already as a child I had a strong desire for adventure, and I dreamed for years to set sail aboard one of my fathers ships. 
It was an odd-looking vine.
A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
it's a funny thing  about mothers and fathers.
I've never been shot.
The first thought Anderton had when he saw the young man was: I'm getting bald.
Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.
The year Janet started at Blackstock College, the Office of Residential Life had spent the summer removing from all the dormitories the old wooden bookcases that, once filled with books, fell over unless wedged.
Why is the measure of love loss?
The scream woke Goldie Roth from a deep sleep.
It was autumn in Venice when Victor first heard of Prosper and Bo.
At the beginning, it hadn't been the intervention that bothered Liz; it was the fervor, the wild, ecstatic gleam in the eyes of her sister, her cousin, her best friend.
There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart's Desire.
It was a pleasure to burn.
Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him
As he glided by the extremely small, out-of-the-way cemetery in his airborne prowl car, late at night, Officer Joseph Tinbane heard unfortunate and familiar sounds.
Goldie Roth hated the punishment chains.
She had invited Alexandra, whether on the spur of the moment or with malice aforethought he did not now, to come and hear Flora Robson do Queen Elizabeth at the national portrait Gallery.
"I got it from my girlfriend," the boy says.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
“There were unexpected difficulties,” said the dark gray blur. 
The primroses were over.
This is how Yuli, son of Alehaw, came to a place called Oldorando, where his descendants flourished in the better days that were to come.
The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
Now she was back in the town of her childhood, standing on a corner across from the village triangle of green, a small pyramid of luggage at her feet, Amy's one clear thought was, "Why on earth have I come?"
The queen waited.
the villagers of little Hangleton still called it 'the Riddle House', even though it had been many years since the Riddle family had lived there.
Late in the winter of my 17th year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time thinking about death.
It was a dumb thing to do but it wasn't that dumb.
This morning Rino telephoned.
"What are you drawing, honey?"
Waves climbed the slope of the beach, fell back, and came again.
Bucky Bitters ran for his life, pursued by the stuff of nightmares.
Luterin had recovered.
Six weeks into her involuntary tenure on Faraday Station, Cynthia Feuerwerker needed a job.
I saw Lila for the last time five years ago, in the winter of 2005.
we begin in the morning of March the twenty-third in the year twenty-four fifty-four.
The music-room in the Governor's house at Port Mahon, a tall, handsome, pillared octagon, was filled with the triumphant first movement of Locatelli's C major quartet.
Mars is free now.
From October 1976 until 1979, when I returned to Naples to live, I avoided resuming a steady relationship with Lila.
Unpaved, uneven trails pretended to be roads; they tied the nation's coasts together like laces holding a boot, binding it with crossed strings and crossed fingers.
In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three.
The house stood on a cold finger of land that poked out grudgingly into a sullen sea.
A flash of light against her closed eyelids brings Zoey up out of the limbo between sleep and waking.
The miracle happened on West Seventy-Fourth Street, in the home where Mama worked.
Rural Texas is just rotten with ghost towns.
Our Dragon doesn't eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley.
Run.
I lead a double life.
The call came in to the Department of Hygiene and Public Works just before five in the afternoon.
Snow was falling on Riverside, great white feather-puffs that veiled the cracks in the facades of its ruined houses, slowly softening the harsh contours of jagged roof and fallen beam.
The thud of the helicopter is in Zoey's head, her body, vibrating the marrow in her bones.
Down in the laundry room with the bloody-wet floors and the ceiling-high stacks of sheets, wraps, and blankets, Vinita Lynch was elbows-deep in a vat of dirty pillowcases because she'd promised - she'd sworn on her mother's life - that she'd find a certain windup pocket watch belonging to Private Hugh Morton before the device was plunged into a tub of simmering soapy water and surely destroyed for good.
A sealed envelope is an enigma containing further enigmas.
Should I have taken the false teeth?
When May Eddings hollered at Dr. David Harper, on his hands and knees at the bottom of a two-meter survey pit (number 13) in the red clay dirt of Harv Eddings's west cowfield, he'd never in his life felt like more of an impostor. 
The day of the countess's famous harvest party began with a driving rain that hammered down all the ancient Von Lingenfels castle's sore spots--springing leaks, dampening floors, and turning its yellow facade a slick, beetle-like black.
My name is David Talbot.
Nikolai guided the truck down the icy, rutted road and tried to decide whether to kill the man who snored beside him.
"Croggon Hainey sends his regards, but he isn't up for hire," Josephine Early declared grimly as she crumpled the telegram in her fist.
In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three.
Spells are the hardest thing in the world to get right.
You don't know the moment your life begins to change.  
Suppressing a small yawn, Cleon said, "Demerzel, have you by any chance ever heard of a man named Hari Seldon?"
“Let’s get one thing straight,” I said to my boss and best friend, Dave,  “this was not my idea.”
The party was going well until I had to kill someone.
Rector "Wreck'em" Sherman was delivered to the Sisters of Loving Grace Home for Orphans the week it opened, on February 9, 1864.
A tremor took hold of the planet.
Silas Heap pulled his cloak tightly around him against the snow.
"You can't just shrug and let them shut you down -- this is a challenge, an opportunity!" Maxwell Profett told Walter Hammond, the head curator.
Her notebooks, of course, where she'd written down everything she'd learned about surviving Maya dialects, socks, a pint bottle of Scotch she'd bought on a whim at the airport's duty free shop months ago, clean underwear.  
It really was a shame.
That morning, Evan walked into the warm dry heat of the Hilliard’s kitchen before anyone else, except, of course, Bonnie.
The children were playing while Holston climbed to his death; he could hear them squealing as only happy children do.
it is night on the Marram Marshes; a full moon shines down on the black waters and illuminates the night-time Things who are going about their business.
The tall glass trophy cabinets had once served as bookshelves.
The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault.
Sally Louisa Tomkins stood her ground.
Dust rained in the halls of Mechanical; it shivered free from the violence of the digging.
Twenty-three stories up and all I could see out the windows was grey smog.
Silas heap and Gringe, the North Gate Gatekeeper, are in a dark and dusty corner of the Palace attic.
Weekdays always begin the same.
I placed a puzzle piece down on the board and looked up at Zeke.
His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a country boy who had never seen Trantor before.
The Galactic Empire Was Falling.
It was not a good time to have to look for a place to live.
Shadow had done three years in prison.
The First Galactic Empire had endured for tens of thousands of years.
it is the weekly market on Wizard Way.
All this happened, more or less.
By the time Phil Chase was elected president, the world's climate was already far along the way to irrevocable change.
Miss Alexia Tarabotti was not enjoying her evening. 
The sun is always just about to rise
it was Nicko's first night out of the House of Foryx, and Jenna thinks he is going a little crazy.
"They made a silly mistake, though," the Professor of History said, and his smile, as Dixon watched, gradually sank beneath the surface of his features at the memory.
How much longer, Mama, must we tolerate this gross humiliation?
The house was old.
Elizabeth Khan closed the door of the surgery, and locked it.
It was clearly going to be a bad crossing.
it is a darke and stormy night
a flame burns at midnight.
Bijou’s fingers angled from her palms as if someone had bent them aside under great heat and pressure.
One evening, it was toward the end of October, Harry Arno said to the woman he'd been seeing on and off the past few years, "I've made a decision. I'm going to tell you something I've never told anyone before in my life."
I find it ironic that I should be invited to write a few introductory words to this book, as I know as little about the subject as it is possible to know.
It was half-past twelve when I returned to the Albany as a last desperate resort.
Fifteen years ago when I left China for the United States, I wanted to forget the dreams my peers and I used to have.
When Chili first came to Miami Beach twelve years ago they were having one of their off-and-on cold winters: thirty-four degrees the day he met Tommy Carlo for lunch at Vesuvio's on South Collins and had his leather jacket ripped off.
There's our hut!' said the young hut-leader, pointing through iron palings at a couple of toy Noah's Arks built large.
Griff saw the whole fight before the first punch landed.
In the middle years of the nineteenth century there first became abundant in this strange world of ours a class of men, men tending for the most part to become elderly, who are called, and who, though they dislike it extremely, are very properly called 'Scientists'.
There’s something about a train ride.
Pocket Upton had come down late and panting, in spite of his daily exemption from first school, and the postcard on his plate had taken away his remaining modicum of breath.
Sunday morning, Ordell took Louis to watch the white-power demonstration in downtown Palm Beach.
Thea woke up with a start when the tapping began.
There was consternation in the domestic camp of Mr Justice Bligh on the banks of the Thames.
Dennis Lenahan the high diver would tell people that if you put a fifty-cent piece on the floor and looked down at it, that's what the tank looked like from the top of that eighty-foot steel ladder.
Life-changing moments are sneaky little bastards.
I am still uncertain which surprised me more, the telegram calling my attention to the advertisement, or the advertisement itself.
One day Karen DiCilia put a few observations together and realized her husband Frank was sleeping with a real estate woman in Boca.
Once upon a time, a girl named September grew very tired indeed of her parents' house, where she washed the same pink-and-yellow teacups and matching gravy boats every day, slept on the same embroidered pillow, and played with the same small and amiable dog.
There had been something loose about the station dock all morning, skulking in amongst the gantries and the lines and the canisters which were waiting to be moved, lurking wherever shadows fell among the rampway accesses of the many ships at dock at Meetpoint.
Raffles had vanished from the face of the town, and even I had no conception of his whereabouts until he cabled to me to meet the 7.31 at Charing Cross next night.
the thing i think i'll never forget is the smell.
The book was thick and black and covered with dust.
Pre-zombification, my father was already obsessed with corn.
there was a boy in her room.
The corpse’s left eye squinted at me from mere centimeters away.
Night. It mantled the city of Iriaebor, veiling all with the soft stuff of darkness.
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
Jeeves—my man, you know—is really a most extraordinary chap.
The day was grey and bitter cold, and the dogs would not take the scent.
Part of the problem, Nita thought as she tore desperately down Rose Avenue, is that I just can’t keep my mouth shut.
An easterly is the most disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay -- Lyme Bay being that largest bite from the underside of England's outstretched southwestern leg -- and a person of curiosity could at once have deduced several strong probabilities about the pair who began to walk down the quay at Lyme Regis, the small but ancient eponym of the inbite, one incisively sharp and blustery morning in the lat March of 1867.
Her limbs are heavy and her head is full of cotton, but the radio plays the same triumphant sounds, and the sky is grey as always.
the home office telegraphy department always smelled of tea.
"Jeeves," I said, "may I speak frankly?"
The comet's tail spread across the dawn, a red slash that bled above the crags of Dragonstone like a wound in the pink and purple sky.
Far across the surging dunes of moonlit sea, the dark wyrm wheeled and, with a deftness surer than any desert falcon, struck again at the distant and battered caravel.
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice 'without pictures or conversation?'
Herewiss sat cross-legged on the parquet floor, his back braced against the wall, his eyes closed, and concentrated.
"Dragons," said Mollander.
All children, except one, grow up.
I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria.
This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.
Matthias cut a comical little figure as he wobbled his way along the cloisters, with his large sandals flip-flopping and his tail peeping from beneath the baggy folds of an oversized novice’s habit.
When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen.
it was nighttime when the three children entered the city of Jewel.
“We should start back,” Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them.
Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents,' grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.
There were four of us—George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency.
Not for the first time, an argument had broken out over breakfast at number four, Privet Drive.
Harry Potter was a highly unusual boy in many ways.
The woman who called herself Samantha Cataranes climbed out of the cab and walked towards the house on 23rd Street. 
Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmond, and Lucy.
She could not remember a time when she had not known the story; she had grown up knowing it.
It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town named Salthook across the dried up bed of the old North Sea.
Once on a dark winter's day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares.
In a castle of Westphalia, belonging to the Baron of Thunder-ten-Tronckh, lived a youth, whom nature had endowed with the most gentle manners.
It was a pleasure to burn.
Squire Trelawney, Dr Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17-, and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn, and the brown old seaman, with the sabre cut, first took up his lodging under our roof.
My father had a face that could stop a clock
Lest anyone should suppose that I am a cuckoo’s child, got on the wrong side of the blanket by lusty peasant stock and sold into indenture in a shortfallen season, I may say that I am House-born and reared in the Night Court proper, for all the good it did me.
Cazaril heard the mounted horsemen on the road before he saw them.
When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
Simon crouched at the edge of the shadow-darkened woods, and stared into a clearing where a lone house stood.
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
Mme. Vauquer (nee de Conflans) is an elderly person, who for the past forty years has kept a lodging-house in the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, in the district that lies between the Latin Quarter and the Faubourg Saint-Marcel.
I didn't ask to be a celebrity.
The manhunt extended across more than one hundred light-years and eight centuries.
Grace was almost home, all the way to Mr. Hunt's field, before she remembered.
The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.
An invasion had come to the town of Adano.
Adam Salton sauntered into the Empire Club, Sydney, and found awaiting him a letter from his grand-uncle.
We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child
The bookstore was sandwiched between a dry cleaner’s and a shifty-looking accounting office.
Sam Braden never talked about his father.
Making one's home in an unpublished novel wasn't without its compensations.
The street was darkened by a smoky sunset, and light had not yet come on in the lamps near the empty house.
I walked into the hallways of my new school, looking up at the world through the dense forest that most sane people would call ‘bangs.’
Sayward awoke this day with the feeling that something had happened to her.
The war wasn't over.
Until he was almost ten the name stuck to him.
Dear Natalia,  It feels like it’s been a long time since middle school.
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit
On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.
It was winter—that is, about the second week in November—and great gusts were rattling at the windows, and wailing and thundering among our tall trees and ivied chimneys—a very dark night, and a very cheerful fire blazing, a pleasant mixture of good round coal and spluttering dry wood, in a genuine old fireplace, in a sombre old room.
I walk to the bus station by myself.
I've always been something of a loner.
To the Public:  The late insurrection in Southampton has greatly excited the public mind and led to a thousand idle, exaggerated and mischievous reports.
Now I believe they will leave me alone.
The minotaur had been causing trouble far in excess of his literary importance.
Dieter scrubbed at his face, willing away his exhaustion.
She trusted them.
He was of medium height, somewhat chubby, and good-looking, with curly red hair and an innocent, gay face, more remarkable for a humorous air about the eyes and large mouth than for any strength of chin or nobility of nose.
Green meteors ripped through the dark clouds that perpetually obscured the heavens over Shadowmoon Valley.
Some time within the first ten years of the last century, there stood in the fair city of Dublin, and in one of those sinuous and narrow streets which lay in the immediate vicinity of the Castle, a goodly and capacious hostelry, snug and sound, and withal carrying in its aspect something staid and aristocratic, and perhaps in nowise the less comfortable that it was rated, in point of fashion, somewhat obsolete.
The patient, an old-fashioned man, thought the nurse made a mistake in keeping both of the windows open, and her sprightly disregard of his protests added something to his hatred of her.
Casi stepped outside, enjoying the fresh, clear air of Montana’s Tom Miner Basin.
The Ellsworths of Long Parkmead had the regard of their neighbours in every respect.
The black people who live in the Quarters at Blue Brook Plantation believe they are far the best black people living on the whole Neck, as they call that long, narrow, rich strip of land lying between the sea on one side and the river with its swamps and deserted rice fields on the other.
The woman caught a glimpse of movement through the dusty haze ahead and wondered if it was the wolf she had seen loping in front of them earlier.
The ancient darkness surrounding him die not stop him from seeing any more than his lack of eyes did.
From the small crossed window of his room above the stable in the brickyard, Yakov Bok saw people in their long overcoats running somewhere early that morning, everybody in the same direction.
"I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one.
The driver of the wagon swaying through the forest and swamp of the Ohio wilderness was a ragged girl of fourteen.
The naked child ran out of the hide-covered lean-to toward the rocky beach at the bend in the small river.
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.
She was dead.
He began his new life standing up, surrounded by cold darkness and stale, dusty air.
the dangerously high level of the Stupidity Surplus was once again the lead story of the owl that morning.
Before the beginning there was nothing - no earth, no heavens, no stars, no sky: only the mist world, for less and shapeless, and the fire world, always burning.
An abandoned auto cout in the San Berdoo foothills; Buzz Meeks checked in with ninety-four thousand dollars, eighteen pounds of high-grade heroin, a 10-gauge pump, a .38 special, a .45 automatic, and a switchblade he’d bought off a pachuco at the border—right before he spotted the car parked across the line: Mickey Cohen goons in an LAPD unmarked, Tijuana cops standing by to bootsack his goodies, dump his body in the San Ysidro River.
Trembling with fear, Ayla clung to the tall man beside her as she watched the strangers approach.
Maman died today.
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 consider’d 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.
The magician’s underwear has just been found in a cardboard suitcase floating in a stagnant pond on the outskirts of Miami.
There is one mirror in my house.
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.
A massive, eight-legged lupine form dropped down on Rhonin.
Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.
When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bad End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special significance, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
A screaming comes across the sky.
My big brother reaches home in the dark hours before dawn, when even ghosts take their rest.
Above the center of the Well of Eternity, the Demon Soul flared bright.
Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon, with an 8-ball of coke in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back seat.
There was no doubt about it: there was a fox behind the climbing frame.
The voices whispered in his head as he moved through the huge cavern.
In the beginning, when God created the universe, the earth was formless and desolate. 
The children were playing while Holston climbed to his death; he could hear them squealing as only happy children do.
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.
Four children were singing at the tops of their voices in a car that was going up a steep mountain-side road.
The sun was faithful again that morning, rising above the farm with a shine so fresh it tasted like gazpacho.
Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar.
We are all waiting on a villain named Boomer.
When Dr James Ackrington limped into the Harpoon Club on the afternoon of Monday, January the thirteenth, he was in a poisonous temper
The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home.
Randy Bieman [male, Caucasian, thirteen years of age] hated his parents so much that he wished they'd die.
Let me tell you my life; it won't take much of your time—you ought to know it.
It was really most extraordinary.
everyone remembers where they where when the BookWorld was remade.
I know it's only self-centered wieners who say stuff like, "You don't know me."
"The galaxy is on fire," said Captain James T Kirk.
"Fire photon torpedoes!"
Dear Cousin Tassie, Thank you for the lovely postcards.
Are you there, Satan?
The body lay naked and facedown, a deathly gray, spatters of blood staining the snow around it.
Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch-hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt.
Her name, to which various people had recently been appending curses, was Ael i-Mhiessan t'Rllaillieu.
Our story opens where countless stories have ended in the last twenty-six years; with an idiot - in this case, my brother Shaun - deciding that it would be a good idea to go out and poke a zombie with a stick to see what happens. 
Good and evil have always existed.
Today a man called from Long Beach.
Almost every Saturday, just before the All-Night Vigil Service, from two windows in the cellar of merchant Petúnnikoff's old and filthy house, opening on the narrow court-yard encumbered with various utensils, and built up with wooden servants'-quarters ricketty with age, broke forth the vehement shrieks of a woman
People disappear all the time. 
My aunt taught me to hold my head high, even when people stared.
"Dearly beloved," said Captain Kirk.
Minks—Herbert Montmorency—was now something more than secretary, even than private secretary: he was confidential-private-secretary, adviser, friend; and this, more because he was a safe receptacle for his employer's enthusiasms than because his advice or judgment had any exceptional value.
One moment asleep.
"Will you all be quiet!" snapped High Chancellor Querida.
A considerable number of hunting parties were out that year without finding so much as a fresh trail; for the moose were uncommonly shy, and the various Nimrods returned to the bosoms of their respective families with the best excuses the facts of their imaginations could suggest.
everything comes to an end.
In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three.
Act one, scene one opens run Lillian Hellman clawing her way, stumbling and scrambling, through the thorny nighttime underbrush of some German schwarzwald, a Jewish baby clamped to either of her tits, another brood of infants clinging to her back.
Allison McFadden walked slowly in the cool night air, her arms tightly wrapped around her slim body to keep the wind from whipping at her coat.
The Officers' Mess of the starship USS Enterprise was a small, rather cozy room, with comfortable chairs, moderately bright lighting, and a food-service wall with four delivery slots, no waiting.
When a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country.
Sage Bascom hadn’t wanted to spend the weekend in the chateau on the hill.
It's a sad fact of modern life that if you drive long enough, sooner or later you leave London behind.
Where you're supposed to be some big West Hills wedding reception in a big manor house with flower arrangements and stuffed mushrooms all over the house
"I wonder," Jupiter Jones said one morning, "how we would go about attempting the biggest robbery ever seen in this area."
Enveloped in the misty grey blur of the midmorning fog, Amandine played the violin.
It occurred on a day in June.
I woke to the taste of stale whiskey and the smell of stale cigarettes.
The impact of fist to bag echoed up through my arm.
The black boots sat on the dust-speckled shelf like a pair of unworn ruby slippers.
Lydia stood in the field, her dark brown hair ruffled by the wind.
On the map, their destination had been a stretch of green, as if they would be living on a golf course.
One dude stood all afternoon at the buffet wearing just his boxers, licking the orange dust off barbecue potato chips
"Hey, Jupe! Diego Alvaro wants to talk to you," called Pete Crenshaw as he came out of the front door of Rocky Beach Central School.
I’m pretty much fucked.
I am afraid.
At the end of a hot November day Miss Baines and Mrs Williams of the Ladies' Frocks Department at Goode's were complaining to each other as they changed out of their black frocks before going home
Like most people, I didn't meet and talk to Rant Casey until after he was dead.
"Nobody move!" Pete Crenshaw cried.
Here is the house.
"Dragons," said Mollander.
“Moira, I just don’t know which one,” Tiarlen snarled, banging his fist down on the ancient mahogany table.
Titian, Rubens, and Van Dyke , it is said, always practiced their art in full dress.
I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites.
This was supposed to be a writers' retreat.
"Watch out!" yelled Pete Crenshaw.
East of Maidenpool the hills rose wild, and the pines closed in about them like a host of silent grey-green soldiers.
I could not see the street or much of the estate.
Today I’m five. 
"Shark reef number one?" Bob Andrews said.
If you're going to read this, don't bother.
The cold in the air was so fierce and penetrating that the only thing Betony could think of was cold, the embodiment of cold, the cold’s very essence of being.
It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
Soris' house-lord, the orchard-lord Tagerwa, had an ancient champions' sword hanging in his office below the spreading, still-green bough from his orchard's first tree.
The journey was no worse than she expected.
Lord Tywin Lannister had entered the city on a stallion, his enameled crimson armor polished and gleaming, bright with gems and goldwork.
The kitchen door banged open.
We didn’t like to gossip; we loved to gossip.
At first, the new owner pretends he never looked at the living room floor.
It was the day my grandmother exploded.
It was Bob Andrews who spotted the plastic tote bag.
He stands up next to the girl’s body.
I approached the witness stand with a warm and welcoming smile.
The hall was loud with drunken Harlaws, distant cousins all.
Jupiter Jones heard the truck turn off the Coast Highway.
Mark and Karen Breakstone got married a little late in life.
Ellis and Long were four car lengths behind the motorcycle on Ventura Boulevard.
Jupiter Jones turned his head at the sound of a horn and groaned.
A steamwrencher in a dress, Toshala Flemmish thought as the hard, smooth, skinny heels of her ankle boots slipped and caught in the cobbles, was as ridiculous as a dog dancing on its hind legs.
The black-clad giant moved slowly, silently, like a grotesque late-afternoon shadow, past the shops on Hemlock Street.
Before the flight I was invited for lunch at a London club with a billionaire I'd been promised had liberal credentials.
I began the arduous task of documenting, preserving, restoring, organizing, collecting, categorizing, and cross-referencing the whole historical truth of the Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF) several lifetimes ago when I was incarnated and initiated in a body much different from this current one.
A crowd of sparrows flies up, peppering the California sky overhead.
It's a funny thing about names.
She wasn't expecting to see him here tonight.
"I would be happier, Jupiter, if you didn't come to breakfast in your swimming trunks," said Aunt Mathilda Jones.
In the corner of a first-class smoking carriage, Mr Justice Wargrave, lately retired from the bench, puffed at a cigar and ran an interested eye through the political news in The Times.
"Land ahead!"
I didn't know what email was until I got to college.
"Uncle Titus!" Jupiter Jones cried.
Cazalet sat up so suddenly that his head hit the woodwork over the upper berth.
When Rooster was nine or so, we used to all sit on the stoop with boodies like charcoal and scratch house music on the cement.
The buzz in the street was like the humming of flies.
Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.
In the course of his meteoric career as Secretary of State for the Home Department, the Right Honorable Topham Vinson instituted many reforms and earned the reformer's whack of praise and blame. 
"Uncle Titus is having a wonderful time," said Jupiter Jones.
"Uncle Titus is having a wonderful time," said Jupiter Jones.
"It is finished," said the woman, speaking very quietly to herself.
I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongates shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria.
If you are interested in stories with happy ending, you would be better off reading some other book. 
On the cool October morning when Cayetana Chávez brought her baby to light, it was the start of that season in Sinaloa when the humid torments of summer finally gave way to breezes and falling leaves, and small red birds skittered through the corrals, and the dogs grew new coats.
I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.
If I must tell more tales of Raffles, I can but back to our earliest days together, and fill in the blanks left by discretion in existing annals.
Ballard and Jenkins rolled up on the house on El Centro shortly before midnight.
Nothing is so easy as falling in love on a long sea voyage, except falling out of love.
Ellery Queen stood knee-deep in luggage on the Wrightsville station platform and thought: 'This makes me an admiral. Admiral Columbus.'
The Home Secretary leant his golf-clubs against a chair.
It was twilight - the abrupt, chill twilight of late December - when Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews first came to Paseo Place.
First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey.
Theodore is in the ground.
The Witching Hill Estate Office was as new as the Queen Anne houses it had to let, and about as worthy of its name.
In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.
"You know I love you."
"And you're quite sure the place doesn't choke you off?"
The first galactic empire was falling.
It was a pleasure to burn.
I confess that I am not entirely certain why I have chosen to write this account.
Harry Ringrose came of age on the happiest morning of his life.
Look at you in your fur!
It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened.
My first impression was that the stranger's eyes were of an unusually light blue.
In a room for women whose bodies are broken, Eivør Mínervudottír’s biographer waits her turn.
Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.
At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound,  a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin.
Arabella was the first at the farm to become aware of Mr. Teesdale’s return from Melbourne.
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
“C’mon Blossom, we’ve got celebrating to do!”
He leaps over two fire-painted blossoms resting on the stark cracked city pavement.
Darkness was encroaching on Cato Neimoidia's western hemisphere, though exchanges of coherent light high above the beleaguered world ripped looming night to shreds.
It was a nice day.
No one - least of all Dr. Litchfield - came right out and told Ralph Roberts that his wife was going to die, but there came a time when Ralph understood without needing to be told.
So, then.
How angry am I?
"La parlate d'amor, O cari fior, Recate i miei sospiri, Narrate i miei matiri, Ditele o cari fior——" Miss Bouverie ceased on the high note, as abruptly as string that snaps beneath the bow, and revolved with the music-stool, to catch but her echoes in the empty room.
Kino awakened in the near dark.
The stretch of road that leads out of the city, past Hazy Harbor and into the town of Tedia, is perhaps the most unpleasant in the world.
My parents' bedroom is arranged exactly the same as it always was.
Kenyon had been more unmanageable than usual.
Simon turned on to his left side, then on to his right, and finally, after kicking his duvet onto the floor, he lay on his back with his hands clasped together behind his head on the pillow. 
Swift of Wallandoon was visibly distraught.
A hooded wagon was creeping across a depressing desert in the middle of Australia; layers of boxes under the hood, and of brass-handled, mahogany drawers below the boxes, revealed the licensed hawker of the bush.
Sometimes the Alps lying below in the moonlight had the appearance of crisp folds of crumpled cloth.
Marisol Rivera ran down the stairwell of the eighty-story building, trailing the banister with one hand and gripping the stolen brick of $10,000 cash in the other.
Long Stow church lay hidden for the summer amid a million leaves.
My wonder upon discovering the Book of Fish remains with me yet, luminous as the phosphorescent marbling that seized my eyes that strange morning; glittering as those eerie swirls that coloured my mind and enchanted my soul -- which there and then began the process of unravelling my heart and, worse still, my life into this poor, scraggy skein that is this story you are about to read.
They were terribly sentimental words, but the fellow sang them as though he meant every syllable.
The opera ghost really existed.
Eilis Lacey, sitting at the window of the upstairs living room in the house on Friary Street, noticed her sister walking briskly from work.
Once upon a time there were two cities within a city.
Barry Laverty - Doctor Barry Laverty - his houseman's year just finished, ink barely dry on his degree, pulled his beat-up Volkswagen Beetle to the side of the road and peered at a map lying on the passenger seat.
 The light freighter Bargain Hunter moved through space, silver-gray against the blackness, the light of thr distant stars reflecting from its hull.
This happened in 1932, when the state penitentiary was still at Cold Mountain.
Life is hard.
3 May. Bistritz. - Left Munich at 8:35 p.m., on. 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late.
“The cow is there,” said Ansell, lighting a match and holding it out over the carpet.
On our wedding day I was forty-six, she was eighteen.
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil foreboding.
It was morning and Mrs. Pollifax was seated on the floor of her living room, legs crossed beneath her as she tried to sustain the lotus position.
This is how I heard the story. 
Slowly, silently, its lights a faint glitter of life amid the darkness, the Imperial Star Destroyer Chimaera glided through space.
The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way towards the lagoon.
My grandfather used to tell me he was a werewolf.
In a distand and second-hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part...
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.
I heard the mailman approach my office door, half an hour earlier than usual.
First of all, it seemed to us that you were very handsome.
Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father.
The Imperial Star Destroyer Chimaera slid through the black of space, its only companion the silent gas giant world of Pesitiin far below. 
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.
In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.
There were men in my room, and it was bright, too bright, and I was being lifted out of bed.
As the manager of the Performance sits before the curtain on the boards and looks into the Fair, a feeling of profound melancholy comes over him in his survey of the bustling place.
In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mr. McKinley
I never used to Keep track of the phases of the moon.
"Where's the map?" said Julian.
If you felt ready to die, wanted death bad enough, and had little enough to live for, The Reckoner would grant your wish and fall on you.
It was a nice day.
There are reasons I hate to drive fast.
The scene of this chronicle is the town of Dawson's Landing, on the Missouri side of the Mississippi, half a day's journey, per steamboat, below St. Louis.
The lobby was a bit the worse for wear.
Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening Hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.
Kane dealt prescription drugs in Ashford; the Gateway to Europe.
The great bell of Beaulieu was ringing.
Pawnshops in Night Vale work like this.
The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at three o'clock.
It was a slow day at Barnegat Books, but then most of them are.
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.
Ilium, New York, is divided into three parts.
It rained toads the day the White Council came to town.
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
I hope you will be ready to own publicly, whenever you shall be called to it, that by your great and frequent urgency you prevailed on me to publish a very loose and uncorrect account of my travels; with direction to hire some young gentlemen of either university to put them in order, and correct the style, as my cousin Dampier did by my advice, in his book called A Voyage round the World 
"I'm going to buy some Easter eggs," said Pip, at breakfast-time.
In the month of July of the year 1348, between the feasts of St. Benedict and of St. Swithin, a strange thing came upon England, for out of the east there drifted a monstrous cloud, purple and piled, heavy with evil, climbing slowly up the hushed heaven.
The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats.
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
Call me Jonah.
“Now,” said Doratie, as she slipped on her blazer. 
Some things just aren't meant to go together.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...
"Of all the miserable holidays these just about beat the lot!" said Pip to Bets.
There was once a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself - not just sometimes, but always.
The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault.
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
The night before he went to London, Richard Mayhew was not enjoying himself.
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend.
“The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years—if it ever did end—began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.”  Excerpt From It Stephen King https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=357912911 This material may be protected by copyright.
His hand shook, and the mark he made with the small bit of charcoal wavered as he drew it: a small, lopsided cross, one arm trailing off unevenly.
My father used to carry me down the hall to my room after I came home from the hospital.
"It's today that Fatty's coming back," said Bets to Pip.
It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain, he fell madly in love with him.
On the whole, we're a murderous race.
"Sarah, that guy is looking at you."
It was at half-past nine on a dark April night that all the excitement began.
Howard Roark laughed.
In Poland's deepest autumn, a tall young man in an expensive overcoat, double-breasted dinner jacket beneath it and - in the lapel of the dinner jacket - a large ornamental gold-on-black enamel Hakenkreuz (swastika) emerged from a fashionable apartment building in Straszewskiego Street, on the edge of the ancient center of Cracow, and saw his chauffeur waiting with fuming breath by the open door of an enormous and, even in this blackened world, lustrous Adler limousine.
Blood leaves no stain on a Warden's gray cloak.
The attic light was burnt out.
Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about—he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock.
"Who is John Galt?"
I have just returned from a visit to my landlord— the solitary neighbor that I shall be troubled with.
West of Pearl Harbor, he drove along the Farrington Highway past fields of sugar cane, dark green in the moonlight.
The sun sets in the west (just about everyone knows that), but Sunset Towers faced east. Strange!
Bets and Pip were waiting impatiently for Larry, Daisy and Fatty to come.
In the near-darkness of the crowded room, violet lights glittered.
If one lives in Galloway, one either fishes or paints.
The kitchen was full of the smells of baking.
Many things are not as they seem: the worst things in life never are.
Pip and Bets sat in their garden, in the very coolest place they could find.
It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton.
Petrograd smelt of carbolic acid.
Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach.
‘Edith!’ said Margaret, gently, ‘Edith!’
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, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.
Pip set out his painting things, poked the playroom fire, and sat down to finish his Christmas cards.
Please don't think I'm running away.
It was a cold grey day in late November.
Once on a dark winter's day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares.
On February 24, 1815, during the reign of King Louis XVIII, the lookout at the port of Marseilles, France, signaled the appearance of the sailing ship named the Pharaon, arriving after a long voyage.
The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. 
One of the luckiest accidents in my wife's life is that she happened to marry a man who was born on the 26th of September.
Elmer Gantry was drunk.
She was dressing for dinner.
Galen Erso was not a good farmer.
Three very excited children bumped along a rough country lane in a farmer's cart.
The horse had bolted and all was lost
The summer sun was busy broiling the asphalt from Chicago's streets, the agony in my head had kept me horizontal for half a day, and some idiot was pounding on my apartment door.
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.
Quick Proffessor pass me the pork pie
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
Three children ran down a rocky path to the seashore.
This novel is crap said the duck
Turning over in bed, she was aware of a summons: Rouse yourself.
"I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one."
My name is Howard W. Camp­bell, Jr.
Winter came early that year; it should have been a tip-off.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
When the dashboard clock read 2:40, Parker drove out of the drugstore parking lot and across the sunlit road to the convenience store/gas station.
Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt.
Senior year is supposed to be the highlight of any teenager’s life.
It was little more than three miles from the Wall into the Old Kingdom, but that was enough.
My palms were wet, and I wiped them carefully on the pleats of the beige skirt I had borrowed for the occasion.
I answered the phone, and Susan Rodriguez said, "They've taken our daughter."
This is where the dragons went.
Some notable sight was drawing the passengers, both men and women, to the window; and therefore I rose and crossed the car to see what it was.
The music in my head swells to a crescendo, the timpani rolling like a summer thunderstorm.  
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
"I am inclined to think --" said I.
First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys
Mab, the Queen of Air and Darkness, monarch of the Winter Court of the Sidhe, has unique ideas regarding physical therapy. 
Hello. Howaya? Feh. You think those are the only words I know? Boychik, you don't know from knowing. 
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.
Yes, it could begin this way, right here, just like that, in a rather slow and ponderous way, in this neutral place that belongs to all and to none, where people pass by almost without seeing each other, where the life of the building regularly and distantly resounds.
Rufus missed enjoying market day.
Training sucked.
One thing was certain, that the WHITE kitten had had nothing to do with it:--it was the black kitten's fault entirely.
On the first Monday of the month of April, 1625, the small town of Meung, the birthplace of the author of the "Romance of the Rose," appeared to be in a state of revolution, as complete as if the Huguenots were come to make a second siege of La Rochelle.
Once a fisherman lived on the lonely shore.
The story of the demon Blue-Shirt (known in His native land as AMORTORTAK) is hinted at in a variety of codices, being revealed nowhere and everywhere, like cabalistic doctrine.
It was her fortieth birthday.
A light rain misted the hillside.
Sam Vimes sighed when he heard the scream, but he finished shaving before he did anything about it.
I was not sorry when my brother died.
Evening had fallen on Seattle, and there were a great many people going somewhere they didn’t want to go.
Once there were three brothers, kings, who decided to build a city and call it Skadar.
Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede jacket, sneakers and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia.
Kylara Vatta looked at the mass of paperwork from Belinta's Economic Development Bureau and sighed.
A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world.
There was once a girl called Vasilissa whose mother had died, and whose father married again.
Later than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof.
In a drafty passageway below the Dalriadan fortress of Dunadd, two men met in shadow
At the little town of Vevey, in Switzerland, there is a particularly comfortable hotel.
Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.
Now single up all lines!"
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. 
Once an old man lived in the forest with his three grandsons, Martin, Mihal and Yanek.
Vincent Terrasi wrote a book about data science and digital marketing
Mandy came out of the all-night Vurt-U-Want, clutching a bag of goodies.
The rays of the September sun flooded the great halls of the old chateau of the Dukes of Charmerace, lighting up with their mellow glow the spoils of so many ages and so many lands, jumbled together with the execrable taste which so often afflicts those whose only standard of value is money.
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
Clarence Potter walked through the streets of Charleston, South Carolina, like a man caught in a city occupied by the enemy.
I peek from behind the tattered velvet curtains at the chattering audience, their mouths full of candied pineapple and kettle corn.
There was once a king who decided that it was time for his son to marry.  
I left kne morning, and nobody saw me go.
A sum of money is a lead­ing char­ac­ter in this tale about peo­ple, just as a sum of honey might prop­erly be a lead­ing char­ac­ter in a tale about bees.
Shadow had done three years in prison. 
"I must speak to you."
The druid stood in the doorway, as still as a figure carven in dark stone, watching the riders come up the hill under the oaks. 
Smart machines lurked about the suite, their power lights in the shuttered dimness like the small red eyes of bats.
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...
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
I have an uncle named Merlin. 
Before Elfrida Phipps left London for good, and moved to the country, she made a trip to Battersea Dogs Home, and returned with a canine companion.
The last notes of her song were fading out of the room as Saina rose carefully from the foot of the bed.
Three children lay on the rocks at the water’s edge. 
My mother was a real witch.
Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife.
The bells of St. Marks were ringing changes up on the mountain when Bud skated over to the mod parlor to upgrade his skull gun.
Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr'd the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware,— the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stocking'd-foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen, in a purposeful Dither since Morning, punctuated by the ringing Lids of various Boilers and Stewing-Pots, fragrant with Pie-Spices, peel'd Fruits, Suet, heated Sugar,— the Children, having all upon the Fly, among rhythmic slaps of Batter and Spoon, coax'd and stolen what they might, proceed, as upon each afternoon all this snowy Advent, to a comfortable Room at the rear of the House, years since given over to their carefree Assaults.
Mr Spock, in his old place at the science officer's station, gazed around at the familiar bridge of the Enterprise.
My mother knew every tale that was ever told by the firesides of Erin, and more besides. 
The thing was: One mil­lion years ago, back in 1986 A.D., Guayaquil was the chief sea­port of the lit­tle South Amer­i­can democ­racy of Ecuador, whose cap­i­tal was Quito, high in the Andes Moun­tains.
It's the first day of spring 2001, and Maxine Tarnow, though some still have her in their system as Loeffler, is walking her boys to school.
He felt a strange tingling coming from somewhere inside his head.
Winter was coming.
Our mother performed in starlight.
All children, except one, grow up.
One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot.
Enterprise, dormant for nearly a week now, was waking up.
This is my favorite book in the world, though I have never read it.
Keep your fingers out of my eye.
Only the members of the Nisus Council were in the refectory, and only computerized food was available.
And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city.
A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey steeple-crowned hats, inter-mixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
I drove to the doctor's office as if I was starring in a movie Phillip was watching—windows down, hair blowing, just one hand on the wheel.
Nadine ran through the bramble, hands upraised to ward off the sting of slapping thorns, her apron stained with the juice of blackberries long since scattered in her wake.
The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest.
"Bones?" Jim Kirk stood in Dr McCoy's doorway, peering cautiously into his chief surgeon's dimly lit cabin.
Context is everything.
In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood. 
"By means of certain myths which cannot easily be damaged or debased the majority of us survive.
The captain of the Enterprise stared up at the shimmering viewscreen and said thoughtfully, "Opinion, Number One."
Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof. 
The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking as it seemed from Bramblehurst railway station and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand.
It emerged from the fog.
It was the seawind woke him, as his head drooped lower over the close-scrawled book.
On that first weekend in December there must have been twenty or twenty-five boats getting ready to leave.
The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.
On a February morning, when a weather front is moving in off the Pacific but has not quite arrived, and the winds are changeable and gusty and clouds drive over and an occasional flurry of fine rain darkens the terrace bricks, this place conforms to none of the clichés about California with which they advertise the Sunshine Cities for the Sunset Years.
Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called True Stories From Nature, about the Primeval Forest.
To whom it may concern: it is springtime.
There were five of us--Carruthers and the new recruit and myself, and Mr. Spivens and the verger.
Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde’s Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof. 
On a blustery autumn day a galley was nosing up the wide loop of a British river that widened into the harbour of Rutupiae.
Trade season came around again.
Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter. 
In 1952 when he was nine years old, Pierce Moffett did start a forest fire in the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky.
The platform clock showed twenty to three. 
Home again.
On a certain day in June, 19—, a young man was making his way on foot northward from the great City to a town or place called Edgewood, that he had been told of but never visited.
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
Iris is only seventeen and already, she's killed a man.
They set a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of this hair.
For months the great pleasure excursion to Europe and the Holy Land was chatted about in the newspapers everywhere in America and discussed at countless firesides.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
I have been sent on errands to our Colonies on many planets.
It was four o’clock when the ceremony was over and the carriages began to arrive.
After Slitscan, Laney heard about another job from Rydell, the night security man at the Chateau.
Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.
Selma decided she hated contstuction work.
Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.
The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home.
The response of students and teachers to the first four editions of Linear Algebra and Its Applications has been most gratifying. 
Rausch," said the voice in Hollis Henry's cell.
London.
She didn't know his name, so tried to avoid situations where she'd have to address her patient.
Inchmale hailed a cab for her, the kind that had always been black, when she'd first known this city.
I wore a black suit and a white shirt, a black tie and black shoes, all polished and shiny: clothes that normally would make me feel uncomfortable, as if I were in a stolen uniform, or pretending to be an adult.
To hear some scientists talk you'd think they knew everything about science...
This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve. 
The night before he went to London, Richard Mayhew was not enjoying himself.
Toward the end of the year 1920 the Government of the United States had practically completed the programme, adopted during the last months of President Winthrop's administration.
They didn't think Flynne's brother had PTSD, but that sometimes the haptics glitched him.
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression “As pretty as an airport.”
It was starting to end, after what seemed most of eternity to me.
I stood there on the beach and said, "Good-by, Butterfly," and the ship slowly turned, then headed out toward deep water.
From the small crossed window of his room above the stable in the brickyard, Yakov Bok saw people in their long overcoats running somewhere early that morning, everybody in the same direction.
I ignored the questions in the eyes of the groom as I lowered the grisly parcel and turned the horse in for care and maintenance.
An extraordinary thing happened today.
A bright flash of insight, to match that peculiar sun . . . .
On my naming day when I come 12 I to gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he be parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs and how there hadnt ben none for a long befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen
 Mister stripes the tiger, stuffed, mounted and plunging through the club wall, mocked Grace with his eye of green glass.
Amber: high and bright atop Kolvir in the middle of the day.
An incredible thing happened in Petersburg on March 25th.
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 along down the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo
It is a pain in the ass waiting around for someone to try to kill you.
The little town had grown much livelier since the cavalry regiment had been quartered there.
My life had been relatively peaceful for eight years--not counting April thirtieths, when someone invariably tried to kill me.
"This is stupid, Mother. I don't want to move!"
I felt vaguely uneasy, though I couldn't say why.
Once, in a department... but better not mention which department.
Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could neither read nor write.
My mother selected her wings as early morning light reached through our balcony shutters. 
I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen.
Her name was Julia, and I'd been damn certain she was dead back on April 30 when it all began.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
See one coronation and you've seen them all.
The rabbit had been run over minutes before.
I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.
Some things start before other things.
It was midnight in Ankh-Morpork's Royal Art Museum.
A spectral apparition shot overhead on rotting vulture's wings.
I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why.
Yesterday I didn't win a Nobel Prize
If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.
On page 22 of Liddell Hart's History Of World War I you will read that an attack against the Serre-Montauban line by thirteen British divisions (supported by 1,400 artillery pieces), planned for the 24th of July, 1916, had to be postponed until the morning of the 29th.
Hedyn crept towards the dead house that stood crumbling at the edge of the wood.
The other day, in looking over my papers, I found in my desk the following copy of a letter, sent by me a year since to an old school acquaintance:
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.
It was the day my grandmother exploded.
They keep saying "the body" and Flora thinks this might make her scream and never stop.
We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression “As pretty as an airport.”
Melancholy.
The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
This time there would be no witnesses.
The history of the Galaxy has got a little muddled, for a number of reasons: partly because those who are trying to keep track of it have got a little muddled, but also because some very muddling things have been happening anyway.
A window burst open high above the market.
Grant lay on his high white cot and stared at the ceiling.
Hidden beneath the London that we all know, there’s another London, called London Below
My life fell apart when I was sixteen. 
Like all men in Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, a slave.
Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcée.
"Aunt Bee," said Jane, breathing heavily into her soup, "was Noah a cleverer back-room boy than Ulysses, or was Ulysses a cleverer back-room boy than Noah?"
At dusk they pour from the sky.
It was between seven and eight o'clock on a March evening, and all over London the bars were being drawn back from the pit and gallery doors.
It was the seventh day of July.
Grant paused with his foot on the lowest step, and listened to the shrieking from the floor above.
A bell clanged.
Dawn was coming.
I remember him (I have no right to utter this sacred verb, only one man on earth had that right and he is dead) with a dark passion flower in his hand, seeing it as no one has ever seen it, though he might look at it from the twilight of dawn till that of evening, a whole lifetime.
It was six o'clock of a March morning, and still dark.
It was night again.
It was four o'clock of a spring evening; and Robert Blair was thinking of going home.
It was a little after seven on a summer morning, and William Potticary was taking his accustomed way over the short down grass of the cliff-top.
Polly sighed and laid her book face down on her bed.
Of the many problems which exercised the reckless discernment of Lönnrot, none was so strange - so rigorously strange, shall we say - as the periodic series of bloody events which culminated at the villa of Triste-le-Roy, amid the ceaseless aroma of the eucalypti.
A large, silver-grey car rolled quietly into the grounds of Hartlands School and stopped outside the main office.
Have you heard of the Flying Dutchman?
The magical activities of Britain have always been highly organized.
"Charmain must do it," said Aunt Sempronia.
Spells are the hardest thing in the world to get right.
These two very old people are the father and mother of Mr Bucket.
When the lights went off the accompanist kissed her.
Up in that part the water smelled rivery.
The night of March 14, 1943, in an apartment in the Zelterngasse of Prague, Jaromir Hladik, the author of the unfinished drama entitled The Enemies, of Vindication of Eternity, and of a study of the indirect Jewish sources of Jakob Böhme, had a dream of a long game of chess.
It was right around midnight and bodies were heating up at the G-Spot.
"Mother?"
Mom and I have been having the same argument for so many weeks now that we've got it down cold.
The Brooklyn housing projects were deserted as Eva Patterson took a shortcut through the buildings.
He made his way through the concourse and stopped by a window to watch a man with two orange wands wave a jet into its gate.
Fridays were big baller nights at Club Humpz.
It was night again.
It was a little after one on a Friday night and mics were on fire at the House of Homicide.
He laid underneath the rear sofa for what felt like and, indeed must have been, hours. 
The villagers of Little Hangleton still called it “the Riddle House,” even though it had been many years since the Riddle family had lived there. 
A man sits in a room, manipulating his kneecaps.
I awoke, as was my detestable habit, two minutes before the sore-throated bat's whine of my why-don't-I-buy a new alarm clock.
The prisoners called him ears because he was the only Russian in Hut 8 who understood German.
Ash fell from the sky.
The guest who was staying in room 3 of Nightingale's Bed and Breakfast, which Cat Nightingale privately thought of as the He-Man room because it was almost unrelievedly masculine, stopped in the doorway of the dining room, then almost immediately stepped back out of sight.
Traffic congestion is a waste of time, and often a miserable waste of time.
A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. 
The moon was hanging insolent and full in the sky just to the left of a billboard for a bankruptcy lawyer, and Stan knew.
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure in the windowpane.
"I thought your mother said you weren't allowed to wear that dress until your birthday party."
Paul managed to balance his hot dogs, nachos, and drink, and started up the ramp to the stadium.
It was a dark and stormy night.
It seems inexcusable to remind the public that one has written a book.
The day war was declared, a rain of telephones fell clattering to the cobblestones from the skies above Novy Petrograd.
There is one thing that all the Birds are afraid of, and that is the thing that will happen when the Bird That Follows the Cuckoo flies into the Cuckoo's mouth.
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more deicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
We Bastables have only two uncles, and neither of them, are our own natural-born relatives.
“There are places you can go”, Ariana tells him, “and a guy as smart as you has a decent chance of surviving to eighteen”. 
The drone Rensik Estemil was in the middle of an intelligence-gathering mission down on Tier 104 when the peremptory summons reached him.
Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer, harried for years on end, after he plundered the stronghold on the proud height of Troy. 
Early one evening in September of 1974 a small twin-engine plane, silver and black, sailed down onto a secondary runway at São Paulo's Congonhas Airport, and slowing, turned aside and taxied to a hangar where a limousine stood waiting.
I knew it would begin with the end, and the end would look like death to these eyes.
They were not railway children to begin with.
This is the story of the different ways we looked for treasure, and I think when you have read it you will see that we were not lazy about the looking.
We were sailing from Venice to Naples when the Turkish fleet appeared.
They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days.
The hulking demon snorted fire with every great breath, clawed hands twitching, eager to grab at the great flaming whip set in a loop on his hip. 
Children are like jam: all very well in the proper place, but you can’t stand them all over the shop—eh, what?’
Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morroco case.
Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of  the kitchen.
Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately overpriced shops, and the quiet, abiding air of earned grace, it was this, the lack of a smell, that most appealed to her, perhaps because the other American cities she knew well had all smelled distinctly. 
“By Lolth’s furry legs!” Braelin Janquay exclaimed, shaking his head in disbelief at the sheer slaughter unfolding in front of him.
The villagers of Little Hangleton still called it “the Riddle House” even though it had been many years since the Riddle family lived there.
This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.
“Mostly human bandits, to be honest,” Regis told Wulfgar. 
His children are falling from the sky.
It began with the day when it was almost the Fifth of November, and a doubt arose in some breast—Robert’s, I fancy—as to the quality of the fireworks laid in for the Guy Fawkes celebration.
The year was 2212, and humanity had branched out into the heavens.
Once upon a time there were two girls.
"What are you looking at me for?"
A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green.
>When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
Imagine all the variety of the human species confined to a single world, a world sown with the petrified bones of human ancestors, a planet dotted with the ruins of ten thousand years of forgotten human civilizations—a planet on which at the time human beings first flew in space, humans still hunted a surplus of animals, gathered wild plants, farmed with ancient methods, spun natural yarns by hand and cooked over wood fires.
Hanging by his heels and twisting slowly in the draught that slipped beneath the crimson door, Detective Inspector Chen tried desperately to attract the demon's attention.
Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.
The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.
I am not superhuman. 
Small trees had attacked my parents' house at the foundation.
It was Hitch Paley, rolling his beat-up Daimler motorbike across the packed sand of the beach behind the Haat Thai Dance Pavilion, who invited me to witness the end of an age. Mine, and the world’s.
Aragorn sped on up the hill.
It was a nice day. 
I'm not a bad guy.
I will weep no more for the lost, asleep in their water graves.
Pippin looked out from the shelter of Gandalf's cloak.
Coraline discovered the door a little while aftet they moved into the house.
The first time Caesar approached Cora about running north, she said no.
Today I went to see my physician Hermogenes, who has just returned to the Villa from a rather long journey in Asia.
First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.
The people who remained in this place have often asked themselves why it was that Ibrahim went mad.
Later than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof.
Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.
On a winter's day in 1413, just before Christmas, Nicholas Hook decided to commit murder.
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice 'without pictures or conversation?'
This time there would be no witnesses. 
Thunder rattles the windowpanes.
Before the discovery of Australia, people in the Old World were convinced that all swans were white, an unassailable belief as it seemed completely confirmed by empirical evidence.
The primroses were over.
My father had a face that could stop a clock.
Once on a Wednesday excursion when I was a little girl, my father bought me a beaded wire ball that I loved.
IT CAN HARDLY be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression “As pretty as an airport.”
Of everything I’ve ever been taught, from how to pick a lock in under thirty seconds to the fine art of walking in high heels, easily the most important lesson I’ve retained has been always to trust your gut.
I didn't ask to be a celebrity.
"Tosser!" cried the raven.
Snowman wakes before dawn.
We arrive from the Big Town.
On top of it all, the cancer wing was "number thirteen".
On his return to Grandmother's house, Lucas lies down by the garden gate in the shade of the bushes.
There was a ticking time bomb inside my head and the one person I trusted to go in and get it out hadn’t shown up or spoken to me for more than a year.
In the early morning Toby climbs up to the rooftop to watch the sunrise
The house was identical to every other residence on the block, but the people paying it a visit knew very well that looks like this were incredibly deceiving and also commonly so—a frightening prospect.
I am in prison in the small town of my childhood.
Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.
On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide - it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese - the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope. 
Thisbee was eating a rat wen Wyn came home.
In the beginning, you lived inside the Egg. 
"So you're all set for money, then?" the boy named Crow asked in his characteristic sluggish voice.
She hated the men, with their red-meat hands and dull gazes.
Three miles up the river Thames from the center of Oxford, some distance from where the great colleges of Jordan, Gabriel, Balliol, and two dozen others contended for mastery in the boat races, out where the city was only a collection of towers and spires in the distance over the misty levels of Port Meadow, there stood the Priory of Godstow, where the gentle nuns went about their holy business; and on the opposite bank from the priory there was an inn called the Trout.
There is sunlight nosing at the corner of the bed, warming the floorboards in a row and setting dust afire in the air.
One night, Azhrarn Prince of Demons, one of the Lords of Darkness, took on him, for amusement, the shape of a great black eagle.
Vic Serotonin sat in a bar on Straint Street, just outside the aureole of the Saudade event, in conversation with a fat man from another planet who called himself Antoyne.
The shining rim of the planet Rodeo wheeled dizzily past the observation port of the orbital transfer station.
Death was white.
The sound of pigs squealing outside the woodcutter’s house on the outskirts of Hannington brought five-year-old Arn Tomas Ericson’s head up as his father leapt from the dinner table.
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detriot day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
The control building for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider was new: it had been authorized in A.D. 2004 and completed in 2006.
They had only just lit the fire, but already the flames burned low and cold as if the pit in the center of the clearing had been burning since sundown.
To start with, look at all the books.
Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we?
On the 24th of February, 1815, the look-out at Notre-Dame de la Garde signalled the three-master, the Pharaon from Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples.
Barrabás came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy.
My God, thought Jake Holman, I did it.
The king stood in a pool of blue light, unmoored.
In a certain reign there was a lady not of the first rank whom the emperor loved more than any of the others.
It was the incessant pounding on the door that finally woke him.
"I am not a decent man."
The house was dark when Gillie came home, the hallways enshrouded in shadow.
Ash fell from the sky.
“Next time you decide to do something stupid, I need at least five minutes’ warning.”
Adam sat in a straight-backed chair by the window, watching the fog bleed through the distant row of cypress trees.
It was little more than three miles from the Wall into the Old Kingdom, but that was enough.
I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well.
The army crept like a dark stain across the horizon.
There wasn’t really a particular reason that Erin hated the place.
I was born in a house with a million rooms, built on a small, airless world on the edge of an empire of light and commerce that the adults called the Golden Hour, for a reason I did not yet grasp.
Marsh struggled to kill himself.
Clarges, the last metropolis of the world, stretched thirty miles along the north shore of the Chant River, not far above the broadening of the Chant into its estuary.
The starship CNE Caragana slipped down out of a night sky, its grey and scarlet hull illuminated by the pale iridescence of the massive ion storms which beset space for lightyears in every direction. 
It was a hot, steamy summer, and the mosquitoes swarmed everywhere, from their breeding grounds in the rotten, reedy shores of the Red Lake up to the foothills of Mount Abed.
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
It was assumed as a matter of course that visitors came to Iszm with a single purpose: to steal a female house.
The amber light came on.
The primroses were over.
A bright penetrating chime struck into two hundred minds, broke two hundred bubbles of trance.
Fog rose from the river, great billows of white weaving into the soot and smoke of the city of Corvere, to become the hybrid thing that the more popular newspapers called smog and the Times "miasmic fog."
Jasnah Kholin pretended to enjoy the party, giving no indication that she intended to have one of the guests killed.
Begins here first account of operative me, agent number 67, on arrival Midwestern American airport greater [redacted] area.
Kalak rounded a rocky stone ridge and stumbled to a stop before the body of a dying thunderclast.
This is the story of Danny and of Danny’s friends and of Danny’s house.
In the Sixth Precinct, the inexorable current of the river that flowed through Death slowed almost to a stop.
I am fourteen years old.
Red as heart's blood, the five rubies glowed in the golden casket, as if a spark of light burned at their innermost core.
"Shall I sit over here, Maistre Andar?"
In the chamber at the top of the tower were six individuals: three who chose to call themselves 'Lords' or sometimes 'Remedials'; a wretched underling who was their prisoner; and two Garrion.
Gavril Nagarian, Lord Drakhaon of Azhkendir, opened the door to Saint Sergius's shrine.
The servants called them alenchki, little ghosts, because they were the smallest and the youngest, and because they haunted the Duke's house like giggling phantoms, darting in and out of rooms, hiding in cupboards to eavesdrop, sneaking into the kitchen to steal the last of the summer peaches.
There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart’s Desire.
My father had a face that could stop a clock.
Toward the far edge of the Cornu Sector of Ophiuchus, Robert Palmer's Star shone brilliant white, its corona flaring with films of blue, red and green color.
Two tanks, American, which showed signs of hard use, moved slowly down a path.
Tika Waylan straightened her back with a sigh. flexing her shoulders to ease her cramped muscles.
During the first expansion of the Gaean Reach, when every adventurous youth yearned to become a locator, thousands of worlds in remote places had been explored.
I still remember the day my father took me to The Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time. 
Sydney struck Phryne Fisher, quite literally, in the face.
It was the deep dark, unexplored except for robotic visitors. 
As a boy Myron Tany had immersed himself in the lore of space exploration.
One night, Azhrarn Prince of Demons, one of the Lords of Darkness, took on him, for amusement, the shape of a great black eagle.
The space age is thirty thousand years old.
BILLY WEAVER had travelled down from London on the slow afternoon train, with a change at Swindon on the way, and by the time he got to Bath it was about nine o'clock in the evening and the moon was coming up out of a clear starry sky over the houses opposite the station entrance.
When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. 
Dot opened her eyes.
Among the people of the Floats caste distinctions were fast losing their old-time importance.
The sun was barely up as I left the cabin that morning, but it was already promising to be a beautiful day.
When the sun finally returned to the Arctic Circle and stained the gray sky with blazing streaks of pink, Augustine was outside, waiting. 
It didn't start out here.
IT WAS BORN in the darkness of the Circle Sea
When the blind man arrived in the city, he claimed that he had traveled across a desert of living sand. 
How to explain?
The eleventh apartment had only one closet, but it did have a sliding glass door that opened onto a small balcony, from which he could see a man sitting across the way, outdoors in only a T-shirt and shorts even though it was October, smoking.
Halfway along the Perseid Arm near the edge of the Gaean Reach, a capricious swirl of galactic gravitation has caught ten thousand stars and sent them streaming off at a veer, with a curl and a flourish at the tip.
It was love at first sight.
And then say what?
The eastern fringe of the Gaean Reach is bounded by a remarkable pocket of emptiness: the Great Hole.
In a distant and second-hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part ... 
The Mexican was half-dead and it was my grandmother's fault.
This is how Yuli, son of Alehaw, came to a place called Oldorando, where his descendants flourished in the better days that were to come.  
He looked to his right, saw the laughing kid and removed the finger from his nose before sheepishly driving off. 
It was always slow in Albuquerque on Tuesday nights, but tonight was worse than usual. 
The plane of Pao's diurnal rotation is the same as its plane of orbit; hence there are no seasons and the climate is uniformly mld.
It was predictable, in hindsight.
Sha stands up in the garden where she has been working and looks into the distance.
"What a paradox, what a fearful reproach, when the distinction of a few hundred miles - nay, as many feet or even inches! - can transform heinous crime to simple unqualified circumstance!"
A month. That's how long Mikayla's been gone.
From "How the Planets Trade," by Ignace Wodlecki: Cosmopolis, September, 1509: In all commercial communities, the prevalence or absence of counterfeit money, spurious bills of exchange, forged notes-of-hand, or any of a dozen other artifices to augment the value of blank paper is a matter of great concern.
On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicals, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology.
It was as black in the closet as old blood.
The longer Alusz Iphigenia traveled in the company of Kirth Gersen, the less certain she became that she understood his personality.
Jack Torrence thought: Officious little prick.
Aloysius, with its sister planets Boniface and Cuthbert, is accounted among the first worlds to be colonized from Earth, and the traveler who enjoys the ambience of antiquity will here find much to please him.
There was going to be a funeral.
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprize which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.
Almost everyone thought the man and the boy were father and son. 
From The Book of Dreams: Raise your eyes, stranger, to that age-worn rampart which confronts all else: there stand the paladins, stern, grave, serene.
I was in a dire predicament; a urgent journey lay before me
They had come so far, yet now that she was here, the years of journeying were already fading in her mind, giving way to the desperate needs of the present.
By the time he graduated from college, John Smith had forgotten all about the bad fall he took on the ice that January day in 1953.
To one side of the Explorator IV flared a dim and aging star, Carina 4269; to the other hung a single planet, gray-brown under a heavy blanket of atmosphere.
There is a right way to do things and a wrong way, if you’re going to run a hotel in a smugglers’ town.
Two thousand miles east of Pera, over the heart of the Dead Steppe, the sky-raft faltered, flew smoothly for a moment, then jerked and bucked in a most ominous fashion.
The year it turns, and turns, and turns.
I was down in Surrey, on business for Lord Cromwell's office, when the summons came.
Time to move on.
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
I think that everything, or at least part of everything that happened to me, started with the Roman architecture mix-up. 
The body lay naked and facedown, a deathly gray, spatters of blood staining the snow around it.
The sun Carina 4269 had passed into the constellation Tartusz, to mark the onset of Balul Zac Ag, the "unnatural dream time," when slaughter, slave-taking, pillage and arson came to a halt across the Lokhar Highlands.
Tell me the story again,’ I urged my sister in the nighttime blackness of our attic bedroom.
For one whole year, we worried about Kate.
"Sherlock Holmes Bookshop and Emporium, Gemma speaking."
In the warehouse at the edge of the Sivishe salt flats Aila Woudiver sat perched on a stool.
"Take all this business about Kenya", said Major Palgrave.
She was going to die because of the rutabagas.
Serenity tried.
If I cock up the next few hours of my life then I’m going to have to admit defeat.
Polly sighed and laid her book face down on her bed.
The man was dead, and although he had not cut a particularly large or imposing figure when he was alive, his lifeless body seemed to take up more space in our entranceway than a whole crowd of living, breathing visitors.
It is hot today, the wind blows over the flat fields and marshes with the stink of the plague.
“If you'll take a seat, sir,” the surgeon said, gesturing toward the chair in front of his desk.
The girl, giggling anf overexcited, was running in the sunlight garden, running away from her stepfather, but not so fast that he could not catch her.
I was a boy of twelve when I watched a dragon die.
Will tugged at his mother's hand and said, "Come on, come on..."
Call me Jonah.
Even when he stood, and spoke suddenly, clearly, and desparately, he was but the last nonoperational bohemoth of this dwindling ember we call San Francisco.
Where the river Vissel entered Surmise Bay stood Coble, a port for both sea-cogs and river barges, and terminus for the famous showboats of the region, such as Fironzelle's Golden Conceit, the Pamellissa, the Melodious Hour, Miraldra's Enchantment, the Fireglass Prism, the Two Varminies, and others of equal repute.
A sum of money is the leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees. 
This is the only story of mine whose moral I know.
Caspar came into the hall one afternoon with a bag of books on one shoulder and a bag of football clothes on the other and saw his brother carrying a large square parcel.
These are excerpts from the Introduction to The Worlds of Man, by Fellows of the Fidelius Institute, and will assist in bridging the gap between now and then, here and there: In this work, now thirty years in preparation, we attempt neither exhaustive detail nor analytical profundity, but, rather, a pastiche of a million parts, which, so it is hoped, will coalesce into a focused picture.
Snowman wakes before dawn.
“We hear that your Prince,’ said Lady Jokaste, ‘keeps his own harem.
In the early morning Toby climbs up to the rooftop to watch the sunrise.
On a dreary winter's day, with rain sweeping across Lyonesse Town, Queen Sollace went into labour.
Laura Brandt knew all about coming out of a suspension chamber.
They made a silly mistake, though,' the Professor of History said, and his smile, as Dixon watched, gradually sank beneath the surface of his features at the memory.
Visbhume, apprentice to the recently dead Hippolito, applied to the sorceror Tamurello for a similar post, but was denied.
The shadows were long with sunset when they rode up, and the horizon was red.
I don't know how I should live.
Doro discovered the woman by accident when he went to see what was left of one of his seed villages.
According to family legend, Ferguson's grandfather departed on foot from his native city of Minsk with one hundred rubles sewn into the lining of his jacket, traveled west to Hamburg through Warsaw and Berlin, and then booked passage on a ship called the Empress of China, which crossed the Atlantic in rough winter storms and sailed into New York Harbor on the first day of the twentieth century.
One dark season, Grandible became certain that there was something living in his domain within the cheese tunnels.
Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.
Wax crept along the ragged fence in a crouch, his boots scraping the dry ground.
I shook his hand for the first time in the spring of 1967.
South of Cornwall, north of Iberia, across the Cantabrian Gulf from Aquitane were the Elder Isles, ranging in size from Gwyg's Fang, a jag of black rock most often awash under Atlantic breakers, to Hybras, the 'Hy-Brasill' of early Irish chroniclers: an island as large as Ireland itself.
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
“You’re not crazy. STOP CALLING YOURSELF CRAZY,” my mom says for the eleventy billionth time.
"ASK ME A RIDDLE," Blaine invited.
It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days. 
There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before all else was made.
While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years.
Fog rose from the river, great billows of white weaving into the soot and smoke of the city of Corvere, to become the hybrid thing that the more popular newspapers called smog and the Times "miasmic fog."
The gunslinger came awake from a confused dream that seemed to consist of a single image: the Sailor in the Tarot deck from which the man in black had dealt (or purported to deal) the gunslinger's own moaning future. 
Niki, the name we finally gave my younger daughter, in not an abbreviation; is was a compromise I reached with her father.
At almost one o'clock I entered the lobby of the building where I worked and turned toward the escalators, carrying a black Penguin paperback and a small white CVS bag, its receipt stapled over the top.
It was her third time on ammunition... and the first time on the draw from the holster Roland had rigged for her.
In the beginning Eru, the One, who in the Elvish tongue is named Ilúvatar, made the Ainur of his thought; and they made a great Music before him.
You would have searched a long time for the sort of winding lane or tranquil meadow for which England later became celebrated.
Hello, this is Paul Chowder, and I'm going to try to tell you everything I know.
I lost an arm on my last trip home.
Nine months Landsman's been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered.
Where you're supposed to be is some big West Hills wedding reception in a big manor house with flower arrangements and stuffed mushrooms all over the house.
It is dark and I am waiting
If you're going to read this, don't bother.
It was Wang Lung's marriage day.
At first, the new owner pretends he never looked at the living room floor. 
It is told among the wise that the First War began before Arda was full-shaped, and ere yet there was anything that grew or walked upon earth; and for long Mellon had the upper hand.
The music-room in the Governor's House at Port Mahon, a tall, handsome, pillared octagon, was filled with the triumphant first movement of Locatelli's C major quartet.
If six month ago, you were to ask me how I would categorize my life, I'd most likely have given you a rather boring answer.
There was once a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault.
Today, a man called from Long Beach. 
The music, she thinks, is supposed to comfort.
In the beginning, there was nothing.
The apartments of Joaz Banbeck, carved deep from the heart of a limestone crag, consisted of five principal chambers, on five different levels.
The Salinas Valley is in Northern California.
It is said by the Eldar that Men came into the world in the time of the Shadow of Morgoth, and they fell swiftly under his dominion; for he sent his emissaries among them, and they listened to his evil and cunning words, and they worshipped the Darkness and yet feared it.
I slipped into my first metamorphosis so quietly that no one noticed.
I want to tell you the circumstances in which I first encountered Hannibal Lecter, M.D.
The war party from Faide Keep moved eastward across the downs: a column of a hundred armored knights, five hundred foot soldiers, a train of wagons.
Cazaril heard the mounted horseman on the road before he saw them.
Radovan had placed seven pebbles on the sundail between the shadow and the next hour.
I, Sinuhe, the son of Senmut and of his wife Kipa, write this.
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.
Of old there was Sauron the Maia, whom the Sindar in Beleriand named Gorthaur.
Behavioral Science, the FBI section that deals with serial murder, is on the bottom floor of the Academy building at Quantico, half-buried in the earth.
After two miles of walking he came to a town.
Where there was nothing, a craft appeared.
Toward the end of a stormy summer afternoon, with the sun finally breaking out under ragged black rain-clouds, Castle Janeil was overwhelmed and its population destroyed.
Once when I was six I saw a magnificent picture in a book about the jungle, called True Stories.
It was the end of the world,  though it would be some time before the general public knew it.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
“Do come out of that dream, Moril,” Lenina said.
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
It was in Warwick Castle that I came across the curious stranger whom I am going to talk about.
The Wilkinson family became ghosts quite suddenly during the Second World War when a bomb fell on their house.
The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.
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, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.
The Dog Star stood beneath the Judgement Seats and raged.
I forget everything between footsteps.
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday.
Ista leaned forward between the crenellations atop the gate tower, the stone gritty beneath her pale hands, and watched in numb exhaustion as the final mourning party cleared the castle gate below.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
See the child.
“Oh wow, you’re actually a novelist.”
And then there was the day when Addie Moore made a call on Louis Waters.
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. 
“Tomoe-sama…Tomoe-sama!”
The copper haired rider looked and the black sky and swore.
They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.
In the hospital of the orphanage — the boys' division at St. Cloud's, Maine — two nurses were in charge of naming the new babies and checking that their little penises were healing from the obligatory circumcision.
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.
Call me Ishmael.
Golden beams of sunlight spilled through the skeletal high rises, and through the concrete and steel network of interlaced highways, bypasses, and rails that once flowed with harried humanity, now devoid of all but the meanest signs of life
He remembered much of his stay in the womb.
Thomas couldn’t click “buy” for his order of a pistol and a single bullet.
Ash fell from the sky.
The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green.
Imagine that you have to break someone's arm. 
Once the siege and assault of Troy had ceased, with the city a smoke-heap of cinders and ash, the traitor who contrived such betrayal there was tried for his treachery, the truest on earth; so Aeneas, it was, with his noble warriors went conquering abroad, laying claim to the crowns of the wealthiest kingdoms in the western world.
ROGER, AGED SEVEN, and no longer the youngest of the family, ran in wide zigzags, to and fro, across the steep field that sloped up from the lake to Holly Howe, the farm where they were staying for part of the summer holidays.
It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
Charlie Asher walked the earth like an ant walks on the surface of water, as id the slightest misstep might send him plummeting through the surface to be sucked to the depths below.
I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.
Lo! the golden dragon of the God of Hell, the gloom of the woods of the world now gone, the woes of Men, and weeping of Elves fading faintly down forest pathways, is now to tell, and the name most tearful of Níniel the sorrowful, and the name most sad of Thalion's son Túrin o'erthrown by fate.
An impossible shot, and a risky one.
It is three hundred forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago today that the citizens of Paris were awakened by the pealing of all the bells in the triple precincts of the City, the Univeristy, and the Town.
Sundown painted purple across the great Pyramid while the Emperor enjoyed a steaming whiz against a dumpster in the alley below.
The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.
Elmer Gantry was drunk.
You bitch, you killed me!
Pain moved up he old man's hipbone like a plow breaking through hard sod.
A! the Trees of Light, tall and shapely, gold and silver, more glorious than the sun, than the moon more magical, o'er the meads of the Gods their fragrant frith and flowerladen gardens gleaming, once gladly shone.
A green hunting cap squeezed the top of a fleshy balloon of a head.
September in Pine Cove is a sigh of relief, a nightcap, a long-deserved nap.
The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.
Burns didn't imagine he could ever bring himself to really like Moore, but as he watched the man work the auger in the flickering shaft of his cap light, he had to admit a kind of grudging admiration for the fellow's grace.
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.
Towcester Abbey -pronounced Toaster- the seat of William Egerton Osingham Belfry, ninth Earl of Towcester, is one of those sately homes of England which were a lot statelier in the good old days before the moth got at them.
All this happened, more or less.
Lo! the flame of fire and fierce hatred engulfed Gondolin and its glory fell, its tapering towers and its tall rooftops were laid all low, and its leaping fountains made no music more on the mount of Gwareth, and its whitehewn walls were whispering ash.
A shout broke the stillness of the evening, and Hilde tensed, trying to sense trouble, but no other sounds came, so she continued her routine.
As I sat in the bath tub, soaping a meditative foot and singing, if I remember correctly, "Pale Hands I loved Beside The Shalimar," it would be deceiving my public to say that I was feeling boomps-a-daisy.
A salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping...
A king there was in days of old: ere Men yet walked upon the mould his power was reared in cavern's shade, his hand was over glen and glade.
If I don't know enough now, I shall never know enough.
"But I've never seen a Construct," Heather said, shaking the tree Simon was sitting against, making leaves fall on his book.
Kit came to Nearside with two trunks and an oiled-cloth folio full of plans for the bridge across the mist.
Spring had come to New York, the eight-fifteen train from Great Neck had come to the Pennsylvania terminus, and G. Ellery Cobbold, that stout economic royalist, had come to his downtown office, all set to prise another wade of currency out of the common people.
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.
This world is the last thing God will ever tell us.
In all this Cuban business there is one man stands out on the horizon of my memory like Mars at perihelion.
A fug of tobacco smoke and damp clammy air hit her as she entered the cafe.
The Dinner given by J.J. Bunyan at his New York residence on the night of September the tenth, 1929, was attended by eleven guests, most of them fat and all, except Mortimer Bayliss, millionaires.
My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks; I had better get to work before the need to write about her, which I felt so strongly at her funeral, dies away and I fall back into the dull speechlessness with which I reacted to the news of her suicide.
Most people -- by which I mean most of us who are part of Japanese society -- graduate from school, then find work, then, after some time has passed, get married.
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
When the past catches up with the present, returning from the realm of broken dreams and dented hopes, the best course of action is to roll over, expose the belly, and pray that it will be merciful.
Maria was ten years old.
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
In a corner of the city, inside a tall, narrow house at Number 4 rue Vauborel, on the sixth and highest floor, a sightless sixteen-year-old named Marie-Laure LeBlanc kneels over a low table covered entirely with a model.
I'm going to tell you about my brother.
I'm going to tell you about my brother.
This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I've never stolen anything.
The sunshine which is such an agreeable feature of life in and around Hollywood, when the weather is not unusual, blazed down from a sky of turquoise blue on the spacious grounds of what, though that tempestuous Mexican star had ceased for nearly a year to be its owner and it was now the property of Mrs. Adela Shannon Cork, was still known locally as the Carmen Flores place.
This is not a coming-out story.
Call me Jonah.
It was a pleasure to burn.
My name is Jace Holden, and today is the day I die.
Alice sat at her desk in their bedroom distracted by the sounds of John racing through each of the rooms on the first floor. 
"John? Can you swim?"
Society Red was the first man on the yard that morning.
I marmaladed a slice of toast with something of a flourish, and I don't suppose I have ever come much closer to saying 'Tra-la-la" as I did the lathering, for I was feeling in mid-season form this morning.
"Brother John--good to see you."
On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide - it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese, the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.
Morning, Jeeves,' I said.
Alive!
"Y'all better hurry along, now."
Ivan's door buzzer sounded at close to Komarran midnight, just when he was unwinding enough from lingering jump lag, his screwed-up diurnal rhythm, and the day's labors to consider sleep.
"And now, I will tell you of my plans to take over the Kingdom," the evil wizard and total douchbag Lartin the Dark Leaf said with a cackle.
We are on our way to Budapest: Bastard and Chipo and Godknows and Sbho and Stina and me.
Lest anyone should suppose I am a son nobody, sold off by some peasant father in a drought year, I may say our line is an old one, though it ends with me.
It was seven in the morning when the alarm clock belonging to Gustavo Tiberius rang and he opened his eyes.
I lost an arm on my last trip home.
I am riding the bicycle and I am on Route 31 in Monument, Massachussets, on my way to Ruttersburg, Vermont, and I'm pedaling furiously because this is an old-fashioned bike, no speeds, no fenders, only the warped tires and the brakes that don't always work and the handlebars with cracked rubber grips to steer with.
Once upon a time, humanity could no longer contain the rage that swelled within, and the world ended in a wave of fire.
The Earl of Hannart arrived in Aberath two days before Midsummer.
The primroses were over.
The twelve men congregated in the smoking room of the Crown Hotel gave the impression of a party accidentally met.
The train journey was horrible.
I am Tersa the Weaver, Tersa the Liar, Tersa the Fool.
The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers.
I'm pretty much fucked.
/There's been an accident!/ she thought.
I first came to know Sophia Leonides in Egypt towards the end of the war.
It began with a wind from another world.
According to the swim instructor at the Gilford gym, I had the worst buoyancy of any human he'd ever seen.
 I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space. 
How to explain?
Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed. 
Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.
A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.
For a week Mr. R. Childan had been anxiously watching the mail.
This is written from memory, unfortunately.
I am a coward.
People may wonder how Mitt came to join in the Holand Sea Festival, carrying a bomb, and what he thought he was doing.
"Will you all be quiet!" snapped High Chancellor Querida.
The courier presses his forehead against layers of glass, argon, high-impact plastic.
Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza was too old to be at a Communist party.
Once, I was famous.
Shadow had done three years in prison.
Not everybody knowx how I killed old Pillip Mathers, smashing his jaw with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar.
It lokked set to become even hotter by the afternoon, just when the job was becoming more fiddly and needed extra concentration.
I had my recurring dream last night.
It begins, as most things begin, with a song.
The last drops of the thundershower had hardly ceased falling when the Pedestrian stuffed his map into his pocket, settled his pack more comfortably on his shoulders, and stepped out from the shelter of a large chestnut-tree into the middle of the road.
Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette; unsupported — hanging high above us in the computer chamber; and it did  not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern.
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
"This is the last call for Jaunt-701," the pleasant female voice echoed through the Blue Concourse of New York's Port Authority Terminal.
The last question was asked for the first tim e, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time  when humanity first stepped in to the light. 
My mother died during my second term at Oxford and when I came down there was nothing--except my own lack of means--to tie me to my uncle.
Nothing was going right with the Wizards' University.
Thursday, 7th November - Beyond the Indian hamlet, upon a forlorn strand, I happened on a trail of recent footprints.
As we now know, William Shakespeare (1564–whenever he died) was well known for borrowing from existing literature when writing his plays.
The cloudless night sky was already displaying a pale glimmer in the distance, over East Berlin, by the time Frank LEhmann, whom they'd recently taken to calling "Herr Lehmann" because word had gotten around that he would soon be thirty, walked home across Lausitzer Platz.
The place where the story happened was a world on the back of four elephants perched on the shell of a giant turtle.
This time there would be no witnesses.
As I left the railway station at Worchester and set out on the three-mile walk to Ransom's cottage, I reflected that no one on that platform could possibly guess the truth about the man I was going to visit.
My father had a face that could stop a clock.
When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
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 become disentangled.
Aragorn sped up on the hill.
Pippin looked out from the shelter of Gandalf's cloak.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market town or rural port, which by some is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly known by the name of Tarry Town.
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice ‘without pictures or conversations?’
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. I arrived here yesterday, and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare and increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking.
Left Munich at 8:35 P. M., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late.
My love is a solitary flower…blooming unseen, scattering alone…
It was midday and the passageway quiet and cool.
It's funny, Vasher thought, how may things begin with my getting thrown into prison.
"Matrimony was ordained, thirdly," said Jane Studdock to herself, "for the mutual society, help, and comfort that the one ought to have of the other."
If there's a single piece of truth among all the pious humbug and retrospective arse-covering that passes for my autobiography, its the last four words of that paragraph.
Elantris was beautiful, once
Maia woke with his cousin's cold fingers digging into his shoulder.
Her name is Melanie.
It was dusk when the London to Little Hampton stage-coach lurched into the village of Billingshurst, and a cold mist was beginning to creep knee-high over the dimly seen countryside.
It was a dumb thing to do, but it wasn't that dumb.
The body lay naked and facedown, a deathly gray, spatters of blood staining the snow around it.
The primroses were over.
A gentleman was strolling down a side street in Paris, on his way back from the house of one Madame de Verchoureux.
Have you heard of the Flying Dutchman?
Behind him, someone said, "They shouldn't be called weddings."
Its hull gleamed in the sunshine as it executed a leisurely turn in the upper atmosphere, retrothrusters punching elliptical holes through the wispy high clouds.
Spells are the hardest thing in the world to get right.
The note said: SOMEONE IN THIS CLASS IS A WITCH.
The garden market positively thronged with people, clustered around the wagons just in from the countryside.
Cat Chant admired his elder sister Gwendolen.
It was years before Christopher told anyone about his dreams.
The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.
The night Effia Otcher was born into the musky heat of Fanteland, a fire raged through the woods just outside her father's compound.
On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology.
Just before the roosters crowed one day in late March 1944, Sorry Rinamu was awakened by great, angry roars from the sky, louder than rolling thunderclaps.
There was a round tower with a weather-cock on it.
In the castle of Benwick, the French boy was looking at his face in the polished surface of a kettle-hat.
Luis Horseman leaned the flat stone very carefully against the piñon twig, adjusted its balance exactly and then cautiously withdrew his hand.
I've always been fascinated by candles.
The primroses were over.
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
The addition of years had not been kind to Agravaine.
No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine.
Johnny bit his lip and concentrated.
The Mighty ScreeWee™ Empire™ is poised to attack Earth!
When Carlo came out of hospital he had to stay in bed at the new flat he shared with his mother, Jessica, and, though it was new (well, new to them) he quickly became very tired of it.
You better not never tell nobody but God.
I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Bob had always wanted to know how to be taken seriously. 
Ray stepped forward and bowed.
 “Where’s Papa going with that axe?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
The old man looked at me with pity in his eyes.
The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards. 
Before the tower, humanity dreamed of flying. 
The Salinas Valley is in Northern California
The voice on the radio spat out a few intelligible words before melting back into static.
Before my wife turned vegetarian, I'd always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way. 
"Will you all be quiet!" snapped High Chancellor Querida.
Walking to school over the snow-muffled cobbles, Karou had no sinister premonitions about the day.
It was a dark and stormy night.
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
I drove up to the house on a private road that widened at the summit into a parking apron.
There were crimson roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood.
I'd been running a low-grade fever for nearly a week.
When Sal Cupertine was going to kill a guy, he'd walk right up and shoot him in the back of the head.
Michelangelo Osiris Leary Kusanagi-Jones had been drinking since fourteen hundred.
Some nights, if I'm sleeping on my own, I still dream about Whitethorn House.
This is merely a copy, word for word, of what was published this morning in the State newspaper:
Captain Crosbie came out of the bank with the pleased air of one who has just cashed a cheque and has discovered that there is just a little more in his account than he thought there was.
I never sleep if I can help it.
One winter morning in the long-ago, four-year-old days of my life I found myself standing before a fireplace, warming my hands over a mound of glowing coals, listening to the wind whistle past the house outside. 
"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. 'Spread your lips, sweet Lil,' they'd cluck, 'and show us your choppers!'"
This is me when I was 10 years old.
In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the Army.
Pretend I'm not already dead.
“Marx has completely changed the way I view the world,” declared the Palliéres boy this morning, although ordinarily he says nary a word to me. 
He had dreamed about her.
Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case.
Once upon a time, in a far-off land, I was kidnapped by a gang of fearless yet terrified young men with so much impossible hope beating inside their bodies it burned their very skin and strengthened their will right through their bones.
Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table.
"I am inclined to think--" said I.
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
From the top of the large boulder he sat on, Ensign Tom Davis looked across the expanse of the cave toward Captain Lucius Abernathy, Science Officer Q'eeng and Chief Engineer Paul West perched on a second, larger boulder, and thought, Well, this sucks.
The old woman remembered a swan she had bought many years ago in Shanghai for a foolish sum.
On the morning Vera died I woke up very early.
This is the Discworld, which travels through space on the back of four elephants which themselves stand on the shell of Great A'Tuin, the sky turtle.
Now consider the tortoise and the eagle.
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn. 
Everyone starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree. 
One hot spring evening, just as the sun was going down, two men appeared at Patriarch’s Ponds. 
It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.
I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other.
Muchos años despues, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo
On the 24th of February, 1815, the look-out at Notre-Dame de la Garde signalled the three-master, the Pharaon from Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples.
Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion and Papa flung his heavy missal across the room and broke the figurines on the etagere
On the first Monday of the month of April, 1625, the market town of Meung, in which the author of ROMANCE OF THE ROSE was born, appeared to be in as perfect a state of revolution as if the Huguenots had just made a second La Rochelle of it.
For three or four weeks Obi Okonkwo had been steeling himself for this moment.
Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego. 
Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. 
A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate. 
There were plenty of times Quinn had almost died
I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751, when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father’s house. 
Mr. Phileas Fogg lived, in 1872, at No. 7, Saville Row, Burlington Gardens, the house in which Sheridan died in 1814. 
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings
On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.
The rays of the September sun flooded the great halls of the old chateau of the Dukes of Charmerace, lighting up with their mellow glow the spoils of so many ages and many lands, jumbled together with the execrable taste which so often afflicts those whose only standard of value is money. 
The alchemist picked up a book that someone in the caravan had brought.
Henry Leroux wrote busily on.
My company was charming.
The skeleton lay on the classroom floor, and Luke Harding prowled around it, thinking.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. 
The white boy walking along Tottenham Court Corridor spotted a tree snake in the elder plant growing up the side of the house
Emily Wonder's eyes did not narrow when the dazzling sunshine fell across her face.
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.
Mommy forgot to warn the new babysitter about the basement.
A shiver enveloped the official executioner's boy when he stepped into the empty Death Cell.
Everything was wrong.
I have just returned from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. 
Nyree was nervous and scared, but she was also spellbound
Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary, and yet somehow lovable. 
Adam Salton sauntered into the Empire Club, Sydney, and found awaiting him a letter from his grand-uncle. 
A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. 
The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child. 
Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.
From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.
Miles returned to consciousness with his eyes still closed.
I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.
There were five of us--Carruthers and the new recruit and myself, and Mr. Spivens and the verger.
It was a nice day.
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport."
Before the birth of King Arthur, Merlin the Sorcerer made this prophecy: From the Distant Isles will come a wondrous dragon.
Beside a lake so vast it extended beyond the horizon, the exhausted travelers stopped for the night.
For numberless years a myna had astounded travelers to the caravansary with its ability to spew indecencies in ten languages, and before the fight broke out everyone assumed the old blue-tongued devil on its perch by the fireplace was the one who maligned the giant African with such foulness and verve.
It was quite by accident I discovered this incredible invasion of Earth by lifeforms from another planet.
“So,” said the young priest. “I think that I’m the man you’re looking for.”
In tide of yore and in time long gone before, there was a King of Kings of the Banu Sasan in the Islands of India and China, there was a Lord of armies and guards and servants and dependents.
Security Commissioner Reinhart rapidly climbed the front steps and entered the Council building.
Elijah Brody was being attacked by butterflies.
I lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of the Bitchun Society, to learn ten languages; to compose three symphonies; to realize my boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World; to see the death of the workplace and of work.
THE HEGEMONY CONSUL sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.
The kids in my local bat-house breathe heavy metals, and their gelatinous bodies quiver nauseously during our counseling sessions, and for all that, they reacted just like I had when I told them I was going away for a while — with hurt and betrayal, and they aroused palpable guilt in me.
The historic city of Cape May, a charming shore village on the tiptoe of New Jersey, is famous for three things: Victorian homes frosted pink and white as the sweetest cakes, sun-washed beaches littered with "diamonds", and many befuddled ghosts.
The coppers smashed my father's printer when I was eight.
“Do your neighbors burn one another alive?” was how Fraa Orolo began his conversation with Artisan Flec.
"Mama, I'm not a super-villain," Hershie said for the millionth time.
I was a happy little girl wearing a pink dress, sitting in our gold minivan, dancing with my doll, Kamara.
The mutineers would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for the collapse of the Flow.
When it comes to picking locks and cracking safes I admit to no master. 
The trouble started the day Howard came home from school to find the Goon sitting in the kitchen.
Shadow had done three years in prison.
Brion entered the temple and stood as if rooted to the ground.
A spark flew, spiraling upward from the massive frame of the new Port Authority building.
The meteor, a pebble, a little larger than a match head, traveled through space and time since it came into being.
I mean, it isn't like we swiped anything.
AT KEL ACADEMY, an instructor had explained to Cheris’s class that the threshold winnower was a weapon of last resort, and not just for its notorious connotations.
The alert tone hummed deep in my ear.
Major Pettigrew was still upset about the phone call from his brother's wife and so he answered the doorbell without thinking.
The Survey-Ship Tethys made the first landing on the planet, which had no name. 
Entering the room, I gagged as the stench of putrefaction assailed my nose.
Lady Miyo!
In All His lifetime of perhaps twenty years, it had never occurred to Burl to wonder what his grandfather had thought about his surroundings.
One afternoon on a farm outside a small town in the King Country two children wandered into the bush and were lost.
The Directory-ship Tethys made the first landing on the planet, L21612.
Era huddled against the wall and pressed her hands to her ears, blocking out the piercing sirens.
Dear You, The body you are wearing used to be mine.
The sky grew gray and then almost white.
Lillian! Lill–ia–an!' called Mrs Perham into the darkness.
When a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country.
There was a wall.
Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
There was once a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself—not just sometimes, but always.
Not for the first time, an argument had broken out over breakfast at number four, Privet Drive.
"In one fell swoop," declared Professor C. Cydwick Ohms, releasing a thin blue ribbon of pipe-smoke and rocking back on his heels, "—I intend to solve the greatest problem facing mankind today."
It was a dark and stormy night.
Harry Potter was a highly unusual boy in many ways.
The villagers of Little Hangleton still called it 'the Riddle House,' even though it had been many years since the Riddle family had lived there.
On the morning of June 15th, Guy Burckhardt woke up screaming out of a dream.
The hottest day of the summer so far was drawing to a close and a drowsy silence lay over the large, square houses of Privet Drive.
It was nearing midnight and the Prime Minister was sitting along in his office, reading a long memo that was slipping through his brain without leaving the slightest trace of meaning behind.
It is a sin to write this.
At least he'd got far enough to wind up with a personal interview. 
"Get away from me!" screamed Dr. Berry at the approaching figure.
In those long-ago days, I was very young and lived with my grandparents in a villa with white walls in the Calle Ocharán, in Miraflores.
The two men appeared out of nowhere, a few yards apart in the narrow, moonlit lane.
It was only a duck pond, out at the back of the far.
The tracks went up one row and down another, and in those rows the vua plants had been sheared off an inch or two above the ground. 
It is my first morning of high school. I have seven new note-  books, a skirt I hate, and a stomachache.
Blandings Castle slept in the sunshine.
Looking back to all that has occurred to me since that eventful day, I am scarcely able to believe in the reality of my adventures. 
The year 1866 was signalised by a remarkable incident, a mysterious and puzzling phenomenon, which doubtless no one has yet forgotten.
Everything was perfectly swell.
Gramps Ford, his chin resting on his hands, his hands on the crook of his cane, was staring irascibly at the five-foot television screen that dominated the room. 
It was in the thirty-fourth century that the dark star began its famous conquest, unparalleled in stellar annals.
A sharp clip-crop of iron-shod hoofs deadened and died away, and clouds of yellow dust drifted from under the cottonwoods out over the sage.
In 1990 I survived a life-crisis.
The stocky roan switched tail angrily against a persistent fly and lipped water, dripping big drops back to the surface of the brook.
After the apple had been cut in half, the halves had been sewn together with coarse black thread.
A few years ago a psychopath burned down my house.
He had no appointment and, looking at him across the doorsill, it didn't seem likely that he would be bringing the first big fee of 1964.
In accordance with the law the death sentence was announced to Cincinnatus C. in a whisper.
What struck him most was the fact that from Monday on he would be Luzhin.
The huge black clock hand is still at rest but is on the point of making its once-a-minute gesture; that resilient jolt will set a whole world in motion.
Shulawitsi, the Little Fire God, member of the Council of the Gods and Deputy to the Sun, had taped his track shoes to his feet.
I met that woman, that Matilda, during my first autumn of émigré existence in Berlin, in the early twenties of two spans of time, this century and my foul life.
A man of middle age, with a large, drooping moustache and brooding eyes, hunched over the steering wheel and gripped the rim anxiously as he maneuvered his car up a mountain road that was narrow, unpaved and torturous.
There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar ; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else were made.
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
Kell wore a very peculiar coat.
The night was cool, and above the village hills the stars hurled down their ancient light-borne messages.
Delilah Bard had a way of finding trouble.
The tired old carriage, pulled by two tired old horses, rumbled onto the wharf, its creaky wheels bumpety-bumping on the uneven planks, waking Peter from his restless slumber.
"Birds don't know how to tell jokes."
There’s a silence that’s the opposite of peaceful.
"Here's the World War I Army Surgeon going in to see one of his patients…"
The big question: Is Origami Yoda real?
Jessika Pava couldn't stop staring at her X-wing fighter.
Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed. 
Maia woke with his cousin’s cold fingers digging into his shoulder.
"What's it going to be then, eh?"
"I know I keep on saying it," exclaimed Mrs. Brown, as she placed an extremely large vegetable marrow on the kitchen scales, "but I'm sure Paddington must have been born with green paws."
Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy.
From the old and pleasantly situated village of Mayenfeld, a footpath winds through green and shady meadows to the foot of the mountains, which on this side look down from their stern and lofty heights upon the valley below.
It was a dull autumn day and Jill Pole was crying behind the gym.
In the last days of Narnia, far up to the west beyond Lantern Waste and close beside the great waterfall, there lived an Ape.
When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
Delaney was starting to wonder if bringing Kee had been a bad idea.
This is the story of an adventure that happened in Narnia and Calormen and the lands between, in the Golden Age when Peter was High King in Narnia and his brother and his two sisters were King and Queens under him.
Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy, and it has been told in another book called The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe how they had a remarkable adventure.
It was in Warwick Castle that I came across the curious stranger whom I am going to talk about.
Ugly stood alone before the processing machine.
This is a story about something that happened long ago when your grandfather was a child.
I stood silently in the farthest corner of the dark room when I was finally admitted, head bowed, hands clamped tightly behind my back, left wrist clasped in a death grip by my right fist, shoulders straight, stomach flat, unconsciously presenting.
Sybil Davison has a genius I.Q. and has been laid by at least six different guys.
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
The three big men were met together in the private building of one of them.
In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit. 
Everybody knows that a seventh son is lucky.
"Quite simply, the answer is -- because they are there!"
The heavy manacles binding my wrists clinked with every step I took, and it felt like I had taken a million.
There is entwined seven-tentacled lightning.
I cannot tell my story without reaching a long way back.
Call me Ishmael.
Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin.
They’re beautiful, my boys.
It was a pleasure to burn.
I'm a senior at Cesar Chavez high in San Francisco's sunny Mission district, and that makes me one of the most surveilled people in the world.
Lee is my name, and this is my house, and in my house I await you.
Tuesday the fourteenth of February began badly for Frankie Parsons.
The Morris dance is common to all inhabited worlds in the multiverse.
Who shows up for a funeral wearing a yellow suit?
A sea mist had coated the window of the farm's kitchen with minuscule drops of rain.
In the nighttime heart of Beiruit, in one of a row of general-address transfer booths, Louis Wu flicked into reality.
This coupon expired yesterday, sir.
Some things start before other things.
Not darkness, for that implies and understanding of light.
The Nac Mac Feegle are the most dangerous of the fairy races, particularly when drunk.
Linderwall was a large kindom, just east of the Mountains of Morning, where philosophers were highly respected and the number five was fashionable.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Lighting a cigarette clutched between slightly yellowed teeth, Emil Acerbi strode down New Eden’s starlit streets.
It was during the period the Guardians called the Age of Triumph, so full of hope and hubris.
The deck of the French ship was slippery with blood, heaving in the choppy sea; a stroke might as easily bring down the man making it as the intended target.
Sunset blazed above Gold Ridge valley in north Emelan, throwing shadows over a company of mounted riders.
My mother thinks I'm dead.
The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created.
My name is Stephen Leeds, and I am perfectly sane.
The day was unseasonably warm for November, but in some misguided deference to the Chinese embassy, the fire in the Admiralty boardroom had been heaped excessively high, and Laurence was standing directly before it.
The regular early orning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
"Send up another, damn you, send them all up, at once if you have to," Laurence said savagely to poor Calloway, who did not deserve to be sworn at: the gunner was firing off the flares so quickly his hands were scorched black, skin cracking and peeling to bright red where some powder had spilled onto his fingers; he was not stopping to wipe them clean before setting each flare to the match.
When the sun had gone, I saw that the water was streaked with great patches of crimson and gold.
"I HATE THAT HEDGEHOG!"
First of all, let me get something straight: This is a JOURNAL, not a diary.
He sat on the floor before the hearth with his knees against his chin, the flames at his back, and warily watched his father's face.
For me, summer vacation is basically a three-month guilt trip.
"Oh, this is NOT cool!"
You know how you're supposed to come up with a list of "resolutions" at the beginning of the year to try to make yourself a better person?
She would leave him, she thought, as soon as the petunias bloomed.
The deck of the French ship was slippery with blood, heaving in the choppy sea; a stroke might as easily bring down the man making it as the intended target.
Gaotona ran his fingers across the thick canvas, inspecting one of the greatest works of art he had ever seen.
I guess Mom was pretty proud of herself for making me write in that journal last year, because now she went and bought me another one.
ONCE UPON a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith.
His name was Jai Vedh.
"Still no sign of the townspeople."
We were right on time.
The man who called himself Bors, at least in this place, sneered at the low murmuring that rolled around the vaulted chamber like the soft gabble of geese.
He sat in a room, the sand of which was synthetic and shining with opal tints, fine and light beneath his bare feet.
Ellen leaned over the sink and took a last, critical look at her makeup in the bathroom mirror.
I'd never given much thought to how I would die - though I'd had reason enough in the last few months - but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this.
A fellow of Clare Hall, being in that state where another hour's tippling should render him swine drunk, asked me, if I had a choice of all mankind that ever lived, which would I choose to sit by me as a guest at the next college feast.
By the time Khreng and Prandra came out of deepsleep, the ship was Solthree orbit.
Pedron Niall' aged gaze wandered about his private adience chamber, but dark eyes hazed with thought saw nothing.
Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs.
I'd never given much thought to dying - though I'd had reason enough in the last few months - but even if I had, I wouldn't have imagined it like this.
"When is the new magician coming, Ruthie?"
The dim wagon track went no further on the praire, and Pa stopped the horses.
Mars was empty before we came.
The point is not to make another Earth.
The big groundcar jerked to a stop centimeters from the vehicle ahead of it, and Armsman Pym, driving, swore under his breath.
No, stop it.
Three luscious lemon tarts glistened up at Catherine.
Nicolas Rathe dragged himself awake at the sound of fists on his door, groped for flint and steel and the candlestick beside his bed.
Mars is free now.
Dawn was coming.
Monkey never dies.
Why do you do what you do?
It snowed the day they killed the boy's parents.
Nobody likes Washington, D.C.
The Earth is bathed in a flood of sunlight
When they pulled her out, she was not crying at all.
Ever since I was a little kid, I've had it drilled into me that my Uncle Lester was my favorite uncle.
It was nearing midnight and the Prime Minister was sitting alone in his office, reading a long memo that was slipping through his brain without leaving the slightest trace of meaning behind.
Nearly a century ago, something incredible happened.
"Do your neighbors burn one another alive?" was how Fraa Orolo began his conversation with Artisan Flec.
I CALL our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.
His arm aches, but it’s a dull, manageable sort of pain.
My father used to carry me down the hall to my room after I came home from the hospital
“Excuse me? Um, excuse me?”
It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.
You must picture your image of eastern Europe.
The memories don’t start coming back until he finds the door.
 The mall had been working very hard all morning, spring cleaning his little home. 
I had expected Birana to weep.
According to the First Scroll of Wen the Eternally Surprised, Wen stepped out of the cave where he received enlightenment and into the dawning light of the first day of the rest of his life
Getting called into the brat’s office is never a pleasant experience.
Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we?
ALICE was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?"
No consider the tortoise and the eagle.
Nagisa was the first to notice when reality split apart, most likely because it happened directly beside him.
 It was warm spring night when a fist knocked at the door so hard that the hinges bent. 
The evening before my departure for Blithedale, I was returning to my bachelor apartments, after attending the wonderful exhibition of the Veiled Lady, when an elderly man of rather shabby appearance met me in an obscure part of the street.
It was sweltering within the cadet-training center.
It all started the night she burst into their rooms.
Polly cut off her hair in front of the mirror, feeling slightly guilty about not feeling very guilty about doing so. 
My father has a glum nature.
Ah, physics.
They never found her.
It was a dumb thing to do but it wasn't that dumb.
It was a fluke.
I had my recurring dream last night.
They'll make a god of her.
Once upon a time a troll named Hawthorn lives very happily indeed in his mother’s house, where he juggled the same green and violet gemstones and matching queens’ crowns every day, slept on the same weather-beaten Stone, and played with the same huge, cantankerous toad. 
This book is about convex optimization, a special class of mathematical optimization problems, which includes least-squares and linear programming problems.
This is how it starts, two men, one a complete stranger, the other all but, look upon a child and decide to cripple him.
It’s reassuring living in a city full of multiple superheroes.
"Of course," they told him in all honesty, "you will be a slave."
Obito is born in darkness, sculpted from ashes wet with blood, given vague form by clumsy hands unused to creation.
I am, my friends agree, a fairly easy-going sort of chap, not quick to anger or to fear.
To wound the autumnal city.
In the whole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
I have been arrested.
I remember how it used to be: I walked down the street and the street was empty and full of people, livid sky, the sun low under the clouds, striking straight into my eyes as I went.  
Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood.
Dr. Jonasson was woken by a nurse five minutes before the helicopter was expected to land.
When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.
My nightmare started like this.
This Friday before winter break, my mom packed me an overnight bag and a few deadly weapons and took me to a new boarding school.
I've never been afraid of ghosts.
It was love at first sight. The first tme Yossarian saw the captain he fell madly in love with him.
I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one.
The hottest day of the summer so far was drawing to a close and a drowsy silence lay over the large, square houses of Privet Drive.
"What in the world, Wimsey, are you doing in this Morgue?" demanded Captain Fentiman, flinging aside the "Evening Banner" with the air of a man released from an irksome duty.
“Admiral’s compliments, and you’re to come to his office right away,” Midshipman Staley announced.
"But if he thought the woman was being murdered—"
Margriet de Vos peered at a horizon smudged with the smoke of small fires.
"Oh, damn!" said Lord Peter Wimsey at Piccadilly Circus
Lorsque j'avais six ans j'ai vu, une fois, une magnifique image, dans un livre sur la Forêt Vierge qui s'appelait "Histoires Vécues."
I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.
If one lives in Galloway, one either fishes or paints.
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
There were crimson roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood.
Two hours before dawn I sat in the peeling kitchen and smoked one of Sarah’s cigarettes, listening to the maelstrom and waiting.
"And by the way," said Mr. Hankin, arresting Miss Rossiter as she rose to go, "there is a new copy-writer coming in today."
"That's torn it!" said Lord Peter Wimsey
Perhaps larks and katydids dream.
Waxillium Ladrian, lawman for hire, swung off his horse and turned to face the saloon.
Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them.
“Jeeves,” I said, “may I speak frankly?” 
My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood.
Barney Doyle sat at his cluttered workbench, attempting to fix Olaf Andersen’s ancient power mower for the fourth time in seven years.
Dr Strauss says I shoud rite down what I think and remembir and evrey thing that happins to me from now on.
Pomona knew the satyr was there.
In an old town of Persia there lived two brothers named Cassim and Ali Baba.
So Peter is really married: I have ordered willow-wreaths for half my acquaintance.
Harriet Vane sat at her writing-table and stared out into Mecklenburg Square.
Most nights we used to mess around in the park around the corner from my house.
I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country.
Amerigo Bonasera sat in New York Criminal Court Number 3 and waited for justice; vengeance on the men who had so cruelly hurt his daughter, who had tried to dishonor her.
I reached out a hand from under the blankets, and rang the bell for Jeeves
The first place that I can well remember was a pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it.
On the very day when the appalling rout and destruction of the Russian fleet near the island of Tsushima was approaching its end and the first vague and alarming rumours of the bloody Japanese triumph were sweeping across Europe - on that very day, Staff Captain Vasilii Alexandrovich Rybnikov, who lived on a small street with no name in the St Petersburg district of Peski, received the following telegram from Irkutsk: 'Dispatch sheets immediately watch over patient pay expenses'.
The truth is, if old Major Dover hadn’t dropped dead at Taunton races Jim would never have come to Thursgood’s at all.
Locke Lamora stood on the pier in Tal Verrar with the hot wind of a burning ship at his back and the cold bite of a loaded crossbow's bolt at his neck.
In a month, four years will have passed since his sister’s death.
"Call me, Ishmael
It starts as a whisper during basic training, a little internal voice that chips in just before he makes a decision.
The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended.
The day it happened Travis drove north.
A Turkish heavyweight boxing champion sauntering down a Hamburg street with his mother on his arm can scarcely be blamed for failing to notice that he is being shadowed by a skinny boy in a black coat.
Sitting behind the pilot as the two-seater aircraft leveled beside a snow-clad peak, I couldn’t help thinking about the money I would waste if we failed to find amountain lion within the rugged wilderness we were scrutinizing.
The fiddle at the Pacific Pastoral meat-packing works was neither particularly original nor fabulously lucrative.
The first thing she dreams is sadness and disappointment and love.
The two cops were virtually invisible.
Two heroes walk into a bar; the third is already there.
When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell.
Kyle stalked through the swirling snow, but he didn't feel the cold.
I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites.
On the morning after the Feds burned down her house and took her father, Havaa woke from dreams of sea anemones.
It's been a while, thought Charles Paris.
You would think that my return home from over a year on Zorbus would be met with celebration, excitement, and a sense of victory.
The history of the Six Duchies is of necessity a history of its ruling family, the Farseers.
I am the recording angel, doomed to watch.
After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, the Danube enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low willow-bushes.
As a child, Trudi Montag thought everyone knew what went on inside of others.
He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead.
It was good standing there on the promontory overlooking the evening sea, the fog lilting itself like gauzy veils to touch his face.
Tony Hill lay in bed and watched a long strip of cloud slide across a sky the colour of duck eggs.
There was a rock that since the creation of the world had been worked upon by the pure essences of Heaven and the fine savours of Earth, the vigour of sunshine and the grace of moonlight, till at last it became magically pregnant and one day split open, giving birth to a stone egg, about as big as a playing ball.
In the autumn of 1992 there were rumours of a mushroom glut in the forests; it was said that the warm moist weather of late summer had provoked a burst of chanterelles and hedgehog mushrooms.
You too will marry a boy I choose,' said Mrs Rupa Mehra firmly to her younger daughter.
Blinded by the headlights, Sumner Kagan lunged off the road and slid down the dir embankment into the dark.
After it's over, of course, you want to kick yourself for all the things you didn't see at the time.
After the thing was all over, and peril had ceased to loom and happy endings had  been distributed in heaping handfuls and we were driving home with our hats on the side of our heads, having shaken the dust  of Steeple Bumpleigh from our tyres, I confessed to Jeeves that there were moments during the recent proceedings when Bertram Wooster, though no weakling, had come very near to despair.
Charlie worries sometimes that his dog is an idiot.
The other side of the sun.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.
A barometric low hung over the Atlantic.
My friend Hergal had killed himself again.
Dear Rose, I'll bet you never thought you'd hear from me again.
Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair.
"Hergal," I said, "if you say that one more time I am personally going to knock you straight through that wall."
They threw me off the hay truck about noon.
"Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs. Ramsey.
At Dove we are dedicated to providing superior nourishment solutions for hair. 
A sea of mist drifted through the cloud forest: soft, grey, luminescent.
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?
Maia woke with his cousin's cold fingers digging into his shoulder.
Apply a small amount on wet hands. 
I am afraid.
I drove out to Glendale to put three new truck drivers on a brewery company bond, and then I remembered this renewal over in Hollywoodland.
The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created.
To a browser of dusty library shelves: My name, in academic circles, is Powl Impres.
This time there would be no witnesses.
A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression "as pretty as an airport".
How the patient scientist feels when the shapeless tussocks and vague ditches under the thistles and scrub begin to take shape and come clear: this was the outer rampart--this the gateway--that was the granary!
His hand trembled as he tried to summon the strength to make himself reach up and pull the spike free from his back and end his monstrous life.
The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
The army crept LIKE A dark stain across the horizon.
This is a story about memory.
  ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
A child was crying.
The primroses were over.
People of Ash'tor, I know you are not evil.
Ash fell from the sky.
The hungry vixen had to be patient as she searched for prey among the dried-out gullies and the bare ravines.
Elijah Baley found himself in the shade of the tree and muttered to himself, “I knew it. I’m sweating.”
Mouldering bone crumbled beneath their boots as Lord Mardus and Vagul Ashnazai lowered themselves down into the tiny chamber beneath the earthen mound.
The problem, as I see it, is an information gap.
I returned from the City about three o'clock on that May afternoon pretty well disgusted with life.
Lije Baley had just reached his desk when he became aware of R. Sammy watching him expectantly.
When a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean’s Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country.
In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the Army
The autumn of 18—was as uncomfortable and triste a season as I have ever known; commerce and crops alike looked down—respectable prophets of Tory tendencies shook their heads with redoubled vigor and gloomy but intense satisfaction at the near approach of that total ruin they had so often foretold; and the unfortunate devils of starving mechanics, unable to solve the problem of depression, were raising shindies by way of relieving their minds.
I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why.
Current theories on the creation of the Universe state that, if it was created at all and didn't just start, as it were, unofficially, it came into being between ten and twenty thousand million years ago.
The rustic portion of the congregation shouted the familiar hymn with laborious goodwill, overpowering the more cultivated voices that rose from the chancel and the front pews—almost defeating the harsh notes wrung from the harmonium by the village schoolmistress, who also led the singing in a piercing key, supported raucously by her pupils gathered about the unmusical instrument.
Cautious investigators will hesitate to challenge the common belief that Robert Blake was killed by lightning, or by some profound nervous shock derived from an electrical discharge.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet's lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income.
For many years it was my good fortune to witness, chronicle, and in some instances to assist my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, in a number of the cases which were submitted to him in his unique capacity as a consulting detective.
In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring.
Once upon a time there were two little Japanese dolls whose names were Miss Happiness and Miss Flower.
The family of Dashwood had been long settled in Sussex.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
I have been blessed, as some would say, with the great gift of observation.
The time traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.
It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to shew by this statement that I am not his murderer.
The Garden Committee had met to discuss the earth; not the whole earth, the terrestrial globe, but the bit of it that had been stolen from the Gardens in the Square.
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
Bartholomew Lampion was blinded at the age of three, when surgeons reluctantly removed his eyes to save him from a fast-spreading cancer, but although eyeless, Barty regained his sight when he was thirteen.
I don't know if my story is grand enough to be a tragedy, although a lot of shitty stuff did happen.
The hammerhead's mouth was jagged as a knife wound.
Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were aroused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt, as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century – and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed – this was the page on which his favourite volume always opened:
I returned from the City about three o’clock on that May afternoon pretty well disgusted with life.
About thirty years ago Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet's lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income.
No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine.
My name is Luke Wakefield, and I am a failure.
Right here and now, as an old friend used to say, we are in the fluid present, where clear-sightedness never guarantees perfect vision.
Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar.
This is how Yuli, son of Alehaw, came to a place called Oldorando, where his descendants flourished in the better days that were to come.
A hesitant cat is at the door.
Almost everyone thought the man and the boy were father and son.
As I left the Kenya Beanstalk capsule he was right on my heels.
Waves climbed the slope of the beach, fell back, and came again.
Mornings he sings on the toilet.
"We need you to kill a man."
You see, I had this space suit.
Luterin had recovered.
I woke up in bed with a man and a cat.
Carl Laurids is born at Morkhoj one New Year's Eve - it has been impossible to discover who his parents were - and adopted, not long afterward, by the estate steward.
The morning after noted child prodigy Colin Singleton graduated from high school and got dumped for the nineteenth time by a girl named Katherine, he took a bath.
No one – least of all Dr Litchfield – came right out and told Ralph Roberts that his wife was going to die, but there came a time when Ralph understood without needing to be told.
After so much time has passed, I feel obliged to write this down.
The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
"I once played Romeo and Juliet as a one-man show," I said.
In years gone, women and men are cutting a line across the dirtland and dragging history with them.
"In five years, the penis will be obsolete," said the salesman.
I have four candles and one evening in which to write this account.
The week before I left my family and Florida and the rest of my minor life to go to boarding school in Alabama, my mother insisted on throwing me a going-away party.
At almost one o'clock I entered the lobby of the building where I worked and turned toward the escalators, carrying a black Penguin paperback and a small white CVS bag, its receipt stapled over the top.
The history of the Galaxy has got a little muddled, for a number of reasons: partly because those who are trying to keep track of it have got a little muddled, but also because some very muddling things have been happening anyway.
His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a country boy who had never seen Trantor before.
Mars sucks.
The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door.
Six North Africans were playing boules beneath Flaubert's statue.
There seemed to be a window in the wall opposite the door, looking out at the landscape beyond the dome.
That evening it was dark early, which was normal for the time of year.
The Galactic Empire was falling.
In Africa, you want more, I think.
Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.
You don't know about me without you have read a book called "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," but that ain't no matter. 
The First Galactic Empire had endured for tens of thousands of years.
The man from Earth came to a decision.
Writer is pretty much tempted to quit writing.
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.
Roving has always been, and still is, my ruling passion, the joy of my heart, the very sunshine of my existence.
We ran like young wild furies, where angels feared to tread.
Horihor Ray was a Brahmin.
A Chancery judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a company of some hundred and fifty men and women not labouring under any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, though the shining subject of much popular prejudice (at which point I thought the judge's eye had a cast in my direction), was almost immaculate
I have a story to tell you.
The day they cut Mrs McKechnie, not much else happened in West Byfleet
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.
When I was nine years old, I hid under a table and heard my sister kill a king.
I had been making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles the day we heard my brother had escaped.
My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.
Behavioral Science, the FBI section that deals with serial murder, is on the bottom floor of the Academy building at Quantico, half-buried in the earth.
For upwards of half an hour now they had watched the runner on the road below the single watchtower of the monastery.
The hall was cold, damp yet still redolent of the dry, dusty scents of the desert.
Once upon a time we had a love affair with fire, the president of the United States thought as the match that he’d just struck to light his pipe flared beneath his fingers.
A child wants to see.
“We should start back,” Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them.
When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold.
Will Graham sat Crawford down at a picnic table between the house and the ocean and gave him a glass of iced tea.
In the corner of a first-class smoking carriage, Mr. Justice Wargrave, lately retired from the bench, puffed at a cigar and ran an interested eye through the political news in the Times.
Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood.
It was love at first sight.
It was the best of terms, it was the worst of terms.
Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors?
Autumn had come too swiftly.
So Mom got the postcard today.
How does one describe Artemis Fowl?
It was full springtime, with promise of the richest summer the farm had ever seen.
I know I'm not an ordinary ten-year-old kid.
Welcome to the beautiful Sinclair family.
A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories.
Not every king would care to start his reign with the wholesale massacre of children.
Lance tapped the beat of A Chorus Line's "What I Did for Love" on Allie's bedroom door.
It's always darkest before the dawn.
"Chirrut Imwe," Silvanie Phest said.
Pawnshops in Night Vale work like this.
There was a wall.
Shadow had done three years in prison.
Were the tower to be laid down across the plain of Shinar, it would be two days' journey to walk from one end to the other.
I awoke one morning with the usual perplexity of mind which accompanies the return of consciousness.
Two hours before dawn I sat in the peeling kitchen and smoked one of Sarah’s cigarettes, listening to the maelstrom and waiting. 
My father was a king and the song of kings.
As Roy Dillon stumbled out of the shop his face was a sickish green, and each breath he drew was an incredible agony.
In a hole in the ground their lived a hobbit
There's this totally false map of the human tongue.
The Rails were called Old Toothless for a reason
I’m staring at the insurance man and he’s staring at me, two cold gray eyes behind old-fashioned tortoiseshell frames, and I’m having this awful and inspiring feeling, like holy moly this is real, and I don’t know if I’m ready, I really don’t.
He woke up to the challenge of a mountain sun blaring through thin white curtains.
It has been said that every great man deserves a biographer.
She got to the parking lot earlier than usual.
The monster's name was Izumrud, the great worm, and there were those who claimed he had made the tunnels beneath Ravka.
Some things just aren't meant to go together.
I was lost, it was already dusk, I had been driving for hours and was practically out of petrol.
It rained toads the day the White Council came to town.
The boy and the girl had once dreamed of ships, long ago, before they'd ever seen the True Sea.
On the whole, we're a murderous race.
Sucking weak coffee through a hole in the plastic lid of a red and green styrofoam cup, Sera spots a place to sit down.
Christopher Pennant had passed through a crisis of faith.
Start with a blank surface.
The servants called them malenchki, little ghosts, because they were the smallest and the youngest, and because they haunted the Duke's house like giggling phantoms, darting in and out of rooms, hiding in the cupboards to eavesdrop, sneaking into the kitchen to steal the last of the summer peaches.
That venerable fairytale of the Miller’s daughter and the Dwarf who helped her spin straw into gold has a happy ending in the popular version.
Joost had two problems: the moon and his mustache.
Retvenko leaned against the bar and tucked his nose into his dirty shot glass.
It was the chill before dawn that woke him, and the snuffling and stamping of the great bull in its stall.
I am an old man now, but I was already past my prime when Arthur was crowned King.
Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she'd been told that she would kill her true love.
"Merlin is dead."
A secret is a strange thing.
As I left the railway station at Worchester and set out on the three-mile walk to Ransom's cottage, I reflected that no one on that platform could possibly guess the truth about the man I was going to visit.
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.
The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault.
Would it ever have happened at all if Trustee Day had not fallen on the 30th of April—which is May Eve, as everybody knows?
Persephone stood on the bare mountaintop, her ruffled ivory dress whipping around her legs, her masses of white-blond curls streaming behind her.
My name is Robinette Broadhead, in spite of which I am male.
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.
Richard Gansey III had forgotten how many times he had been told he was destined for greatness.
It started when David came in from the lawn absolutely furious. 
Charon, the Ferryman of renown, was cruising slowly along the Styx one pleasant Friday morning not long ago, and as he paddled idly on he chuckled mildly to himself as he thought of the monopoly in ferriage which in the course of years he had managed to build up.
It had been a bad day from the start.
Garp's mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theater.
There was a skull on Tony's desk when he got to work.
The House-boat of the Associated Shades, formerly located upon the River Styx, as the reader may possibly remember, had been torn from its moorings and navigated out into unknown seas by that vengeful pirate Captain Kidd, aided and abetted by some of the most ruffianly inhabitants of Hades.
One in fire, two in blood.
If we could only get used to the idea that ghosts are perfectly harmless creatures, who are powerless to affect our well-being unless we assist them by giving way to our fears, we should enjoy the supernatural exceedingly, it seems to me.
“Tonight we’re going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.”
For some weeks after the happy event which transformed the popular Mrs. Smithers into the charming Mrs. John Pedagog all went well at that lady's select home for single gentlemen.
Came the time when the two travelers knew night would catch them, and shelter must be found.
It was before the Idiot's marriage, and in the days when he was nothing more than a plain boarder in Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog's High-class Home for Single Gentlemen, that he put what the School-master termed his "alleged mind" on plans for the amelioration of the condition of the civilized.
This is a story about memory.
The heat came with the devil.
There are moments of supreme embarrassment in the lives of persons given to veracity,—indeed it has been my own unusual experience in life that the truth well stuck to is twice as hard a proposition as a lie so obvious that no one is deceived by it at the outset. 
I'd been waiting for the vampire for years when he walked into the bar.
The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn't sure it was worth all the effort.
There was a man and he had eight sons.
Miss Elizabeth Mapp might have been forty, and she had taken advantage of this opportunity by being just a year or two older.
The wind howled.
This volume provides a compilation of descriptive taxonomy and palaeobiology of North American Teriary mammals. 
In the beginning, it was dark. 
This is where the dragons went.
I can’t see the sun right now; there’s an angel in the way.
Should I have taken the false teeth?
My godmother lived in a handsome house in the clean and ancient town of Bretton.
Now consider the tortoise and the eagle.
Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table.
Landscapes viewed from afar have a timeless quality that is soothing to the human spirit. 
The Dutch of Grand Fenwick lies in a precipitous fold of the northern Alps and embraces in its tumbling landscape portions of three valleys, a river, one complete mountain with an elevation of two thousand feet and a castle.
Everything starts somewhere, though many physicists disagree.
Dear Cousin Tassie, Thank you for the lovely postcards.
THERE were no two horses to be seen winding along the base of a precipitous hill; and there were no dark-looking riders on those horses which[Pg 12] were not to be seen; and it wasn't at the close of a dusky autumn evening; and the setting sun didn't gild, with his departing rays, the steep summit of the mountain tops; and the gloomy cry of the owl was not to be heard from the depths of a neighboring forest—first, because there wasn't any neighboring forest, and, second, because the owl was in better business, having, some hours before, gone to bed, it now being broad daylight.
“I suppose that your first serious discovery, Dr. Pilman, should be considered what is now called the Pilman Radiant?”
Polly Nichols, a Whitechapel whore, was profoundly grateful to gin.
The play — for which Briony had designed the posters, programs and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crêpe paper — was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch.
Our son, Thomas Jefferson, and his wife, Maggie, have been wadin’ through a sea of trouble.
Lily Walker could smell a copper a mile away.
Until he was almost ten the name stuck to him.
I remember the first time the thought struck me. 
It was nine-thirty on Christmas Eve.
Did all English girls make love like a man?
… cannot take responsibility for items damaged in transit.
You ask for my name, the real one, and I cannot tell.
They lay in the dark, guarding. 
Dere Mable:   I guess you thought I was dead.
It was a morning in the middle of April, and the Jackson family were consequently breakfasting in comparative silence. 
Whenever my mother talks to me, she begins the conversation as if we were already in the middle of an argument.
Vertebrates are all the animals with backbones, the fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. 
The man in the street would not have known it, but a great crisis was imminent in New York journalism.
Bracken was born on an April night in a warm dark burrow deep in the historic system of Duncton Wood, six moleyears after Rebecca.
When a seed-merchant of cautious disposition and an eye to the main chance receives from an eminent firm of jam-manufacturers an extremely large order for clover-seed, his emotions are mixed.
Considering our present advanced state of culture, and how the Torch of Science has now been brandished and borne about, with more or less effect, for five thousand years and upwards; how, in these times especially, not only the Torch still burns, and perhaps more fiercely than ever, but innumerable Rushlights, and Sulphur-matches, kindled thereat, are also glancing in every direction, so that not the smallest cranny or dog-hole in Nature or Art can remain unilluminated,—it might strike the reflective mind with some surprise that hitherto little or nothing of a fundamental character, whether in the way of Philosophy or History, has been written on the subject of Clothes.
“My aunt will be down presently, Mr. Nuttel,” said a very self-possessed young lady of fifteen; “in the meantime you must try and put up with me.”
The farmhouse kitchen probably stood where it did as a matter of accident or haphazard choice; yet its situation might have been planned by a master-strategist in farmhouse architecture.
Mr Salteena was an elderly man of 42 and was fond of asking peaple to stay with him.
Hello, Nik. 
During the daylight hours of several autumn Saturdays there had been severe outbreaks of cavalry in the Schofield neighbourhood.
Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone.
"And what," asked the enlisting officer, regarding me as if I had insulted him, his family and his live stock, "leads you to believe that you are remotely qualified to join the Navy?"
Researcher Martha Genicon, through a series of events too ludicrous to go into here, found herself possessed of amazing powers, and now Fights a never ending battle against crime and sexual frustration as...
By the time dåddy gets his tåil unknøtted, åll the tunnels between here ånd the pålåce will håve cøllåpsed!
They were waiting for the end of the world.
The Tepoktan student, whose blue robe in George Kinton's opinion clashed with the dull purple of his scales, twiddled a three-clawed hand for attention.
So long Pop; I’m off to check my tiger trap!
Rob McKenna was a miserable bastard and he knew it because he'd had a lot of people point it out to him over the years and he saw no reason to disagree with them except the obvious one which was that he liked disagreeing with people, particularly people he disliked, which included, at the last count, everybody.
The sound of the Gion Shōja bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the color of the sāla flowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must decline. The proud do not endure, they are like a dream on a spring night; the mighty fall at last, they are as dust before the wind. 
Since that formidable personage, Sir Christopher Clarke, square built, square jawed, iron of fist and will, with fierce little eyes that gleamed as though they sought whom they might devour next, was by far the most important and influential client of Messrs Marsden, Carsley and Marsden, Lincoln's Inn, the well-known and long-established firm of solicitors, it is perhaps no matter for surprise that a certain nervousness, or even more than that, was apparent in the manner of the senior partner of the firm as he rose to greet him.
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
Miss Minerva Winterslip was a Bostonian of good standing, and long past the romantic age.
Now this isn't a Heterodyne story like your mama tells you when she tucks you in at night.
Rex Bader took down two bottles from the medicine cabinet in his efficiency bath and shook out one pill and one capsule.
Well, welcome home Mrs. Booker.
Szeth-son-son-Vallano, Truthless of Shinovar, wore white on the day he was to kill a king.
Ho!
The hammer banged reveille on the rail outside camp HQ at five o’clock as always.
It all started, as so many things these days do, because she needed a job.
Once upon a time there lived a fox spirit with nine tails.
Once, on a cedar-shingles cottage on a bluff by the sea, there lived a lonely old man.
I would never have sold him the car in the first place if I’d known what he was going to do with it.
Once upon a time, there was a great pirate.
I was ever of opinion, that the honest man who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who continued single and only talked of population.
That day the human race the terror of being dominated by 'them,' and the shame of being held captive in a birdcage. 
This is a good room.
The rumbling and tremors continue!
I’m smoking and looking out of my office window while I listen to some guy, some manager, crapping away on the speakerphone.
I feel it here.
The elderly passenger sitting on the north-window side of that inexorably moving railway coach, next to an empty seat and facing two empty ones, was none other than Professor Timothy Pnin.
Aside from the low droning noise it was quiet in this section of the factory.
In the afternoons it was the custom of Miss Jane Marple to unfold her second newspaper.
It was a clean sweep for October - the fourth Monday in a row that Angelica Lorenzo y Lopez wanted to tell her boss to grease his head and go pearl diving for hemorrhoids.
Ye wake in a corner and stay there hoping yer body will disappear, the thoughts smothering ye; these thoughts; but ye want to remember and face up to things, just something keeps ye from doing it, why can ye no do it; the words filling yer head: then the other words; there’s something wrong; there’s something wrong; there’s something far far wrong; ye’re no a good man, ye’re just no a good man.
Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.
As Karl Rossman, a poor boy of sixteen who had been packed off to America by his parents because a servant girl had seduced him and got herself with child by him, stood on the liner slowly entering the harbour of New York, a sudden burst of sunshine seemed to illumine the Statue of Liberty, so that he saw it in a new light, although he had sighted it long before.
Cherry Tree Lane is a nice London street.
It was late in the evening when K. arrived.
Dr. Thomas Neill looked over the file of his newest patient. 
Going into the mountains had never been easy
We four sisters are sitting in the courtyard at dusk in what passes for peace in our house.
The dim shadows were kinder to the theater’s dilapidation.
Frogs fall out of my mouth when I talk.
For the past five years, Ceony had wanted to be a Smelter.
Makeisha has always been able to bend the fourth dimension, though no one believes her.
Two o'clock was missing.
This cold could kill me, but it’s no worse than the memories.
What the hell is up with the moon?
Today is a day like any other day.
Vlad no longer shows his wife his sharp teeth.
There was something cathartic about wielding a crowbar.
On a Friday after jumah prayers, under the sturdy old oak in their yard, they came together as a family for the last time.
Irene passed the mop across the stone floor in smooth, careful strokes, idly admiring the gleam of wet flagstones in the lantern-light.
“It’s not like I’d be selling my own liver.”
"We're a little disappointed," said Saint Peter.
The redwoods whispered overhead in the warm summer breeze as Lucy Goodwin gathered another handful of fallen branches for the camp fire.
In the dimness where night gives way to dawn, two fey monarchs met in the center of an oak-encircled clearing.
Me and Case met when someone slammed his head against my door, so hard I heard it with my earphones in and my Game Boy cranked up loud.
The space/time coordinate system they used has no relationship to Earth, our sun, the Milky Way, or any other point of reference we could use to find our way around, and in any coordinate system we use, they're so far off the edge of the chart that nobody has ever contemplated going there, even with the proton drive.
Growing up, it never occurred to me that everyone didn’t have a bonedrake mother, or, in the early days, that there was anyone else in the world.
Emmett Till, sure, I remember.
My name is Jacky Faber and in London I was born, but, no, I wasn't born with that name.
After a year in San Francisco, my legs grew strong again.
Key’s favorite time of day is sunset, her least is sunrise.
The deck of the French ship was slippery with blood, heaving in the choppy sea; a stroke might as easily bring down the man making it as the intended target.
It was raining when Amarelle Parathis went out just after sunset to find a drink, and there was strange magic in the rain.
"Your grandfather," said Vanyel's brawny, fifteen-year-old cousin Radevel, "was crazy."
“This is Jasmine,” she says.
As dawn approached, the snow outside Mara’s window slowed, spiky white stars melting into streaks on the pane.
There is one mirror in my house.
As I left the railway station at Worchester and set out on the three-mile walk to Ransom's cottage, I reflected that no one on that platform could possibly guess the truth about the man I was going to visit.
PEOPLE WHO MOVE TO NEW YORK always make the same mistake.
I powered up the transporter and said a silent prayer.
Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife.
Reconquista was cleaning the counter with his good hand when the double doors swung open. 
Rani Trader pushed through the throngs in front of the cathedral, sparing only the Pilgrims' dusty robes from her sharp-elbowed thrusts.
Quinn had two swords.
The girls were never present for the entrance interviews.
A hotel room in Sao Paulo is the third worst place in the world in which to go into cardiac arrest.
Out of the corner of his eye, Special Agent Gabriel Ruiz watched his new partner with serious trepidation.
Only mud came up from the wells at Ajeric, no water.
THE WORDS THAT TWANGED and thrummed their way to Nth said, New food coming, and he stirred, resettling his legs to take the measure of the message: how far, what direction, who originated it.
I shut the door of the old Victorian behind me, and the stuffy atmosphere closed in: overheated, dry, and redolent of mothballs. 
“I want you to kill my stepdad.”
Relina Gyre picked up a pen and wondered how much she valued her neck.
It took fifteen long years for Prince Lionus to return from exile, and when he did, it was at the head of an army a hundred thousand strong.
This is where the dragons went.
My name is Louis Williamson.
It was an age of tragic mistakes.
Now that the moon is near to full, the branch of an apple tree casts its nighttime shadow in through the high window across the wall beside my bed.
Death was on the cards that day, but would it be ours or the panthers?
They say that the statue of Our Lady of the Sorrows wept tears of blood the day the sickness came to Santa Olivia.
By day, the Nicollet Mall winds through Minneapolis like a paved canal.
You want to know what good is?
Lily Proctor was not asleep, she wasn't unconscious or dreaming, nor had she accidentally slipped into another universe.
You are food.
Sandy Blunt straightened the bottles of the Amazingly Miraculous Manticore's Youthifying Tonic on the shelf, but her thoughts were of creamy skin, large blue eyes, and moist red lips.
Riannon of Gast felt the first pain knifing down her chest as she craned her neck to see the top of the castle keep through the narrow eye slits of her helm.
There was a Master come unto the earth, born in the holy land of Indiana, raised in the mystical hills east of Fort Wayne.
Kaye took another drag on her cigarette and dropped it into her mother's beer bottle.
Maia woke with his cousin's cold fingers digging into his shoulder.
I emerge from the simulation with a yell.
The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset.
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.
I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen.
These tales concern the doing of things recognized as impossible to do; impossible to believe; and, as the weary reader may well cry aloud, impossible to read about.
Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians.
"Where is he?"
"Too many!" James shouted, and slammed the door behind him.
Willow Crest Unified School District spared no expense celebrating the retirement of a beloved principle.
Only one newspaper carried the story in detail, under the headline: Treasures stolen from museum.
"Are you awake, Will?"
Katherine sat by the fire and sewed.
Will said, turning a page, "He liked woad."
This story, esteemed reader, took place in ancient times.
When our dragon declared war on Indiana, I knew it was going to be a bad day.
About a year before the time traveling began, before I lost Wayne and found Lena, Wayne DeMint stumbled into my bar for the first time.
Arry opened the door to call the cats.
There was a new house next door to Gentian's.
He's gone,' said Petr in a choked whisper.
Edward Fairchild, Prince of the Enchanted Forest, Lord of the Desert's Edge, Friend to the Unicorns, and King of the Secret Country, wished he were somewhere else.
Summer swept on faster, as it always did, than you expected.
The year Janet started at Blackstock College, the Office of Residential Life had spent the summer removing from all the dormitories the old wooden bookcases that, once filled with books, fell over unless wedged.
Marley was dead, to begin with.
Fifty thousand people had come to the Suffolk Air show on the east coast of England.
Dear Cousin Tassie, Thank you for the lovely postcards.
In their ruddy jackets of leather that reached to their knees the men of Erl appeared before their lord, the stately white-haired man in his long red room.
It began one day in summer about thirty years ago, and it happened to four children.
It happened just the other day, to a boy named Roger.
Lesson learned: if you take a Valkyrie out for coffee, you'll get stuck with a check and a dead body.
It was Martha who saw the lake first.
The house and the garden were waiting.
It was a crisp, sunny October afternoon and Benjamin, Thomas and Melinda Potter were visiting the Bramblewood Zoo.
I walk to the bus station by myself.
It begins, as most things begin, with a song.
At the hour of sunset, on a hot spring day, two citizens appeared in the Patriarch's Ponds Park.
I'm going to die tomorrow morning.
There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.
The night before he went to London, Richard Mayhew was not enjoying himself.
I wore a black suit and a white shirt, a black tie and black shoes, all polished and shiny: clothes that normally would make me feel uncomfortable, as if I were in a stolen uniform, or pretending to be an adult.
When I was a little girl, my mother would spend long afternoons telling me old folktales.
There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart's Desire.
I have had the same nightmare for the past month.
"By God!"
Many years ago, when he was ten, her father had ridden a big yellow bus to the planetarium.
There are children whose best friends have two legs, and there are children whose best friends have four, or a thousand, or none at all.
The Wilkinson family became ghosts quite suddenly during the Second World War when a bomb fell on their house.
There are reasons I hate to drive fast.
Kit had only recently found out what a flail was, and now there was a rack of them hanging over his head, shiny and sharp and deadly.
I rise to my feet when he lets me.
Robert was tired of dreaming.
The evening before the start of fifth grade, Leon Zeisel was feeling unusually chipper.
The night before the start of fourth grade, Leon Zeisel was on pins and needles.
At the time I first realized I might be fictional, my weekdays were spent at a publicly funded institution on the north side of Indianapolis called White River High School, where I was required to eat lunch at a particular time - between 12:37 P.M. and 1:14 P.M. - by forces so much larger than myself that I couldn't even begin to identify them.
Mickey Cray had been out of work ever since a dead iguana fell from a palm tree and hit him on the head.
You do not enter a race to lose.
It was the start of the Summer of the Late Rose.
Hushflowers always bloomed when the night was longest.
This one was different.
I duck into the parking garage, hoping to escape.
I dreamt that I heard Mr Punch laughing gleefully by my ear, but when I woke I realised it was my phone.
She felt his breath.
Once upon a time, a girl named September had a secret.
The night was rank with the smell of man.
I was just passing the Hoover Centre when I head Mr Punch scream his rage behind me.
At twenty-three minutes past eleven Robert Weil drove his 53 registered Volvo V70 across the bridge that links Pease Pottage, the improbably named English village, with Pease Pottage, the motorway service station.
On the 20th of August, 1672, the city of the Hague, always so lively, so neat, and so trim, that one might believe every day to be Sunday; with its shady park, with its tall trees, spreading over its Gothic houses; with its canals like large mirrors, in which its steeples and its almost Eastern cupolas are reflected; the city of the Hague, the capital of the seven United Provinces, was swelling in all its arteries with a black and red stream of hurried, panting, and restless citizens, who, with their knives in their girdles, muskets on their shoulders, or sticks in their hands, were pushing on to the Buitenhof, a terrible prison, the grated windows of which are still shown, where, on the charge of attempted murder, preferred against him by the surgeon Tyckelaer, Cornelius De Witte, the brother of the Grand Pensionary of Holland, was confined.
Back in the summer I'd made the mistake of telling my mum what I did for a living.
The first outcry of the morning was lost in a Manhattan mix of distant sirens, barking dogs and loud music from a car rolling by outside the park.
The bells of St. Mark's were ringing changes up the mountain when Bud skated over to the mod parlor to upgrade his skull gun.
Master was a little crazy; he had spent too many years reading books overseas, talked to himself in his office, did not always return greetings, and had too much hair.
"Fayina, who's got the schedule for the electrical classes?"
The house was named "The Cave".
It was Napoleon who had such a passion for chicken that he kept his chefs working around the clock.
We ascended towards the light, five floors up, and split up into thirteen rows facing the god who unlocks the gate of morning.
Darkness, like the darkness after birth, darkness all around.
Describe, using diagrams where appropriate, the exact circumstances leading to your death.'
When I was quite small i would sometime dream of a city - which was strange because it began before i even knew what a city was.
The sea is full of saints.
IN THE Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I joined the militia, I saw an Italian militiaman standing in front of the officers’ table.
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.
My name is Odd Thomas, though in this age when fame is the altarat which most people worship, I'm not sure why you should care who I am or that I exist.
Waking, I heard a warm wind strumming the loose screen at the open window, and I thought Stormy, but it was not.
Embraced by stone, steeped in silence, I sat in the high window as the third day of the week surrendered to the fourth.
It's only life; we all get through it.
Near the sunset of my second full day as a guest in Roseland, crossing the immense land between the main house and the eucalyptus grove, I halted and pivoted, warned by instinct.
Before dawn, I woke in darkness to the ringing of a little bell, the thimble-size bell that I wore on a chain around my neck: three bursts of silvery sound, a brief silence after each.
Alone in the vastness of the Mohave, at two o'clock in the morning, racing along at seventy miles per hour, I felt safe and believed that any terror might await me was many miles ahead.
Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.
Will tugged at his mother's hand and said, "Come on, come on..."
In a valley shaded with rhododendrons, close to the snow line, where a stream milky with meltwater splashed and where doves and linnets flew among the immense pines, lay a cave, half hidden by the crag above and the stiff heavy leaves that clustered below.
I suppose this bloody mess might partly be my fault.
When the spring wind returned that year, we shook hands with an old foe.
“So now get up.”
The night Effia Otcher was born into the musky heat of Fanteland, a fire raged through the woods just outside her father’s compound
I had my recurring dream last night
The close observers of vegetable nature have remarked, that when a new graft is taken from an aged tree, it possesses indeed in exterior form the appearance of a youthful shoot, but has in fact attained to the same state of maturity, or even decay, which has been reached by the parent stem.
William, the Conqueror of England, was, or supposed himself to be, the father of a certain William Peveril, who attended him to the battle of Hastings, and there distinguished himself
The course of four centuries has wellnigh elapsed since the series of events which are related in the following chapters took place on the Continent
He - for there could be no doubt about 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.
The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.
Strange not to know you're alive or even that you're about to die.
The First Time Caesar approached Cora about running north, she said no.
Isma was going to miss her flight
The body lay naked and facedown, a deathly gray, spatters of blood staining the snow around it.
In that pleasant district of merry England which is watered by the river Don, there extended in ancient times a large forest, covering the greater part of the beautiful hills and valleys which lie between Sheffield and the pleasant town of Doncaster
The latter part of the fifteenth century prepared a train of future events that ended by raising France to that state of formidable power which has ever since been from time to time the principal object of jealousy to the other European nations
The burning sun of Syria had not yet attained its highest point in the horizon, when a knight of the Red Cross, who had left his distant northern home and joined the host of the Crusaders in Palestine, was pacing slowly along the sandy deserts which lie in the vicinity of the Dead Sea, or, as it is called, the Lake Asphaltites, where the waves of the Jordan pour themselves into an inland sea, from which there is no discharge of waters.
In the latter days of July in the year 185-, a most important question was for ten days hourly asked in the cathedral city of Barchester, and answered every hour in various ways--Who was to be the new Bishop?
Before the reader is introduced to the modest country medical practitioner who is to be the chief personage of the following tale, it will be well that he should be made acquainted with some particulars as to the locality in which, and the neighbours among whom, our doctor followed his profession
When young Mark Robarts was leaving college, his father might well declare that all men began to say all good things to him, and to extol his fortune in that he had a son blessed with so excellent a disposition.
Whether or no, she, whom you are to forgive, if you can, did or did not belong to the Upper Ten Thousand of this our English world, I am not prepared to say with any strength of affirmation.
 wonder whether the novel-reading world--that part of it, at least, which may honour my pages-will be offended if I lay the plot of this story in Ireland!
The Drenai herald waited nervously outside the great doors of the throne room, flanked by two Nadir guards who stared ahead, slanted eyes fixed on the bronze eagle emblazoned on the dark wood.
In the days of the first Phoenix King, Aenarion the Defender founded the realm of Nagarythe in the harsh north of Ulthuan.
Capturing... It is a law inflexible, that whatever circumstances fail to destroy a species only serve to enhance it further.
None knew at the time that the greatest saviour of the elvss would also be their doom.
During the darkest years of Ulthuan, the two greatest elves to have lived were at the forefront of the war against the daemons of Chaos.
The smell of old death was heavy in the air.
The air was filled with swirling grey dust, whipped up into a storm by a wind that shrieked across the hard black granite of the tower.
Monday morning and there's one less donut than there should be.
The chamber hummed and vibrated with energy that coursed along the thick cables snaking across the low ceiling.
I always get the shakes before a drop.
Despite the darkness, the pressure on every centimeter of skin, and the smooth, flat plastic in front of her nose, Adda Karpe was NOT locked in a coffin in deep space.
The Orcs came down out of the World's Edge Mountains into Ostermark like a green tide, sweeping villages and towns before them in a cascade of flame and pillage.
Darkness clung to the corroding bulkheads, thick and heavy with menace.
Robert Gladstone approached the ancient lead coffin that occupied the centre of his wine cellar, the night’s sacrifice clutched to his chest and the straight razor heavy in his plump hand.
The door had been kicked in.
The door had been kicked in.
The ride's a little bumpy on the famous Road of Skulls.
Tell me, what is happiness?
Shadow had done three years in prison.
They're all dead now.
Few in the town agreed on when the battle began.
All was quiet.
I'm going to die.
It was a blindingly sunny morning in May, and Joe Molinari was out for a walk with Martha, his smart and funny dog, and Julie, his adorable nine-month-old baby girl.
Two hours before dawn I sat in the peeling kitchen and smoked one of Sarah's cigarettes, listening to the maelstrom and waiting.
Ironically, since the attacks, the sunsets have been glorious.
It's ten to two in the afternoon and I've been waiting for my little sister, Vivi, to arrive since one thirty. Finally, she's coming home.
The ship didn't even have a name.
The pain is everywhere.
With its two fighting claws held forward like a wrestler's arms the big pandinus scorpion emerged with a dry rustle from the finger-sized hole under the rock.
Alone on the timeless beach, Joséphine Pellegrini finds herself disappointed by the end of the world.
Bones rubbed softly together within tattered scraps of armour as the skeletal sentries shifted aside their spears.
At certain moments in life, reflection is mandatory.
The pungent smell of smouldering warpstone wafted through the blankened chamber, the corrupt fume slithering into every nook and cranny, oozing between the crumbling bricks, burning inti beams of oak and ash, discolouring glass and tarnishing bronze.
A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.
Gunther Soreson had never been so scared in his life.
Swooping whorls of colour lit the night sky with their vibrant shades.
Marx has completely changed the way I view the world', declared the Pallières boy this morning, although ordinarily he says nary a word to me.
Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy.
This one might be trouble.
When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.
Clarity. That would have been good.
The prophet and the murderess stood on the battlements of the dead citadel, weapons in their hands.
"I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one."
A little more than one hundred days into the fortieth year of her confinement, Dajeil Gelian was visited in her lonely ship that was her home.
It was a dark and stormy night.
When shall we three meet again?  In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
The wintry sky was blemished by black stains that whirled and circled high overhead, their ugly squawks raining down upon the ears of the men below.
Sophie Le Patourel was reading aloud to her two daughters from the Book of Ruth, as they lay upon their backboards digesting their dinners and improving their deportment.
Then, it was as though everything was stripped away: sensation, memory, self, even the notion of existence that underlines reality - all seemed to have vanished utterly, their passing marked only by the realisation that they had disappeared, before that too ceased to have any meaning, and for an indefinite, indefinite instant, that was only the awareness of something; something that possessed no mind, no purpose and no thought, except the knowledge that it was.
Keith, the boy in rumpled shorts and shirt, did not know he was being watched as he entered room 215 of the Mountain View Inn.
All around the buildings burned.
The last drops of the thundershower had hardly ceased falling when the Pedestrian stuffed his map into his pocket, settled his pack more comfortably on his tired shoulders, and stepped out from the shelter of a large chestnut-tree into the middle of the road.
The trees were laced with snow and the forest lay waiting below him like a reluctant bride.
A tall, slim girl, 'half-past sixteen', with serious grey eyes and hair which her friends called Auburn, had sat down on the broad red sandstone doorstep of a Prince Edward Island farmhouse one ripe afternoon in August, firmly resolved to construe so many lines of Virgil.
The house was on Dresden Avenue in the Oal Knoll section of Pasadena, a big solid cool-looking house with burgundy brick walls, a terra-cotta tile roof, and a white stone trim.
Only five remained.
It was a curse, to be a god's son.
The warrior turned his helm over in his hands.
The old man was dying an ugly death and for all their skill and faith there was nothing either the chirugeon or the priest could do to prevent it.
It was desperate.
The man cast a terrified glance over his shoulder as he ran.
Jack Reacher ordered espresso, double, no peel, no cube, foam cup, no china, and before it arrived at his table he saw a man's life change forever.
People say that knowledge is power.
You spilled my beer,' Gotrek Gurnisson said.
Someone is looking for you, Captain.'
As serious as a heart attack.
London hacked up its lungs and glistened.
There were three watchers, two men and a boy.
I was arrested at Eno's diner.
He rolled onto his front, coughing blood between broken teeth.
A thousand years might pass and it would never losr its fascination.
Long, low strips of silver fog filled the green hollows and ravines of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
As soon as our quarantine flag came down and the last of the barefooted, blue-uniformed policemen of the Bombay Port Health Authority had left the ship, Coelho the Goan came aboard and, luring me with a long beckoning finger into the saloon, whispered, "You have any cheej?"
At first there was silence.
I was lost, it was dusk, I had been driving for hours and was practically out of petrol.
The eyewitness said he didn't actuall see it happen.
Once, I got lost.
The world was dead.
Claude Gueux was a poor workman, living in Paris about eight years ago, with his mistress and child.
It was a way of daring fate. 
My God, Mae thought. It's heaven.
It is almost pleasant, at first, to be falling.
Three hundred and forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago to-day, the Parisians awoke to the sound of all the bells in the triple circuit of the city, the university, and the town ringing a full peal.
Guilty
You'd think it wouldn't bother me now.
The Nurthene uttered some of the usual gibberish before he died.
It’s a rock, Holmes 
It was the day my grandmother exploded.
Bobbi and I first met Melissa at a poetry night in town, where we were performing together.
Tell me about a complicated man.
They gathered at the car park in the hour before dawn and waited to be told what to do.
I move.
That summer I would ride my bike over the bridge, lock it up in front of one of the bars on Orchard Street and drift through the city on foot, recording.
We live ans die for Huron Blackheart!'
Perhaps if you spent more time studying the xenos and less time burning them, Inquisitor Malchankov, you would be better equipped to understand the import of my meaning, sir,' Interrogator Raimus Klute heard his master suggest.
The man was called Calvin Franz and the Helicopter was a bell 222.
Angelica stared at the mirror.
The night before he went to London, Richard Mayhew was not enjoying himself.
Colossus, this is orbital command.'
Tsu'gan screamed as he plummeted from the stone parapet towards the temple floor below.
The twisted, baying creatures came on in a great mass, howling and screaming at the darkening sky.
The deafening silence of carnage after the fact.
It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.
There were four of us.
This sort of guy, the way he jangles his keys, you just know he's sexually frustrated.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
I stood up.
Dear You, The body you are wearing used to be mine.
I will try to be your eyes, Jorge.
One afternoon - it must have been about March 10th - I was having tea at the Café Central on the Egyetem-tér in Budapest.
To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.
The town is dark, night lies upon it, the moon roams over other regions and the stars have closed their golden eyes.
My name is Jake.
Once again I am driving southwest on the great Tokaido Road that runs between Tokyo, the present capital of Japan, and Kyoto, the ancient capital.
Duncan MacKenzie was ten years old when he found the magic number.
Three miles up the river Thames from the centre of Oxford, some distance from where the great colleges of Jordan, Gabrie, Balliol, and two dozen others contended for mastery in the boat races, out where the city was only a collection of towers and spires in the distance over the misty levels of Port Meadow, there stood the priory of Godstow, where the gentle nuns went about their holy business; and on the opposite bank from the priory there was an inn called the Trout.
The way Mama could peel apples!
"Robert," he said, "thank you for coming on time."
The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset.
I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of gods.
As I walk'd through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep; and as I slept, I dreamed a Dream.
"Little man, would you come on?  You keep it up and you're gonna make us late."
That Sam-I-am!
There was a great feeling of anxiety in the air.
Boraz felt incredibly cold.
I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner, of Bremen, who settled first at Hull.
In the minutes before the message that should change the lives of the Montrose family arrived, nothing seemed to indicate that this day could be anything else than a day like any other.
Death below, the unknown above.
There was no wind in the air and no wave on the lake.
A ominous feeling came over Jonathan as he took the shortcut to school.
Serenity entered the mind and hearts of Mantillio Galt.
I hadn't really planned to go out on a Tuesday evening, mainly because I had to be at uni relatively early on Wednesday - had to, because my lecturer was an old fogey who thought himself a drill sergeant, and I had already neglected to attend once, leading to a ten-minute screaming fit.
The sigmarite runeblade gleamed in the soft glow of infinity, as it etched complex patterns upon the air.
It is unseemly to start the telling of a story such as this, without first going into the circumstances that triggered it in the first place.
It was a rainy night, as wet, cold and foggy as the last several weeks had been.
It was the hottest day of the year 1706.
It happened to be a rather large room but for the amout of people that were inside, it was still too small.
There was a plethora of reasons to be on your guard in Vienna's Praterstern train station.
The beautifully crafted casket was made from dark wood with painted ornaments but the most interesting part about it was the engraved symbol from the Baron. 
The reader must begin this book with an act of faith and end it with an act of charity.
On her 23rd birthday, Mary got out of bed around the time the walls started to shake. 
I've seen Steelheart bleed.
This is Ares Launch Control, Jacqueline B. Kennedy Space Center.
Eventually they put Reacher in a car and drove him to a motel a mile away, where the night clerk gave him a room, which had all the features Reacher expected, because he had seen such rooms a thousand times before.
Matt Carse knew he was being followed almost as soon as he left Madam Kan's.
Alicia was irked, not exactly a rare event.
The stench of chlorine was in the air.
When the siege and the assault had ceased at Troy, and the fortress fell in flame to firebrands and ashes, the traitor who the contrivance of treason there fashioned was tried for his treachery, the most true upon earth - it was Aenas the noble and his reknowned kindred who then laid under them lands, and lords became of well-nigh all the wealth in the Western Isles.
About two miles outside of Centerburg where route 56 meets route 56A there lives a boy named Homer.
So.
In the days when the spinning wheels hummed busily in the farmhouse - and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread lace, had their toy spinning wheels of polished oak - there might be seen, in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid undersized men who, by the side of the brawny countryfolk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race.
Living as we do in the closing year of the twentieth century, enjoying the blessings of a social order at once so simple and logical that it seems but the triumph of common sense, it is no doubt difficult for those whose studies have not been largely historical to realize that the present organization of society is, in its completeness, less than a century old.
Five o'clock of a fine summer's morning,' chanted the night-watchman.
Across the night the Ring of Yan arched like a silver bow, shedding the small bright fire-arrows of meteors into the upper air.
You needn't think I'm crazy, Eliot - plenty of others have queerer prejudices than this.
Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies' eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place' it was reputed to be in intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde's Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde's door without decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything she passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
There is nothing more absurd, as I view it, than that conventional association of the homely and the wholesome which seems to pervade the psychology of the multitude.
When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams.
"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.
I have examined maps of the city with the greatest care, yet have never again found the Rue d'Auseil.
There is a similarity, if I may be permitted an excursion into tenuous metaphor, between the feel of a chilly breeze and the feel of a knife's blade, as either is laid across the back of the neck.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Kragar says that life is like an onion, but he doesn't mean the same thing by it that I do.
The family of Dashwood had been long settled in Sussex.
When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country.
Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at the end.
This is the city: Adrilankha, Whitecrest.
It was a pleasant summer morning, so Frances took her bat and her ball, and some chocolate sandwich cookies and went outside.
The sun did not shine.
West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut.
I never really knew Father very well till we moved to the ranch on the Fort Logan - Morrison road, not far from Denver.
Cautious investigators will hesitate to challenge the common belief that Robert Blake was killed by lightning, or by some profound nervous shock derived from an electrical discharge.
The Cycle: Dragon, dzur, and chreotha; athyra, hawk, and phoenix; teckla and jhereg.
It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer.
On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology.
During the winter of 1927-28 officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts report of Innsmouth.
The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.
Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams Walter Gilman did not know.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems like when things are going wrong—your wife is ready to leave you, all of your notions about yourself and the world are getting turned around, everything you trusted is becoming questionable—there's nothing like having someone try to kill you to take your mind off your problems.
I jumped out of bed that morning with one question in my mind - sun or fog?
Miles returned to consciousness with his eyes still closed.
Captain First Rank Marko Ramius of the Soviet Navy was dressed for the Arctic conditions normal to the Northern Fleet submarine base at Polyarnyy.
After twenty two years of nightmare and terror, saved only by a desperate conviction of the mythical source of certain impressions, I am unwilling to vouch for the truth of that which I think I found in Western Australia on the night of July 17-18, 1935.
Ivan's door buzzer sounded at close to Komarran midnight, just when he was unwinding enough from lingering jump lag, his screwed-up diurnal rhythm, and the day's labors to consider sleep.
If, by the grace of God, I should live three years longer, I will be one hundred years old.
Woman, girl, man, and boy sat together, like good companions, around a fire in the woods.
One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it - it was the black kitten's fault entirely.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
It was around the hub of the evening on the planet of Porlumma when Captain Pausert, commercial traveler from the Republic of Nikkeldepain, met the first of the witches of Karres.
Vlad knew almost at once that I was in disguise, because I told him so.
The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do:  once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?"
Not long after I moved with my family to a small town in New Hampshire I happened upon a path that vanished into a wood on the edge of town.
Anything that happens, happens.
This time there would be no witnesses.
No shit, there I was...
Kell wore a very peculiar coat.
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport."
Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.
Aujourd'hui, maman est morte
Imo set out one day to catch some fish, but there was no sea.
The rain poured down on London so hard that it seemed it was dancing spray, every raindrop contending with its fellows for supremacy in the air and waiting to splash down.
It is hard to understand nothing, but the multiverse is full of it.
I've heard it said that manners are more complex in primitive societies—that it is easier to give accidental offense in, for example, the Island kingdoms of Elde or Greenaere, or among the Serioli, or the Jenoine, or the various kingdoms of my own Eastern people, than among the more civilized Dragaerans.
The goblin experience of the world is the cult or perhaps religion of Unggue.
Now consider the tortoise and the eagle.
There was a man and he had eight sons.
It was a nice day.
I like to imagine there were more of us in the beginning.
It was born in the darkness of the Circle Sea; at first just a soft, floating thing, washed back and forth by tide after tide.
Against the stars a turtle passes, carrying four elephants on its shell.
Vili glanced up, turned his head back toward the interior, and said, with no particular inflection, "Klava with honey for Lord Taltos."
You can hear a miracle a long way after dark. 
The bees of Death are big and black, they buzz low and somber, they keep their honey in combs of wax as white as altar candles.
This is the bright candlelit room where the life-timers are stored -- shelf upon shelf of them, squat hourglasses, one for every living person, pouring their fine sand from the future into the past.
Thud... ...that was the sound the heavy club made as it connected with the head.
It was a moonless night, which was good for the purposes of Solid Jackson.
They say the world is flat and supported on the back of four elephants who themselves stand on the back of a giant turtle.
Joost has two problems: the moon and his mustache. 
It was midnight in Ankh-Morpork's Royal Art Museum.
The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn't sure it was worth all the effort.
It has now been a mere two score of years since we had the honor to have our work, Toward Beginning a Survey of Some Events Contributing To the Fall of the Empire, rejected by Lord Tri'ari and Master Vrei of the Institute.
When the storm came, it hit the hills like a hammer.
This is a story about magic and where it goes and perhaps more importantly where it comes from and why, although it doesn't pretend to answer all or any of these questions.
In a distant and secondhand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part...
Upon the first day of autumn, that is, the ninth day of the month of the Vallista in the five hundred and thirty-second year of the reign of His Imperial Majesty, Tortaalik I, of the House of the Phoenix, a messenger arrived at the Imperial Wing of the Palace and begged an audience with the Emperor.
The flotillas of the dead sailed around the world on underwater rivers.
It came crackling over the hills, like an invisible fog.
This is a story about memory.
Why was it, Tiffany Aching wondered, that people liked noise so much?
It was on a Homeday in the early summer of the 156th year of the Interregnum that a traveler entered a small village in the East.
This is where the dragons went.
Some things start before other things.
Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years two months and twelve days.
It was a warm spring night when a fist knocked at the door so hard that the hinges bent.
Corporal Carrot, Ankh-Morpork City Guard (Night Watch), sat down in his nightshirt, took up his pencil, sucked the end for a moment, and then wrote:
The first queen built the Alskad Empire from scorched earth and ash after the goddess Dzallie split the moon and rained fire from the sky. 
On the ground floor of Whitecrest Manor was a wide enclosed terrace, the twin to the open terrace on the other side where the Count and Countess of Whitecrest were accustomed to take their morning klava and watch the ocean.
Through the shredded black clouds a fire moved like a dying star, falling back to earth -- the earth, that is, of the Discworld -- but unlike any star had ever done before, it sometimes managed to steer its fall, sometimes rising, sometimes twisting, but inevitably heading down.
Watch... This is space.
Nothing but stars, scattered across the blackness as though the Creator had smashed the windscreen of his car and hadn't bothered to sweep up the pieces.
The rumor spread through the city like wildfire (which had quite often spread through Ankh-Morpork since its citizens had learned the words "fire insurance").
Now read on... When does it start?
They lay in the dark, guarding.
Polly cut off her hair in front of the mirror, feeling slightly guilty about not feeling very guilty about doing so.
The first time is, nominally, a complete accident.
The wind howled.
They go crashing into the wall like the forces of nature that they are, and the only thing that keeps the wood from cracking is that the full regard of their wrath is on each other.
This is where the gods play games with the lives of men, on a board which is at one and the same time a simple playing area and the whole world.
According to the First Scroll of Wen the Eternally Surprised, Wen stepped out of the cave where he had received enlightenment and into the dawning light of the first day of the rest of his life.
The Morris dance is common to all inhabited worlds in the multiverse.
...The Special Operations Network was instigated to handle policing duties considered either too unusual or too specialized to be tackled by the regular force.
It began with my father not wanting to see the Last Rabbit and ended up with my being eaten by a carnivorous plant.
I didn't ask to be a celebrity.
Let me start with this:  I am apostate.
It looked set to become even hotter by the afternoon, just when the job was becoming more fiddly and needed extra concentration.
It was the week following Easter in Reading, and no one could remember the last sunny day.
The first thing we had to do was catch the Tralfamosaur.
I work in the magic industry.
I was in the fourth grade and in trouble.
The dangerously high level of the stupidity surplus was once again the lead story in The Owl that morning.
Everything comes to an end.
Making one's home in an unpublished novel wasn't without its compensations.
I made my first public appearance on the stairs up to the school nurse's room, at St. Peters Preparatory School, Weston-Super-Mare, Somerset, England, on September 12, 1948.
The Minotaur had been causing trouble far in excess of his literary importance -- first by escaping from the fantasy-genre prison book Sword of the Zenobians, then by leading us on a merry chase across most of fiction and thwarting all attempts to recapture him.
When my family first moved to North Carolina, we lived in a rented house three blocks from the school where I would begin the third grade.
He comes every Wednesday for the Wednesday special, stands at the same machine all the way until closing time, and never says a word.
When I asked my mother and my uncle about our ancestors, they started with their grandparent's generation, the earliest one they'd known.
He spots the woman midway through practice.
Composite image, optically encoded by escort-craft of the trans-Channel airship Lord Brunel: aerial view of suburban Cherbourg, 14 October 1905.
This time there would be no witnesses.
For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.
Ron,age 25, single, no children, suffered multiple sharp force stab wounds to his neck, chest, head abdomen, thigh, face, and hands. 
It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.
Elmer Gantry was drunk.
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
It is the last day of my childhood.
I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
What about the teakettle?
It was a pleasure to burn.
It was 7 minutes after midnight.
I have never been what you'd call a crying man.
Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.
Two hundred and forty-six years after Adron's Disaster, Zerika succeeded in retrieving the Orb.
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
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.
The Galactic Empire was dying.
"We should start back,” Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them.
The light hadn't even officially turned green at the intersection of 17th and Broadway before an army of overconfident yellow cabs roared past the tiny deathtrap I was attempting to navigate around the city streets.
It was like so, but wasn't.
Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father.
There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.
The sunset at Ka'a Beach was glorious.
The villagers of Little Hangleton still called it “the Riddle House,” even though it had been many years since the Riddle family had lived there.
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.
I am an invisible man.
In the summer of 2255, the San Francisco fog was like a living entity.
The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years - if it ever did end - began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.
The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.
The night before he went to London, Richard Mayhew was not enjoying himself.
The great gray beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.
Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond.
Tonight we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.
Nothing ever begins.
The primroses were over.
The ghost in the Paris Opera existed.
When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.
Of all the conceptions of the human mind, from unicorns to gargoyles to the hydrogen bomb, the most fantastic, perhaps, is the black hole:   a hole in space with a definite edge into which anything can fall and out of which nothing can escape; a hole with a gravitational force so strong that even light is caught and held in its grip; a hole that curves space.
Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach.
It was a nice day.
About 13.5 billion years ago, Matter, energy, time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang.
In a valley shaded with rhododendrons, close to the snow line, where a stream milky with meltwater splashed and where doves and linnets flew among the immense pines, lay a cave, half-hidden by the crag above and the stiff heavy leaves that clustered below.
Over the years I've become accustomed to the following experience.
One late December morning in 1910, Hermann Rorschach, twenty-six years old, woke up early
It took two years for things to truly begin to change, and it began with his holiday.
This time there would be no witnesses.
Years, centuries had passed as she rested within the earth.
London, Ontario, is a middling manufacturing town halfway between Toronto and Detroit, once known for its cigars and breweries.
He smelled food.
"Is this the Shadow?" Jack said, holding up the cellophane envelope.
The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy;  he wis trembling.
As the Minister was a very stout man, inclined to apoplexy, they feared to arouse in him any dangerous excitement, and it was with every possible precaution that they informed him that a very serious attempt upon his life had been planned.
In the Indian Ocean, fifteen hundred miles east of Africa and four thousand miles west of Australia, lies an island that the Portuguese knew as Santa Apolonia, the British as Bourbon, and the French, for a time, as Ile Bonaparte.
The first time you catch the government in a lie, it changes you.
All his life, Howard Hughes stood in awe of his father, the tall, handsome, flamboyant man who endowed him with a flair for the dramatic, a love of things mechanical, and one of the great industrial creations of the twentieth century.
The outing hd been planned on a whim; an afternoon lesson up in the hills, away from the smoke and stink of the city.
The one -year-old decided to take justice into his own hands.
I won Dribble at Jimmy Fargo's birthday party.
He had probably been watching her for a while.
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
He came out to see me in the cage because I belonged to him.
Audrey Villenueve knew what she imagined could not possibly be happening.
Regardless of the reality or otherwise of the Thutmose III/Amenhotep II co-regency, Amenhotep will still have been a young man when he became the sole ruler of Egypt.
Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.
Toward the far edge of the Cornu Sector of Ophiuchus, Robert Palmer’s Star shone brilliant white, its corona flaring with films of blue, red and green color.
The rumor spread through the city like wildfire (which had quite often spread through Ankh-Morpork since its citizens had learned the words "fire insurance.")
Year 12, II prt, day 8: [the king and Queen] appeared on the great carrying-chair of gold to receive the tribute of Kharu [Syria-Palestine] and Kush [Nubia}, the West and the East.
“Telsin!” Waxillium hissed as he crept out of the training hut.
What follows is a truthful account, as best I am able to provide it, of my role in the British deception operation, codenamed Windfall, that was mounted against the East German Intelligence Service (Stasi) in the late nineteen fifties and early sixties, and resulted in the death of the best British secret agent I ever worked with, and of the innocent woman for whom he gave his life.
Larry went officially missing from the world on the second Monday of October, at ten minutes past eleven, when he failed to deliver his opening lecture of the new academic year. 
How does it come about that alongside of the idea of ponderable matter, which is derived by abstraction from everyday life, the physicists set the idea of the existence of another kind of matter, the ether?
A HISTORY OF THE SIX Duchies is of necessity a history of its ruling family, the Farseers.
One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Buker Hill, down in the middle of Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or I got out: that was what the note said, the note the landlady had put under my door. A great problem, deserving acute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed.
Ned Willard came home to Kingsbridge in a snowstorm.
There were never enough biscuits.
When I found my husband at the bottom of the stairs, I tried to resuscitate him before I ever considered disposing of the body.
A Christmas tree was coming up Eleventh Avenue.
It's all going to be just fine, he kept repeating, as if I were listening.
Last summer, in a season of intense heat, Jim Burden and i happened to be crossing Iowa on the same train.
The show was breaking at Orchestra Hall
It begins, as most things begin, with a song.
Men are like shoes.
At the time of his disappearance, Epstein had been living in Tel Aviv for three months.
Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.
He's tracking my time.
In the town there were two mutes, and they were always togehter.
The screen blurred in front of Anna's eyes.
The fastest route from Logan Airport to downtown Boston is a mile-long tunnel called the Sumner.
The first snowfall of the year is no more than a swirl of flurries and whipping winds that bite the skin raw.
It's a lovely little flat, the agent says with what could almost pass for genuine enthusiasm.
It's freezing cold; like the air is made of broken glass.
Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.
Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond.
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
The primroses were over.
In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite the misfortune to be born the eldest of three.
Ballard and Jenkins rolled up on the house on El Centro shortly before midnight.
Polly cut off her hair in front of the mirror, feeling slightly guilty about not feeling very guilty about doing so.
The Salinas Valley is in Northern California.
Sam Vimes sighed when he heard the scream, but he finished shaving before he did anything about it.
Renowned curator Jacques Sauniere staggered through the archway of the museum's Grand Gallery.
The motorcade streamed into the tree-shaded parking lot, where it disgorged numerous people who looked hot, tired and genuinely unhappy.
It was the day my grandmother exploded.
You can't throw the seven of hearts, Brian.
On a Tuesday night, I found myself playing a game of crazy eights with three residents of the Hope Street Teen House.
Joe watched the body wrapped in a dark green tarp being carefully lifted from the grave by the forensic team.
Party till you drop, man!
Something wrong here, a cold whisper of evil.
Randy Whitcomb was a human stinkpot, a red-haired cripple with a permanent cloud over his head; a gap-toothed, pock-faced, paraplegic crank freak, six weeks out of the Lino Lakes medium-security prison.
The advertisement was in November's Vogue.
The town itself is dreary; not much is there except the cotton-mill, the two-room houses where the workers live, a few peach trees, a church with two coloured windows, and a miserable main street only a few hundred yards long.
The unusual events described in this chronicle occurred in 194-, at Oran.
Her key in the lock wakes us.
When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to the child sleeping beside him
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday.
Simon Dykes, the artist, stood, rented glass in hand, and watched as a rowing eight emerged from the brown brick wall of one building, slide across a band of grey-green water, and then eased into the grey concrete of another building.
The day I met my boyfriend Simon's mother started out badly
No one noticed the rock.
Let me tell you of the worlds I left behind.
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
When I was a little girl I used to dress Barbie up without underpants.
Francoise raised her eyes.
There should have been a dark whisper in the wind.
My mother looked up at the stars.
I lifted my dad's PDA and counted off the seconds with the two thousand other people in the room.
Again the deadly blue light engulfed him.
There were twenty-two days to go before Christmas, but Lenny was doing his Christmas shopping early this year.
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.
Jennet faced the Dark Queen, her mage staff at the ready.
Isabel Dalhousie saw the young man fall from the edge of the upper circle, from the gods.
Mma Ramotswe had a detective agency in Africa, at the food of Kgale Hill.
Mma Ramotswe remembered exactly how it was that the subject of taking a holiday arose. 
The eerie call of the hunting horn floated over the drowsing city, sending sleepers' dreams spiraling into nightmare—or jolting them awake, hearts pounding in sudden terror.
When you are just the right age, as Mma Ramotswe was, and when you have seen a bit of life, as Mma Ramotswe certainly had, then there are some things that you just know. s
Precious Ramotswe was sitting at her desk at the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency in Gaborone.
Lor' love you sir!' Fevvers sand out in a voice that clanged like dustbin lids.
It was the day my grandmother exploded.
Roscommon came and laid waste to the garden an hour after dawn, about the time I usually got out of bed and  he usually passes out on the shoulder of some freeway.
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
Mma Ramotswe was sitting alone in her favourite cafe, on the edge of the shopping centre at the Gaborone end of the Tlokweng Road.
The bells of St. Mark's were ringing changes up on the mountain when Bud skated over to the mod parlor to upgrade his skull gun.
The morning sun shone down on Blandings Castle, and the various inmates of the ancestral home of Clarence, ninth Early of Emsworth, their breakfasts digested, were occupying themselves in their various ways.
It looked the same.
Two tires fly. Two wail. // A bamboo grove, all chopped down // From it, warring songs. ... is the best that Corporal Bobby Shaft can do on short notice—he's standing on the running board, gripping his Springfield with one hand and the rearview mirror with the other, so counting the syllables on his fingers is out of the question.
Truman Held drove slowly into the small town of Chicokema as the two black men who worked at the station where he stopped for gas were breaking for lunch.
Enoch rounds the corner just as the executioner raises the noose above the woman's head.
It was the hight of the racing-season at Saratoga.
The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at three o'clock.
Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus.
He was not merely <i>awakened</i>, but <i>detonated</i> out of an uncommonly long and repetitive dream.
The little town of Vezza stands at the confluence of two torrents that come down in two deep valleys from the Apuan mountains.
"Do your neighbors burn one another alive?" was how Fra Orolo began his conversation with Artisan Flec
"The Oracle of Delphi is dead."
Reamde
On a bleak and rocky spit of land that stretched like an arm into the gray North sea stood the ancient castle of Carra.
Kidnapping children is not a good idea.
When people quarrel it is bad, but when witches quarrel it is terrible.
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 in 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 humors and dispositions which were then uppermost;—Had they duly weighted 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.
If you went into a school nowadays and said to the children: "What is a gump?" you would probably get some very silly answers.
Have you heard of the Flying Dutchman?
As soon as he was born, Mr. and Mrs. Canker knew that their baby was not like other people's children.
Green sky at night; hacker's delight.
This time there would be no witnesses.
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport."
Iron Sunrise
The storm came up out of the southwest like a fiend, stalking its prey on legs of lightning.
The day war was declared, a rain of telephones fell clattering to the cobblestones from the skies above Novy Petrograd.
There can be only one true religion.
Otto Houlihan sat in the dark room and listened to the two creatures who had brought him here, a three-eyed thing by the name of Lazaru and its sidekick, Baby Pink-Eye, playing Knock the Devil Down in the corner.
Ten and a half hours before a mounted knight with a machine gun tried to kill her, tech journalist Miriam Beckstein lost her job.
On the early coast of Idjit, where two a.m. looked south over the darkened straigts toward the island of Gorgossium, there was a house, its facade much decorated, set high upon the cliffs.
The committee meeting was entering its third hour when the king sneezed. bringing matters to a head.
The wreckage still smoldered in the wan dawn light, sending a column of grayish-white smoke spiraling into the misty sky above Niejwein.
The tired old carriage, pulled by two tired old horses, rumbled onto the wharf, its creaky wheels bumpety-bumping on the uneven planks, waking Peter from his restless slumber.
"He's coming around."
Lady Juliana Chase's family often accused her of looking for trouble.
I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte.
I approached the witness stand with a warm and welcoming smile.
The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.
I first saw the light in the city of Boston in the year 1857.
As Will Robie stared out the plane window, he knew the next twenty-four hours could possibly be his last on earth.
My lover is experiencing reverse evolution. 
It was a storm as dark as night.
"Will you all be quiet!" snapped High Chancellor Querida.
Today is the two hundredth anniversary of the final extinction of my One True Love, as close as I can date it.
Nothing was going right with the Wizards' University.
The problem was that Simon did not know how to pack like a badass.
Once upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn't go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his niece, the Princess Saralinda.
I may as well start with some of our deep secrets because this account will not be easy to understand without them.
When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventh-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement of Hobbiton.
In the hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
I have been with the Court all my life, travelling with the King's Progress.
Today's errand had become routine for the woman who was currently calling herself Chris Taylor.
The Dog Star stood beneath the Judgment Seats and raged.
Polly sighed and laid her book face down on her bed.
Unlike most boys, David dreaded the holidays.
It was in Warwick Castle that I came across the curious stranger whom I am going to talk about.
"Tom!"
When Hayley arrived at the big house in Ireland, bewildered and in disgrace, rain was falling and it was nearly dark.
The letter was in Earth script, unhandily scrawled in blobby blue ballpoint.
The peculiars in the village of Swampmuck lived very modestly.
When Mr. Dildo Bugger of Bug Ends grudgingly announced his intention of throwing a free feed for all the baggies in his part of the Sty, the reaction in Boggietown was immediate—all through the messy little slum could be heard squeals of "Swell!" and "Hot puppies, <i>grub</i>!"
Have you heard of the Flying Dutchman?
The train journey was horrible.
There's been an accident! she thought.
"Hi my name is Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way and I have long ebony black hair (that's how I got my name) with purple streaks and red tips that reaches my mid-back and icy blue eyes like limpid tears and a lot of people tell me I look like Amy Lee (AN: if u don't know who she is get da hell out of here!)."
There was once a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself, not just sometimes, but always.
My name is Kathy H.
It was quite untrue that the Minnipins, or Small Ones, were a lost people, for they knew exactly where they were.
Spring came late to the Land Between the Mountains in the year Gammage 885.
I'm not a teller of tales, not like the Rhymer.
It was 11:45pm and Harry Potter was sitting on his bed with all his possessions packed up, counting down the remaining 15 minutes til he would turn 17, til he would be allowed to do magic outside of school, til he would be allowed to leave the Dursleys forever.
The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.
He was lost when he came to us, and I fear the silver spoons he stole from us didn't save him when he ran away and went up into the high domains.
The first thing I can remember clearly is writing the way into the secret room.
"Don't talk about it," Sallo tells me.
It was 6 o'clock and Eddward, nicknamed Double D by his friends, was talking to Ed and Eddy on their personal phone system (the one from 3 Squares and an Ed) he had built for them the time when they had got grounded.
Sitting in the hospital waiting room was 17 year old, Barry Blaze.
The last drops of the thundershower had hardly ceased falling when the Pedestrian stuffed his map into his pocket, settled his pack more comfortably on his tired shoulders, and stepped out from the shelter of a large chestnut-tree into the middle of the road.
Beneath the red ramparts of Paris the army of France lay marshaled.
As I left the railway station at Worchester and set out on the three-mile walk to Ransom's cottage, I reflected that no one on that platform could possibly guess that truth about the man I was going to visit.
"Matrimony was ordained, thirdly," said Jane Studdock to herself, "for the mutual society, help, and comfort that the one ought to have of the other."
My dear Wormwood, I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend.
At the height of the long wet summer of the Seventy-seventh Year of Sendovani, the Thiefmaker of Camorr paid a sudden and unannounced visit to the Eyeless Priest at the Temple of Perelandro, desperately hoping to sell him the Lamora boy.
Locke Lamora stood on the pier in Tal Verrar with the hot wind of a burning ship at his back and the cold bite of a loaded crossbow's bolt at his neck.
At first it’s just this idea.
Place ten dozen hungry orphan thieves in a dank burrow of vaults and tunnels beneath what used to be a graveyard, put them under the supervision of one partly crippled old man, and you will soon find that governing them becomes a delicate business.
The reflection that looked back at her from the mirror wasn't her own.
The King of the Faeries was abroad that night, in a fiddle tune, if not literally.
The house stood on a slight rise just on the edge of the village.
On a morning in mid-April, 1687, the brigantine 'Dolphin' left the open sea, sailed briskly across the Sound to the wide mouth of the Connecticut River and into Saybrook Harbor.
From the pleasant village of Mayenfield a path leads through the green fields, richly covered with trees, to the foot of the mountain, which from this side overhangs the valley with grave and solemn aspect.
A mouse was looking at Mario.
Jack Holloway found himself squinting, the orange sun full in his eyes.
"Are we rising again?"
Midway this way of life we're bound upon, I woke to find myself in a dark wood.
One night after dinner when David was reading 'Doctor Dolittle in the Moon,' and his father was reading the newspaper, and his mother was darning socks, his father suddenly exclaimed: "Well, now, that's very odd!"
Matthias cut a comical little figure as he wobbled his way along the cloisters, with his large sandals flip-flopping and his tail peeping from beneath the baggy folds of an oversized novice's habit.
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
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.
I remember the day the Aleut ship came to our island.
Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin.
Jake Prescott looked at his watch and saw an illuminated 1:50 a.m.
When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificense, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
Lou Searing was watching television in his Grand Haven, Michigan, home. 
To those of us who survived it, the First Martian War of the early twentieth century was a cataclysm.
Nothing is as it should be; everything is upside down.
The Grand House on New Samara was exactly what its name suggested.
The calendar above the sink in the tourist cabin said April 26, and this was Monday and the third morning of our vacation.
It was a warm spring night when a fist knocked at the door so hard that the hinges bent.
I am not the most important person in this story.
The alert siren screamed, a piercing wail that couldn't be ignored by any being on board with ears and a pulse.
Poke kept her eyes open all the time.
I was weeding the garden when the nanotech came to town.
Directly ahead, the star was a marble-sized yellow-orange ball, its intensity moderated by its distance and by the viewports' automatic sunscreens.
The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.
Gliding through the blackness of deep space, the Imperial Star Destroyer Chimaera pointed its mighty arrowhead shape toward the dim star of its target system, three thousandths of a light-year away.
I am the Vampire Lestat.
The villagers of Little Hangleton still called it 'the Riddle House', even though it had been many years since the Riddle family had lived there.
It begins as most things begin, with a song.
The barracuda surprised them by opening its jaws to an angle of ninety degrees, revealing the sharp rows of teeth that were capable of tearing out chunks of flesh in an instant.
Shadow had done three years in prison.
I breathe freely in the neighbourhood of this lake; the ground upon which I tread has been subdued from the earliest ages; the principal objects which immediately strike my eye, bring to my recollection scenes, in which man acted the hero and was the chief object of interest.
In Styria, we, though by no means magnificent people, inhabit a castle, or schloss.
Enoch rounds the corner just as the executioner raises the noose above the woman's head.
During the winter of 1927-28 officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country.
The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living. 
I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why.
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.
Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable.
Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17—, and go back to the time when my father kept the "Admiral Benbow" inn, and the brown old seaman, with the sabre cut, first took up his lodging under our roof.
A girl flew through the air, heading towards a tall T-shaped tower.
I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull.
Call me Ishmael.
It was seven o'clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills when Father Wolf woke up from his day's rest, scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feeling in the tips.
Squeak.
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
Kitty Maule was difficult to place.
The woman stood in the far corner of the dimly lit room, hiding in shadows like a fish in gray water.
Daniel Tate clenched his teeth and looked away just as the needle pierced a vein in his arm.
Mma Ramotswe, the daughter of the late Obed Ramotswe of Mochudi, near Gabarone, Botswana, Africa, was the announced fiancee of Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, son of the late Pumphamilitse Matekoni, of Tlokweng, peasant farmer and latterly chief caretaker of the Railway Head Office.
Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, proprietor of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, found it difficult to believe that Mma Ramotswe, the accomplished founder of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, had agreed to marry him.
The correct address of Precious Ramotswe, Botswana's foremost solver of problems - in the sense that this was where she could be found between eight in the morning and five in the afternoon, except when she was not there - was The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, c/o Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, Gaborone, Botswana.
No car, thought Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, that great mechanic, and good man.
"You're almost fifteen minutes early," I told the elegant-looking visitor who stood erect on our front stoop.
Okay, so the Times called it the best Broadway musical of the year; this wasn't the first instance where that esteemed journal and I found ourselves on opposite sides of the fence.
"We are invited to dine with Mr. and Mrs. Alberton," Hester said in reply to Monk's questioning gaze across the breakfast table.
The courtroom at the Old Bailey was crowded.
Sir Oliver Rathbone sat in his chambers in Vere Street, just off Lincoln's Inn Fields, and surveyed the room with eminent satisfaction.
The wraiths of mist curled up slowly from the gray-and-silver surface of the river, gleaming in the first light from the sun.
All this happened, more or less.
In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of Londin, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the Army.
Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case.
The infant's mouth sucked at his mother's breast.
It was nearly ten o'clock, but South Beach was just beginning to wake up, Taylor Maxwell noticed as she strolled along Ocean Drive toward Brew Ha-Ha.
Imagine a chest of drawers!
It was a nice day.
The two stalwart highway patrolmen guarding the barricade stared at her without registering any emotion, but because of the media blitz of the past few days, she knew they recognized her and that, in spite of their implacable demeanor, they were curious to know why Judge Holly Spencer was angling to get closer to the scene of a bloodbath.
Wescott knew he was dead.
New Year's Eve.
When Sutty went back to Earth in the daytime, it was always the village. At night, it was the Pale.
I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
There was a wall.
I am not as I once was.
Illiterates, abecedarians, elitists, rodents all - I will tell you this: I, Zebra, born Bibi Abbas Abbas Hosseini on a scorching August day in 1982, am a descendant of a long ling of self-taught men who repeatedly abandoned their capital, Tehran, where blood has been washed with blood for a hundred years, to take refuge in Nowshahr, in the languid, damp regions of Mazandaran.
I remember that it was midmorning.
I am born!
The straw is so warm that Damaya doesn't want to come out of it.
Lessa woke, cold.
Roane fought against closing her eyes, tensed her slight body until it ached.
It was late January, and New England wore a fresh coat of snow as I stepped along the gangplank to the shore.
"I believe the question , then, said Vasily Yaroslav, is one of intent."
It was the view which finally made us take the place.
The Home Office telegraphy department always smelled of tea.
So the Fields were captured by the Philistines, and Chloris and Jurgen and all the People of the Field were judged summarily.
After several months of the most arduous research, involving the study of countless manuscripts, Simon Flagg succeeded in summoning the devil.
Americans are considered crazy anywhere n the world.
When the six chimpanzees came into his life, Mr. Bainbridge was thirty-eight years old.
Hot and wet from the fine, steamy rain, Kylis sat on her heels at the top of the drilling pit and waited for the second-duty shift to end.
My eyes are open and I am awake.
In making this statement - which I do of my own free will - I wish first to make it perfectly clear that I am not in any way trying to gain sympathy, nor do I expect any mitigation of whatever sentence the court may pronounce.
I see her first when the Mexicana 727 is barelling down to Cozumel Island.
Katy drives like a maniac; we must have been doing over 120 kilometers per hour on those turns.
There will be no returning home, not in our lifetimes.
"Apart from causing some fifty thousand deaths," said my uncle Charles, "the first atomic bomb has much to answer for."
There is only one paint store in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia.
My decision to become a lawyer was irrevocably sealed when I realized my father hated the legal profession.
I can trace it back with precision to one of those fitful weeks in August, when the thermometer hit triple digits for the tenth day in a row.
As she woke up in the pod, she remembered three things.
The exterior ice chime sounded, warning of potential ice on the roadway, and Gerhard Milner gripped the leather steering wheel of his black Audi A6 a little tighter.
On any other weekend, my body would have been discovered more quickly.
The face of Nicholas Easter was slightly hidden by a display rack filled with slim cordless phones, and he was looking not directly at the hidden camera but somewhere off to the left, perhaps at a customer, or perhaps at a counter where a group of kids hovered over the latest electronic games from Asia.
Hwa wondered if today was the day she would finally get to finish the sorry son of a bitch once and for all.
At this prison the doors are inches thick, steel; once factory smooth, they now carry multiple dents. 
Down to the last day, even the last hour now.
The man with the rubber boots stepped into the elevator behind me, but I didn't see him at first.
Nothing ever starts where we think it does.
I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.
Beautiful long-stemmed red roses filled the hotel suite - the perfect gifts, really.
Through the shredded black clouds a fire moved like a dying star, falling back to earth - the earth, that is, of the Discworld - but unlike any star had ever done before, it sometimes managed to steer its fall, sometimes rising, sometimes twisting, but inevitably heading down.
I was seven years old  before I first understood the meaning  of "bad" and "good", because it was at that time I noticed carefully that my father married three wives, as they were doing in those days, if it is not common nowadays.
I was a palm-wine drinkard  since I was a boy of ten years of age.
It was a warm spring night when a fist knocked at the door so hard that the hinges bent.
It was a moonless night, which was good for the purposes of Solid Jackson.
Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork.
When John Dortmunder, relieved, walked out of Pointers and back to the main sales floor of the O.J. Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Avenue, a little after ten that Wednesday evening in November, the silence was unbelievable, particularly in contrast with the racket that had been going on when he'd left.
Jeeves', I said, 'May I speak frankly?'
The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.
Sigismundo Celine was lost in a dark forest with a Red Indian, seeking the supreme wakan.
Armand Daumal didn't like the idea of wet work, but he even more strongly didn't like what he was hearing about the king.
A Danish Norseman or Norwegian Dane named Brodar, who wasn't particularly brilliant or scintillating and never did anything else that got him into the history books, killed an old man around the hour of sunset on April 23, 1014 in a bull-grazing field called Clontarf, on the north coast of Dublin Bay.
Moving a guy as big as Keever wasn't easy.
Five minutes to three in the afternoon.
I was almost 12 years old when I decided to kill my parents.
Feeling energized by the death that was about to happen, Doug Jacobs adjusted his headset and brightened his computer screen.
Why did you come to the United States?
It rose from the depths like an evil monster in a Mesozoic sea.
Someone was watching him.
The waves turned vicious and worsened with every rush of wind.
Living in Trenton in July is like living inside a big pizza oven.
Zahir Damari watched the coyote turn to face the ragged band of Hondurans on the sloping Texas side of the Rio Grande.
At the end of the continent, near the foot of Wilshire Boulevard, Jesse Stone stood and leaned on the railing in the darkness above the Santa Monica beach and stared at nothing, while below him the black ocean rolled away toward Japan. 
Emily Jansen sighed in relief.
When the cat came through the little trapdoor at the bottom of the screen it made a clack-clack sound. 
The anaconda held the small Indian girl wrapped in its heavy coils, dragging her toward the river. 
The girl's hair looked silky.
All heart surgeons are bastards, and Conway is no exception.
Tom Sanders never intended to be late for work on Monday, June 15.
The early morning chill carried a memory of winter.
Perspiring through his rented tuxedo, Sheriff Kurt Muller stood on the dais in the hotel ballroom and smiled gamely at the audience murmuring under dimmed chandeliers.
Mars, Melvin.
His bags were packed and sitting by the door.
It is a warm summer evening, and by the light of a full white moon, I, John Whitman Sutter, am watching my wife, Susan Stanhope Sutter, as she rides her horse Zanzibar across the quiet acres of Stanhope Hall, her ancestral estate.
“You've got a good point, Reyne. But I'm still not sure I buy your tale.”
"I'm just saying that the system is broken and it's time we tried something else, that's all."
The limo pulled up to the front door of the Hay-Adams Hotel after a short jaunt across Lafayette Park.
Let's see what she has in her medicine cabinet.
In fifteen seconds Miles Lord's life changed forever.
The airport security line slowly inched forward, nearly sixty passengers stoically weaving back and forth in the ritual strip-dance everyone knew and put up with.
A boy would have ruled out any possibility, destroying their last and final hope.
I bet I can see London from here, I was thinking.
It was a pretty regular early-summer night at 72 Little Lane.
Locked in darkness that surrounded me like a coffin, I had nothing to distract me from my memories.
He had never left the elf homeworld, partially because he preferred to stay with his own people and see his own planet before moving on, and partially because space travel was difficult and expensive. 
Prince Jehal felt the dragon take to the air.
Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy.
On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar her parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs.
As I left the railway station at Worchester and set out on the three-mile walk to Ransom's cottage, I reflected that no one on that platform could possibly guess the truth about the man I was going to visit.
There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart's Desire.
Rowlf awoke suddenly.
The summer my father bought the bear, none of us was born--we weren't even conceived: not Frank, the oldest; not Franny, the loudest; not me, the next; and not the youngest of us, Lilly and Egg. 
Father Victor Calvert looked out from his pulpit and let out a disheartened sigh
The year was 1918.
I had just finished my studies at Oxford, and was taking a brief holiday from work before assuming definitely the management of the estate.
In the summer of 1967, when I was ten years old, my father caved in to my persistent pleas and took me to get my own dog.
"Ever - wait!"
"You'll never beat me. You'll never win this one, Ever. It's impossible. You can't do it. So why waste your time?"
"What the fug?"
"Everything is energy"
"Close your eyes and picture it. Can you see it?"
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974.
If this were a movie instead of real life, this would be the part where in a strange, ominous voice I'd say, "Take me to your leader!"  
The first thought that popped into my head when we entered the Roman city limits was: Hunh?
Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called True Stories from Nature, about the primeval forest. 
At the dawn of time, long before the ancestors of Styricum slouched, fur-clad and club-wielding, out of the mountains and forests of Zemoch onto the plains of central Eosia, there dwelt in a deep cavern lying beneath the perpetual snows of northern Thalesia a dwarfed and misshapen Troll named Ghwerig.
The second I laid eyes on Aurora my shoulders slumped, my face unsquinched, and I heaved a deep sigh of releif knowing I had an ally, a friend on my side.
It was her scars that made her beautiful.
"Go on, Buttercup - go get it, boy!"
My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie.
The quickest way to a man's heart,' said the instructor, 'is proverbially through his stomach. But if you want to get into his brain, I recommend the eye-socket.'
The weirdest part about dying is that nothing really changed.
Once, as old stories tell, there was a prince named Theseus that in Athens ruled long since,  a conqueror in his time; for rich lands won there was no greater underneath the sun.
When a man you know to be of sound mind tells you his recently deceased mother has just tried to climb in his bedroom window and eat him, you only have two basic options.
I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one. Or at least as close as we're going to get.'
The music-room in the Governor's House at Port Mahon, a tall, handsome, pillared octagon, was filled with the triumphant first movement of Locatelli's C major quartet.
"Guess who?"
Lance Sidway pulled himself up from the stone steps of the Natural History Museum.
Take heed and bear witness to the writings contained herein, because they are the prophecies of the Linkara, the angelic protector of Sin.
Sadly, death at the races is not uncommon.
It was the stunned, pale look of bad news.
There once was a boy who was called Eustace Clarence Scrubb and he almost deserved it.
Once there was a boy who lived in a cabin in the deep woods with no one for company but an old woman and an old man.
The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended.
The palace still shook occasionally as the earth rumbled in memory, groaned as if it would deny what had happened.
Even in this metric age, it was still the thousand-foot telescope, not the three-hundred-metre one.
Sometimes, I worry that I'm not the hero everyone thinks I am.
“It’s a pe­cu­liar ap­pa­ra­tus,” said the Of­fi­cer to the Trav­eler, gaz­ing with a cer­tain ad­mi­ra­tion at the de­vice, with which he was, of course, thor­oughly fa­mil­iar.
"Go on, then. Try to make me hit myself in the face."
Sooner or later, it was bound to happen.
Ivan's door buzzer sounded at close to Komarran midnight, just when he was unwinding enough from lingering jump lag, his screwed-up diurnal rhythm, and the day's labors to consider sleep.
One hot spring evening, just as the sun was going down, two men appeared at Patriarch's Ponds.
I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other.
Helena Cuthbertson picked up the crumpled Times by her sleeping husband and went to the flower room to iron it.
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
Upper Main Street in the village of North Bath, just above the town's two-block-long business district, was quietly residential for three more blocks, then became even more quietly rural along old Route 27A, a serpentine two-lane blacktop that snaked its way through the Adirondacks of northern New York, with their tiny, down-at-the-heels resort towns, all the way to Montreal and prosperity.
Maple and oak branches lash the windowpanes, sirens scream all over town.
When Pat MacGregor received an invitation from Bruce Anderson to meet him for coffee at the Elephant House on George IV bridge, her first reaction was to delete it.
Lest anyone should suppose that I am a cuckoo's child, got on the wrong side of the blanket by lusty peasant stock and sold into indenture in a shortfallen season, I may say that I am House-born and reared in the Night Court proper, for all the good it did me.
She was probably a cute kid once, four maybe five years old.
As the British Airways 747 lumbered toward Heathrow, Ali Reynolds looked out into the early-afternoon light.
Even for June, it was ungodly hot as Gemma Ralston pulled into a nearly deserted parking lot and slid her Mercedes SLK into a spot just in front of the brick-and-mortar offices of Video-Glam.
There had been something loose about the station dock all morning, skulking in amongst the gantries and the lines and the canisters which were waiting to be moved, lurking wherever shadows fell among the rampway accesses of the many ships at dock at Meetpoint.
The reader will remember that, long before going that day (on the evening of which the Princesse de Guermantes was to give her party) to pay the Duke and Duchess the visit which I have just described, I had kept watch for their return and had made, in the course of my vigil, a discovery which, albeit concerning M. de Charlus in particular, was in itself so important that I have until now, until the moment when I could give it the prominence and treat it with the fulness that it demanded, postponed giving any account of it.
At daybreak, my face still turned to the wall, and before I had seen above the big inner curtains what tone the first streaks of light assumed, I could already tell what sort of day it was.
For those who are willing to risk the dangers of the Hunt, the rewards can be great
Many would call me a dishonest man, but I've always kept faith with myself.
Randa called me at seven in the morning on Saturday, because she is a genetic freak who can pop out of bed before the birds, even on the weekend.
"Mademoiselle Albertine has gone!"
Hwa wondered if today was the day she would finally get to finish that sorry son of a bitch once and for all.
Accidents ambush the unsuspecting, often violently, just like love.
You're quitting the Blackbirds?
It was midmorning on a Monday when magic walked into my life wearing a beige Ann Taylor suit and sensible flats.
It was night, and dogs came through the trees, unleashed and howling.
The ship didn't even have a name.
The servants called them malenchki, little ghosts, because they were the smallest and the youngest, and because they haunted the Duke's house like giggling phantoms, darting in and out of rooms, hiding in cupboards to eavesdrop, sneaking into the kitchen to steal the last of the summer peaches.
The whole day long, in that rather too countrified house at Tansonville, which had the air merely of a place to rest in when out for a stroll or during a shower, one of those houses in which every drawing-room gives the effect of a summerhouse, and when, in the bedrooms, on the wallpaper of one the roses of the garden, and on the wallpaper of the other the birds from the trees, have come to join you and keep you company (but singly, at any rate, for they were old-fashioned wallpapers, on which each rose was so distinct that it could have been picked if it had been real, and each bird could have been put in a cage and tamed) having none of the pretentious interior decoration of the rooms of the present day, in which, on a silver background, all the apple trees of Normandy stand out in Japanese style, to fill with fantasies the hours spent abed - that whole day I remained in my room, which looked out on the beautiful verdure of the estate and the lilacs at the entrance, on the tall trees at the water's edge, their green foliage glistening in the sunlight, and on the forest of Meseglise.
I was a sound sleeper, for good reasons, but the smell of smoke always woke me.
All the days of the modern world begin at the International Date Line, in the middle of the Pacific.
That venerable fairytale of the Miller's daughter and the Dwarf who helped her spin straw into gold has a happy ending in the popular version.
Kidnapping is a fact of life.
No!
There was low droning overhead a week or so after the Detonations; time was hard to track.
Two hundred and forty-six years after Adron's Disaster, Zerika succeeded in retrieving the Orb.
There will be swarm.
A distant roar rose and fell, rose again.
Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driver would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake.
You know me.
Night in the palace.
This is Ares Launch Control, Jacqueline B. Kennedy Space Center.
Things don't just disappear into thin -
The encounter of old friends was common enough on Meetpoint Station, where half a dozen species came to trade; and one such old friend came walking Pyanfar Chanur's way when she had no more than put The Pride into dock.
Each hour, a myriad of trillions of little living things - microbes, bacteria, the peasants of nature - are born and die, not counting for much except in the bulk of their numbers and the accumulation of their tiny lives.
My name is Kinsey Millhone
I'd been to the office no more than twenty minutes that morning.
The blaze of sun wrung pops of sweat from the old man's brow, yet he cupped his hands around the glass of hot sweet tea as if to warm them.
Sixty seconds to detonation.
I met Bobby Callahan on Monday of that week.
The Pride came in, dropping suddenly into here and now; and Pyanfar Chanur reached for controls, half-dazed yet.
<Daughter.>
The sun was already sinking into the deep green of the hills to the west of the valley, the red and gray-pink of its shadows touching the corners of the land, when Flick Ohmsford began his descent.
Once upon a time, a man came from the sky and killed my wife.
Thursday, March 17, I spent the morning in anxiety, the afternoon in ecstasy and the evening unconscious.
I rise into darkness, away from the garden they watered with the blood of my friends.
I would have lived in peace.
Horace Hopper opened his eyes and looked at the clock: five a.m.
"It's nearly seven," warned Bro. 
How could I have died and gone to hell without noticing the transition?
Late one evening toward the end of March, a teenager picked up a double-barreled shotgun, walked into the forest, put the gun to someone else's forehead and pulled the trigger.
The fight (or "battle", as per official Heroes Association terminology) started with an explosion and went downhill from there. 
The Pride's small galley table was awash in data printout, paperfaxes ringed and splotched with brown gfi-stains, arrowed, circled, crossed out, and noted in red and green ink till they were beyond cryptic.
Ove is fifty-nine.
"Gwendolyn Margaret Elizabeth Lancaster," said Mother in a firm, cross voice, "you will cease this nonsense at once."
"I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one."
In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind every since. 
As she woke up in the pod, she remembered three things.
The young man, who would have looked owlish even without the round eyeglasses, unfolded a piece of paper and laid it on the counter in front of Keller.
I walk to the bus station by myself. 
"I just don't think it's that good," said Denise.
Keller drew his pair of tongs from his breast pocket and carefully lifted a stamp from its glassine envelope.
They want me to kill a child, Lieutenant Oscar Britton thought.
Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt. 
As a young warrior, Nukurren had heard the demons come.
It was a nice day. 
At a quarter after ten on the last Wednesday in May, I put a beautiful woman in a taxi and watched her ride out of my life, or at least out of my neighborhood.
He races into the water, kicking up clods of wet sand, waves sloshing over the glass-polished surface of his shoes.
"Not a bad-looking Burglar," he said.
I clasp the flask between my hands even though the warmth from the tea has long since leached into the frozen air.
I stare down at my shoes, watching as a fine layer of ash settles on the worn leather.
Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book called True Stories of the Virgin Forest. 
In deck-chairs all along the front the bald pink knees of Bradford businessmen nuzzled the sun.
Mei?
In formal beds beside the Serpentine, early tulips stood in tight-lipped rows.
Aubrey Fitzwilliam hated being dead. 
Bryce waited for Rivers to finish reading before he spoke again.
The Scopuli had been taken eight days ago, and Julie Mao was finally ready to be shot.
A sea of mist drifted through the cloud forest - soft, gray, luminescent.
I am afraid.
The tall and dour noncom wore Imperial dress greens and carried his communications panel like a field marshal's baton.
"Ship duty!" chortled the ensign four ahead of Miles in line.
"Now is it, 'Diplomacy is the art of war pursued by other men,'" asked Ivan, "or was it the other way around?"
The birth was progressing normally.
Her name is Melanie.
"You have a visitor, Lieutenant Vorkosigan."
Harvey Dent was needed.
A man with binoculars.
The chief priest sat in the canoe as the boy rowed to the sacred island.
His combat drop shuttle crouched still and silent in the repairs docking bay - malevolent, to Miles's jaundiced eye.
The rain had not let up for the better part of an hour.
A chill November breeze blew John Soeder's hair into his face, Mother Nature's reminder to get a haircut in the absence of his actual mother being around to nag him about it.
The row of comconsole booths lining the passenger concourse of Escobar's largest commercial orbital transfer station had mirrored doors, divided into diagonal sections by rainbow-colored lines of lights.
I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why.
Miles returned to consciousness with his eyes still closed.
Brian Robeson stared out the window of the small plane at the endless green northern wilderness below.
The last gleaming silver of Komarr's true-sun melted out of sight beyond the low hills on the western horizon
During the icy blue days of winter and the spongy green mornings of spring and the steamy white heat of a summer afternoon, Marco had not especially wanted.
In the mid-eighteen hundreds, when the East was young and the West was yet to be settled, a baby was born, named Charlotte.
The feathers were starting to be a nuisance.
My name is Arthur Gordon Pym.
The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.
Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.
Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway.
A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.
Trade season came around again.
The snow-clad hill didn't look like much, but the granite that lay just a few feet below the topsoil had been strong enough to hold its own against a retreating glacier thousands of years before, and was likely to be there for millennia yet to come.
In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army. 
The big groundcar jerked to a stop centimeters from the vehicle ahead of it, and Armsman Pym, driving, swore under his breath.
Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case.
The shining rim of the planet Rodeo wheeled dizzily past the observation port of the orbital transfer station.
Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table.
“I am inclined to think—” said I.
In the image above the vid plate, the sperm writhed in elegant, sinuous curves.
Ivan's door buzzer sounded at close to Komarran midnight, just when he was unwinding enough from lingering jump lag, his screwed-up diurnal rhythm, and the day's labors to consider sleep.
Angels were falling all over the place.
It was a good day on the military transfer station orbiting the planet Sergyar.
Ista leaned forward between the crenellations atop the gate tower, the stone gritty beneath her pale hands, and watched in numb exhaustion as the final mourning party cleared the castle gate below.
Cazaril heard the mounted horsemen on the road before he saw them.
The prince was dead.
Fawn came to the well-house a little before noon.
Dag had been married for a whole two hours, and was still light-headed with wonder.
Dag was riding up the lane thinking only of the chances of a Bluefield farm lunch, and his likelihood of needing a nap afterwards, when the arrow hissed past his face.
The Drowntown day market was in full spate.
We invited him to all of our weddings; he was famous.
This is how I heard the story.
Fast-quick, flea-maggots!'
There were occasional relaxed periods of what the Lao called sabai.
My father used to carry me down the hall to my room after I came home from the hospital.
The stones echoed to the sound of a gong.
Boop.
"Let's wait just a bit longer, please," said the girl in dark-blue trousers and the light summer coat. 
"I must speak to you."
W'sorsn awoke slowly, reluctantly.
There had been the three of them - the three Gilbert brothers: the twins, Alfred and Albert; and the younger boy, John, who had been killed one day in North Africa. 
Nathan Rubin died because he got brave.
I remember much of what he said even now, but we all learned quicker from example than words.
On Mondays to Fridays it was fifty-fifty whether the postman called before Julia Stevens left for school.
Death had them surrounded.
"So now get up."
"Edith!" said Margaret, gently, "Edith!"
The schoolroom in the Parsonage at Heythram was not a large apartment, but on a bleak January day, in a household where the consumption of coals was a consideration, this was not felt by its occupants to be a disadvantage.
Not more than five days after she had despatched an urgent missive to her brother, the Most Honourable the Marquis of Alverstoke, requesting him to visit her at his earliest convenience, the widowed Lady Buxted was relieved to learn from her youngest daughter that Uncle Vernon had just driven up to the house, wearing a coat with dozens of capes, and looking as fine as fivepence.
The elegant travelling carriage which bore Miss Wychwood from her birthplace, on the border of Somerset and Wiltshire, to her home in Bath, proceeded on its way at a decorous pace.
Newark was left behind and the post-chaise-and-four entered on a stretch of flat country which offered little to attract the eye, or occasion remark.
Upon her butler’s announcing the arrival of Mr Ravenscar, Lady Mablethorpe, who had been dozing over a novel from the Circulating Library, sat up with a jerk, and raised a hand to her dishevelled cap.
Maia woke with his cousin's cold fingers digging into his shoulder.
In a small clearing, an intricate device of glass and metal tubes scanned the night skies.
A white bird hung in the clear western sky and flapped its wings sporadically.
A rare sunny morning comes to Colma.
A fox got in amongst the hens last night, and ravished our best layer,' remarked Miss Lanyon.
When someone ties you naked to a tree in the yard and beats you unconscious with a broom handle, you don't soon forget it, or him.
Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jefff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Oillie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza was too old to be at a Communist party.
The gates were the ruin of the qhal.
A little before eight o'clock, at the close of a damp autumn day, a post-chaise entered Bath, on the London Road, and presently drew up before a house in Sydney Place.
Dead tired, I headed "home" in the early evening Las Vegas Strip traffic.
On moonless nights the men and boy of Jableh, a dusty fishing town on the coast of Syria, would gather their lanterns and set out in their quietest boats.
A coyote yipped in the desert night surrounding Las Vegas.
I was born in the city of Bombay...once upon a time
The swordmaiden will discover the secrets of men.
The Drowntown day market was in full spate.
The fat sun stalls by the phone masts.
Six days out of seven, the ten thousand or so people in the city of New Orleans whose bodies were the property of other people were kept pretty busy.
The day was unseasonably warm for November, but in some misguided deference to the Chinese embassy, the fire in the Admiralty boardroom had been heaped excessively high, and Laurence was standing directly before it.
From a yellow book -- He is hungry tonight.
Hmmm. No. I'm telling this wrong.
The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.
On the day the armada went off to war, on the last day of life as we knew it, I was invited to a party.
"So I often hook my foot over the side of the mattress."
When the old man died, there was probably no great joy in heaven; and quite certainly  little if any real grief in Charlbury Drive, the pleasantly unpretentious cul-de-sac of semi-detatched houses to which he had retired.
Not remarkably beautiful, he thought.
Intermittently, on the Tuesday, he felt sick.
As she woke up in the pod, she remembered three things.
Several of our Correspondents have written to enquire exactly what is meant by that familiar phrase, the World.
Today I'm five.
She copes.
-D'yeh do the Facebook thing?
My mother looked up at the stars.
This is where the dragons went.
Tina Cogin knew how to make the most out of what little she had.
Fat girls can do.
It was a solecism of the very worst kind.
In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three.
Reports from the investigating officers who interviewed both Michael Spargo and his mother prior to charges being filed against him all suggest that the morning of the boy's tenth birthday began badly.
The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home.
"Will you all be quiet!" snapped High Chancellor Querida.
It began when George was trying on a black suit in Allders the week before Bob Green's funeral. 
They had flown from England to Minneapolis to look at a toilet.
She didn't want to be a beauty queen, but as luck would have it, she was about to become one.
A bottle of wine.
There are gods in Alabama: Jack Daniel's, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus.
There was a wall.
My mother and I lived alone.
I was born blue.
My son, Digby, began at exactly 3:02 in the morning on the first Friday in June. 
This is a story about the color blue.
I did not scream when I came in the back door of Sal's Saloon, where I work, to find Sal himself lying there on the floor of the stockroom, the color of blue ruin, fluids leaking from his various holes and puddling on the ground, including a little spot of blood by his head.
In the small and stormy bay below the little village of Fishcake, the sea was coming in.
Miss Jane Neal met her maker in the early morning mist of Thanksgiving Sunday.
Had CC de Poitiers known she was going to be murdered she might have bought her husband, Richard, a Christmas gift.
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.
Kneeling in the fragrant moist grass of the village green Clara Morrow carefully hid the Easter egg and thought about raising the dead, which she planned to do right after supper.
More than a century ago the Robber Barons discovered Lac Massawippi.
All of them?
Up the stairs they raced, taking them two at a time, trying to be as quiet as possible.
They'd driven all the way to Mr. Styles's house before Anna realized that her father was nervous.
Oh, no, no, no, thought Clara Morrow as she walked toward the closed doors.
In the early nineteenth century the Catholic Church realized it had a problem.
As Clara Morrow approached, she wondered if he'd repeat the same small gesture he'd done every morning.  
Running, running, stumbling, running.
Armand Gamache sat in the little room and closed the dossier with care, squeezing it shut, trapping the words inside.
State your name, please.'
His two girls are curled together like animals who's habit is to sleep underground, in the smallest space possible.  
 The King is ready for war.
Hilldale Cemetery in North Bath was cleaved right down the middle, its Hill and Dale sections divided by a two-lane macadam road, originally a colonial cart path.
 There were crimson roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood.
Atticus was almost home when the state trooper pulled him over.
This is the day the world changes.
It's a room an uninspired playwright might conjure while staring at a blank page: White walls.
My father called me out.
pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.
No one could say he hadn't been warned.
Mr. Sunshine first enters the city near dusk of a spring day in 1866, after heavy showers have turned its dirt roads and streets to mud soup.
There was a boy in her room.
It was love at first sight.
Shit's been weird ever since the eclipse.
 From the top of the large boulder he sat on, Ensign Tom Davis  looked across the expanse of the cave toward Captain Lucius Abernathy, Science Officer Q'eeng and Chief Engineer Paul West  perched on a second, larger boulder, and thought, Well, this sucks.
Why?
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Growing up in rural Connecticut, I had been told the name Riddell meant something to people in the Northwest.
At half-past six on the twenty-first of June 1922, when Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov was escorted through the gates of the Kremlin onto Red Square, it was glorious and cool.  
This is the worst story I know about hocuses.
When I opened the door, I could tell that Thamuris was dosed to the gills on laudanum.
So to begin with, General Mercator was dead.
Bon Agornin writhed on his deathbed, his wings beating as if he would fly to his new life in his old body.
One by one we walked the labyrinth beneath Summerdown, and one by one we came to the engine, dark and cold, at its heart.
Maia woke with his cousin’s cold fingers digging into his shoulder.
The Phurnacite factory in Abercwmboi killed all the trees for two miles around.
Lovelace had been in a body for twenty-eight minutes, and it still felt every bit as wrong as it had the second she woke up inside it.
Again today Alex Housman drove the Buick Riviera.
Once upon a time there was a girl named Summer, whose mother loved her very very very much.
The sheep lay on its back in the centre of the field with its legs in the air.
Imagine all the variety of the human species confined to a single world, a world sown with the petrified bones of human ancestors, a planet dotted with the ruins of ten thousand years of forgotten human civilizations—a planet on which at the time human beings first flew in space, humans still hunted a surplus of animals, gathered wild plants, farmed with ancient methods, spun natural yarns by hand and cooked over wood fires.
A host of sparrows were hopping through the bright-berried pyracantha outside the kitchen window.
THE DECK OF the French ship was slippery with blood, heaving in the choppy sea; a stroke might as easily bring down the man making it as the intended target. 
Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. 
The book was thick and black and covered with dust. 
THE road the Romans made traversed North Wales a little way inland, between the weather off the Irish Sea and the mountains of Gwynedd and Powys; past the copper and the lead that the travel-hungry Empire craved. 
Every day she came into the Registry, and he began to watch her – tall, thin woman, unremarkable among others who came looking for jobs, men and women beached at Thule, men and women at the end of the line and hoping for a new beginning somewhere, on some further station or aboard some ship that came to dock and trade in the days of Thule's second fading.
They'd left her lipstick behind when they patted her down, and the bright pink slashes on the wall marked the days better than they'd ever marked her lips.
  The storyteller said: Now that the good winds are blowing, now that we’re done with days of anxiety and nights of terror, now that there are no more denunciations, persecutions, secret executions, and whim and madness have departed from the heart of the Empire, and we and our children aren’t playthings of blind power; now that a just man sits on the Golden Throne and people look peacefully out of their doors to see if the weather’s fine and plan their vacations and kids go to school and actors put their hearts into their lines and girls fall in love and old men die in their beds and poets sing and jewelers weigh gold behind their little windows and gardeners rake the parks and young people argue and innkeepers water the wine and teachers teach what they know and we storytellers tell old stories and archivists archive and fishermen fish and all of us can decide according to our talents and lack of talents what to do with our lives—now anybody can enter the emperor’s palace, out of need or curiosity; anybody can visit that great house which was for so many years forbidden, prohibited, defended by armed guards, locked, and as dark as the souls of the Warrior Emperors of the Dynasty of the Ellydróvides.
The magic in that country was so thick and tenacious that it settled over the land like chalk-dust and over floors and shelves like slightly sticky plaster-dust.
ROBERT BLAISDELL, THE NINTH DUKE OF CLERMONT, was not hiding.
Their names were Sandor and Allison... Kreja and Reilly respectively.
One fine August evening in South Carolina, Agnes Crandall stirred raspberries and sugar in her heavy nonstick frying pan and defended her fiancé to the only man she’d ever trusted.
Once upon a time, Minerva Dobbs thought as she stood in the middle of a loud yuppie bar, the world was full of good men. 
I DIDN’T KNOW HOW LONG I had been in the king’s prison.
In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women.
HE WAS ASLEEP, BUT WOKE at the sound of the key turning in the lock. 
The place was large and cold and somehow the instructions lost themselves in so strange a place.
THE queen waited. 
Moon had been thrown out of a lot of groundling settlements and camps, but he hadn’t expected it from the Cordans.
Moon had been consort to Jade, sister queen of the Indigo Cloud Court, for eleven days and nobody had tried to kill him yet. 
The meeting of the Royal Society of Unnatural Philosophers was well under way, and the entrance hall was almost empty.
When the Hidden Schools threw Tara Abernathy out, she fell a thousand feet through wisps of cloud and woke to find herself alive, broken and bleeding, beside the Crack in the World.
Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians.
THERE IS A SIMILARITY, if I may be permitted an excursion into tenuous metaphor, between the feel of a chilly breeze and the feel of a knife’s blade, as either is laid across the back of the neck.
 Scholarship asks, thank God, no recompense but Truth.
The body lay naked and facedown, a deathly gray, spatters of blood staining the snow around it.
Considering the circumstances, you could use another lieutenant.
One moment asleep. 
The steerswoman centered her chart on the table and anchored the corners around. 
THERE WERE CRIMSON ROSES on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood.
His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god.
“THAT’S TORN IT!” SAID Lord Peter Wimsey.
Harriet Vane sat at her writing-table and stared out into Mecklenburg Square. 
The Computer man, thought Hiero.
I lost an arm on my last trip home. 
In a sheepfarmer's low stone house, high in the hills above Three Firs, two swords hang now above the mantlepiece.
IT’S A PORT CITY.
Lisette Toutournier sighed. 
Two Spanish soldiers swaggered up Tower Street toward William Shakespeare.
My mother selected her wings as early morning light reached through our balcony shutters. 
I tried to get the octopus to let go, but it wasn't having any of that.
By 1927 there were twelve girls who danced all night and never gave names, but by then the men had given up asking and called them all Princess. 
Startled awake by the ammoniated mists, I am roused in one instant from glutinous sleep to grieving awareness; I have done it again.
I had expected Birana to weep.
The International Assembly audience hall was half-empty—too empty, Suyana might have said, in her first year there, when she was still surprised by the distance between good public relations and good politics.
Suyana wore sleeveless gowns so people could see where she’d been shot.
No one sends for a niece they've never seen before just to annoy her family and ruin her life.
Once there was a village on a river in a southern country.
AT KEL ACADEMY, an instructor had explained to Cheris’s class that the threshold winnower was a weapon of last resort, and not just for its notorious connotations. 
The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL KEL Brezan’s general had just been tapped to deal with the Hafn invasion. 
In the court of the fountain the sun of March shone through young leaves of ash and elm, and water leapt and fell through shadow and clear light.
A ballister walked along Lakeview Street in Carradoon, the wizard's black cloak wrapped tight against his skin-and-bones body to ward off the wintry blows whipping in from Impresk Lake.
Amerigo Bonasera sat in New York Criminal Court Number 3 and waited for justice; vengeance on the men who had so cruelly hurt his daughter, who had tried to dishonor her.
LET’S START WITH THE END of the world, why don’t we? 
After Farmer Flint of the Middle Valley died, his widow stayed on at the farmhouse.
HMM. NO. I’M TELLING THIS WRONG. 
TIME GROWS SHORT, MY LOVE. 
The large fighter shifted uneasily in his seat, looking all about the nearly empty tavern.
The Skydiver 7 had been filled with the soft sounds of beeping instruments and the ominous rumbling of the windstorm outside when Jakob Faraday had finally drifted off to sleep.
The island of Gont,a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.
I AM NOT AS I ONCE WAS. 
Finding oneself a guest of honour only increases the presentiment of anxiety, should one be disposed to such feelings.
In the five thousand years that had passed since The Death, the world had changed.
My first day on the job coincided with the first day of the Haden Walkout, and I'm not going to lie, that was some awkward timing.
It was worse once.
Aballister Bonaduce looked long and hard at the shimmering image in his mirror.
Although it was winter, the nearest ocean four hundred miles away, and the Tribal Weatherman asleep because of boredom, a hurricane dropped from the sky in 1976 and fell so hard on the Spokane Indian Reservation that it knocked Victor from bed and his latest nightmare.
I'm not sure why I followed the boy.
SHE LOOKS SO much like Enefa, I think, the first time I see her.
The arrival of the stranger was quite a shock.
This morning, just after 11:00, Michael locked himself in his office and he won't come out.
"Nottingham has enough pubs and clubs", say the local police.
This is for real.
Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice's Lenten fast in the desert.
Aug. 1, 2185: So we begin again.
How is a road beaten down through the virgin snow?
The duel was to be held just across the state line in Kentucky.
Ash fell from the sky.
I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I'm old, and you said, I don't think you're old.
The village seemed faintly familiar, but most villages were much alike.
Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself.
Vickers got up at an hour outrageous for its earliness, because Ann had phoned the night before to tell him about a man in New York she wanted him to meet.
I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.
The noise was ended now.
Between her toes the damp earth felt cool, but already sweat crept between the roots of her hair.
I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.
I awoke to darkness.
Is that it?' Emma asked as they pulled up in front of a rusty gray trailer.
The king's grayships spread out down the length of the coastline, their red-streaked sails visible between the palm trees.
Snow, tenderly caught by eddying breezes, swirled and spun in to and out of bright, lustrous shapes that gleamed against the emerald-blazoned black drape of sky and sparkled there for a moment, hanging, before settling gently to the soft, green-tufted plain with all the sickly sweetness of an over-written sentence.
Rattisbon Anno <del>Dommini</del> Domini mense decembri mclv Cronicle of Baudolino of the fammily of Aulario.
Questions, always questions.
"And what's your name?"
"I'm telling you, there's more history to this house than any other place on Indian Neck, and that's the truth," Ted Martin said, and took a long swallow of beer.
The mystery would never be solved.
I take pride withal in my humiliation, and as I am to this privilege condemned, almost I find joy in an abhorrent salvation; I am, I believe, alone of all our race, the only man in human memory to have been shipwrecked and cast up upon a deserted ship.
It was an old plane, a four-engine plasma jet that had been retired from active service, and it came in along a route that was neither economical nor particularly safe.
You know the city in the clouds that everyone imagines?
The circus arrives without warning.
Linderwall was a large kingdom, just east of the Mountains of Morning, where philosophers were highly respected and the number five was fashionable.
Matty was impatient to have the supper preparations over and done with.
On November 8, 1895, 36 years after the discovery of cathode rays, William Konrad Roentgen Discovered "a new kind of ray" which blackened photographic film and which he termed an x-ray.
All my friends are dead.
"Mother?"
On August 16, 1968, I was handed a book written by a certain Abbé Vallet, Le Manuscrit de Dom Adson de Melk, traduit en français d'après l'édition de Dom J. Mabillon (Aux Presses de l'Abbaye de la Source, Paris, 1842).
It was perfect weather for an outdoor wedding.
It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened.
It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
It was a dark and stormy night.
My sweat smells like peanut butter.
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
Jacob Dietmahler was not such a fool that he could not see that they had arrived at his friend's home on the washday.
George, the barber, slashed his scissors in the air, snipped their blades together furiously.
"No good!" said Lamont, sharply.
Marley was dead: to begin with.
Right now it's seven o'clock on a Monday morning, and I'm lying on the floor of my bedroom watching the white plastic ceiling fan go around and around and around.
Veltd to scrub to fields to farms to these first tumbling houses that rise from the Earth.
Teacher: Children, write down the proposition: "The fish was sitting in a tree."
I could not see the street or much of the estate.
In Iceland, fairies live inside of rocks.
Freak. FREEEEEEEK.
Beyond the Indian Hamlet, upon a forlorn strand, I happened on a trail of recent footprints.
A mile below the lowest cloud, rock breaches water and the sea begins.
INTERVIEWER: ... I suppose that your first important discovery, Dr. Pillman, was the celebrated Pillman radiant?
As she woke up in the pod, she remembered three things.
In an unremarkable room, in a nondescript building, a man sat working on very non-nondescript theories.
Lovelace had been in a body for twenty-eight minutes, and it still felt every bit as wrong as it had the second she woke up inside it.
On the whole, we're a murderous race.
Drudii Codex Entry 432.24    The following excerpt is taken from correspondence originally intended for Barl Tinumun, a highly decorated admiral and leader of the drudii fleet fighting for Inaricaa at the end of the inaricaan-rewquian war in the Hesteau system.
I am.
The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
The gale tore at him and he felt its bite deep within and he knew that if they did not make landfall in three days they would all be dead.
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
There are reasons I hate to drive fast.
In the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I joined the militia, I saw an Italian militiaman standing front of the officer's table.
Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file.
No one noticed the rock.
For a full minute Jiggs stood before the window in a light spatter of last night's confetti lying against the windowbase like spent sorry foam, lightpoised on the balls of his greasestained tennis shoes, looking at the boots.
‪My "this is the Girl" moment was 23 years ago, an impulse to go and save you from the unruly mob of your classmates, at the Freshmen Ball.‬
Riding up the winding road of Saint Agnes cemetery in the back of the rattling old truck, Francis Phelan became aware that the dead, even more than the living, settled down in neighborhoods.
Fran finished casting the circle.
A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of Rum Alley.
At the time I first realized I might be fictional, my weekdays were spent at a publicly funded institution on the north side of Indianapolis called White River Highschool, where I was required to eat lunch at a particular time -- between 12:37 P.M. and 1:14 P.M. -- by forces so much larger than myself I couldn't even begin to identify them.
Before I even opened my eyes, I knew something was wrong.
There were more than twenty-four hundred people in the town of Tikiy-by-the-Water, but only one of them was alive.
For as long as anyone can remember, the students of Mount Washington High have arrived at school on the last Monday of September to find a list naming the prettiest and the ugliest girls in each grade.
Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood.
It was born in the darkness of the Circle Sea; at first just a soft floating thing, washed back and forth by tide after tide.
"Miss Temminick. Miss Plumleigh-Teignmott. With me, please ladies."
Sophronia intended to pull the dumbwaiter up from the kitchen to outside the front parlor on the ground floor, where Mrs. Barnaclegoose was taking tea.
It was only a duck pond, out at the back of the farm.
Take a God-sized bottle of hundred-proof night, spill it across a couple of dozen light-years, and you have the phenomenon humanxkindcalled the Velvet Dam.
Another sliver of silvery-pale wood joined the tiny pile at Ilya Ivanovitch's feet, and the rough shape in his hand became a little more foxlike.
It as been the custom in Savalik for centuries: The old, knowing that their spirit was tired of this world, should be allowed to die in the manner of their choosing.
"Watch where you're going, qwot!"
Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.
Maskelle had been asking the Ancestors to stop the rain three days running now and, as usual, they weren't listening.
The bees of Death are big and black, they buzz low and sombre, they keep their honey in combs of wax as white as altar candles.
Before dawn, I woke in darkness to the ringing of a tiny bell, the thimble-size bell that I wore on a chain around my neck: three bursts of silvery sound, a brief silence after each.
I'm walking up Long's Hill, hoofing it because I am about to be late for school again.
At first thought, you'd think it would be eas to find a missing planet.
The woods were dark, filled with strange shadows
When Serena went missing I looked in all the places she might go and she wasn't anywhere, just like a lot of the other girls weren't anywhere.
Shadow had done three years in prison.
This is the Discworld, which travels through space on the back of four elephants which themselves stand on the shell of Great A'Tuin, the sky turtle.
Under a chill, gray sky, two riders jogged across the turf.
The night before he went to London, Richard Mayhew was not enjoying himself.
My name is Jessie, and I'm the reason why your life is about to change forever.
Some things start before other things.
Shadow had done three years in prison.
We rowed out through the harbor, past bobbing boats weeping rust from their seams, past juries of silent seabirds roosting atop the barnacled remains of sunken docks, past fishermen who lowered their nets to stare frozenly as we slipped by, uncertain whether we were real or imagined; a procession of waterborne ghosts, or ghosts soon to be.
The festering mob of meat puppets in their tattered Sunday best shambled aside as I rode Pal down Main Street toward the stark white columns and broad marble steps of the Saguaro Hotel.
When the storm came, it hit the hills like a hammer.
The Nac Mac Feegle are the most dangerous of the fairy races, particularly when drunk.
This is where the dragons went.
They say the world is flat and supported on the back of four elephants who themselves stand on the back of a giant turtle.
"Someone bloody famous," said the hoarse voice on the end of the line, "better've died, Strike."
It was a moonless night, which was good for the purposes of Solid Jackson.
It all came of a fear of flying.
Lolita.
Here the sea ends and the earth begins.
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
Someone was singing.
I returned to myself.
Call made a few final tweaks to his robot right before sending him into the "ring" - a section of his garage floor outlined in blue chalk.
Call removed a small circle of oily pepperoni from his slice of pizza and slid his hand under the table.
Hey, that crow's in the garden again.'
It was the day mum took the coast road to school.
Ironically, since the attacks, the sunsets have been glorious.
Everyone thinks I'm dead.
Dad had Uncle Eddie round so naturally they had to come and nose around and see what I was up to.
Staring out of my bedroom window at other people having a nice life.
How does one describe Artemis Fowl? 
The following article was posted on the fairy internet on the site www.horsesense.gnom.
Barely an hour north of Dublin's fair city lies the Fowl estate, where the boundaries have changed little in the last five hundred years.
Happy was not a word often used to describe Artemis Fowl's bodyguard.
There was once an Irish boy who longed to know everything there was to know, so he read book after book until his brain swelled with astronomy, calculus, quantum physics, romantic poets, forensic science and anthropology among a hundred other subjects.
The berserkers lay arranged in a spiral under the rune stone, looping down, down into the earth - boots out, heads in as the spell demanded.
The Hogwash School for Wizards was the most famous school in the wizarding world, and Barry Trotter was its most famous student.
I could feel everyone looking at me, but I was used to it.
There were only two kinds of people in our town.
"Why can't I go with you?"
A lone cloud in the azure sky provided escort to the motorcade thundering along the desert road, its white tendrils seeming to point the way.
I used to think our town, buried in the South Carolina backwoods, stuck in the muddy bottom of the Santee River valley, was the middle of nowhere.
In Gatlin, it's funny how the good things are all tied up with the bad.
Other people had flying dreams.
There are only two kinds of Mortals in the  backwater town of Gatlin, South Carolina - the stupid and the stuck.
Love is ten kinds of a crazy, right?
The last time we saw Charlie, he was riding high above his home town in the Great Glass Lift.
Piper Halliwell groaned and slowly sat up, rubbing her shoulder.
"You've got to be kidding me," the bouncer said, folding his arms against his massive chest.
The formidable glass-and-steel structure rose from its position on Front Street like a glittering needle threading the sky.
The cold snap of the previous week was over; the sun was shining brightly as Clary hurried across Luke's dusty front yard, the hood of her jacket up to keep her hair from blowing across her face.
"Just coffee, please."
Strike cruiser Gotthammar powered smoothly through the void, its vast engines operating at less than half capacity, its wing of escorts keepimg pace comfortably across the ten thousand kilometre-wide patrol formation.
With feline grace and the alertness of a hawk, Tzula Digriiz prowled through the benighted corridors of the museum.
For a week Mr R. Childan had been anxiously watching the mail.
The wizard looked over the gameboard at Death.
The ghost image collapsed into smoke.
Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driger would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake.
“Get your ass out of my chair.”
„A billion spoons!“ he cried and started his out-of-body experience with a smile on his palms.
With a crackle like a rainstorm, our cruiser dropped out of warp and into a sea of pink light.
It was the day my grandmother exploded.
Apparently I am what is known as an Unreliable Narrator, though of course if you believe everything you’re told you deserve whatever you get.
There was a man and he had eight sons.
Against the stars a turtle passes, carrying four elephants on its shell.
This is a story about memory.
Every day, Commander Sam Vimes of the City Watch would be home at six o'clock sharp to read to Young Sam, who was one year old
The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn't sure it was worth all the effort.
“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.”
“Mum, just take the meds, ok?” Mora sighed.
I know I'm not an ordinary ten year old kid.
"Introducing their Royal Majesties, King Aurileous and Queen Osmada Cavelle."
Friday, 5 July 2013, Morning, There is a pile of clothing on the side of the train tracks.
It's the sixth night when the hunters find us.
Teleportation killed the Mona Lisa.
Madam, I sit down to give you an undeniable proof of my considering your desires as indispensable orders.
The wind came across the bay like something living.
In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco – the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity – had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo.
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.
If you were to look for the little island of Tana Masa on a map you would find it right on the equator slightly to the west of Sumatra.
He recrossed his legs, comfortable on the Club chair, and gazed out through the floor-to-ceiling window, pretending to consider the question. 
The storm ripped its way through the almost never-ending darkness that encircled Peladon.
I bet there aren't many people who can say they've changed human history.
Steve sat perfectly still, his finger on the firing button, his eyes straining the horizon for first signs of trouble.
Call it a hunt.
May I state now, once and for all, that I did not see the bucket.
Few of the folk in Faërie would have anything to do with the computer salesman.
Magus MacCullen patted the neck of his mule, and the gesture made the pouch at his belt jingle pleasantly.
Movies always begin with a panorama.
The colors in France were all wrong.
Dear Madam, I hope you won't think me forward, but I wanted to write to express my admiration for your novel, From an Eagle's Aerie.
The Chevalier was not dead when hey found her, but the scavengers had already begun to pick at her body.
The deck of the French ship was slippery with blood, heaving in the choppy sea; a stroke might as easily bring down the man making it as the intended target.
Arry opened the door to call the cats.
Hating the Earth was easy. 
Miles returned to consciousness with his eyes still closed.
It was Phyphor's birthday.
Sung was a land which was famous far and wide, simply because it was so often and so richly insulted.
It was Third Foal of Seventh Cohort in the year Khmar 18, and the season, of course, was snow.
Drake Douay had his sixteenth birthday two months before the start of the year Khmar 17.
In winter in Alliance 4324 Sean Sarazin was again wounded in combat.
Mighty are the labours of the redactors of Odrum, and merciless is their diligence.
The Witchlord's sons were three in number, and Sken-Pitilkin was lecturing all three when the Witchlord himself intruded on their lesson.
It was the dead end of winter and Parker was riding through the Little Sally pass, his saddlebags filled with a payroll he really oughtn't have, wearing every stitch of clothing he owned and wishing he was someplace warm, like Hell.
Cold rain drizzled on the dark London streets - at least, it looked cold.
Senses nearly overpowered by the scent of sweat gunpowder and onions, Tomas followed his nose through the 1st Aydori Volunteers, searching for his greatcoat.
This is not the end of the world, Ross told himself.
People who knew Chester and Serena Wolcott socially would have placed money on the idea that the couple would never choose to have children.
2198 in the calendar of the gethes.
Before Rick spoke, I saw from his expression what was coming.
How on earth could I have let them talk me into it?
“They’re sending us Rust, somebody who goes by Blossom, and Halt.”
I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.
The volcano that had reared Tratua up from the Pacific depths had been sleeping now for half a million years.
From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that--a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.
Zora  Sometimes I just need to go for a walk.
Waking up doesn’t hurt.
When Otto von Lambert was informed by the police that his wife Tina had been found dead and violated at the foot of the Al-Hakim ruin, and that the crime was as yet unsolved, the psychiatrist, well known for his book on terrorism, had the corpse transported by helicopter across the Mediterranean, suspended in its coffin by ropes from the bottom of the plane, so that it trailed after it slightly, over vast stretches of sunlit land, through shreds of clouds, across the Alps in a snowstorm, and later through rain showers, until it was gently reeled down into an open grave surrounded by a mourning party, and covered with earth, whereupon Lambert, who had noticed that F., too, had filmed the event, briefly scrutinized her and, closing his umbrella despite the rain, demanded that she and her team visit him that same evening, since he had an assignment for her that could not be delayed.
So, how do you feel about polyamory?
He floated on the rising wind, the setting sun’s last warmth at his back.
Jack Holloway found himself squinting, the orange sun full in his eyes.
Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies' eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde's Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde's door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.
He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher—the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum.
A month before Blood Maiden started her senior year at Himinbjorg High, her best friend gave birth to a raven.
April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.
Day jolts awake beside me.
I didn't know how long I had been in the king's prison.
The queen waited, sitting at the window, she watched the lights of the town glow in the last of the long twighlight
On a certain day in June, 19—, a young man was making his way on foot northward from the great City to a town or place called Edgewood, that he had been told of but had never visited.
If on a sunny day you climb the steep path leading up from the little wooden bridge still referred to around here as 'the Bridge of Hesitation', you will not have to walk far before the roof of my house becomes visible between the tops of two gingko trees. 
Because he had once been human, the King Under Stone sometimes found himself plagued by human emotions.
Once upon a time, in a faraway country, there was a woman who lived by herself in the middle of a great forest.
The Day after my mother died, the priest and I wrapped her body in a gray shroud and carried her to the village church.
"It's only a rumor," Abuji said as I cleared the table. 
My father's father was a Methodist minister.
They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles.
In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.
It was a nice day.
He drank his way across the narrow sea.
“We should start back,” Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them.
The comet’s tail spread across the dawn, a red slash that bled above the crags of Dragonstone like a wound in the pink and purple sky.
The day was grey and bitter cold, and the dogs would not take the scent.
“Dragons,” said Mollander. He snatched a withered apple off the ground and tossed it hand to hand.
Where to finish?
He’s been a legend in his own lifetime.
Nothing but stars, scattered across the blackness as though the Creator had smashed the windscreen of his car and hadn’t bothered to stop to sweep up the pieces.
This is where the gods play games with the lives of men, on a board which is at one and the same time a simple playing area and the whole world.
They lay in the dark, guarding.
And in the twilight of the mouth of the cave, the geode hatched, and the Brothers were born.
Some things start before other things.
Through the shredded black clouds a fire moved like a dying star, falling back to earth— —the earth, that is, of the Discworld— —but unlike any star had ever done before, it sometimes managed to steer its fall, sometimes rising, sometimes twisting, but inevitably heading down.
This is the bright candlelit room where the life-timers are stored—shelf upon shelf of them, squat hourglasses, one for every living person, pouring their fine sand from the future into the past.
Sam Vimes sighed when he heard the scream, but he finished shaving before he did anything about it.
The Morris dance is common to all inhabited worlds in the multiverse.
The man in the gray overcoat had no eyes.
There was an error, somewhere.
There was an error, somewhere.
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.
It was Sunday evening when the TV people showed up
This is the Discworld, which travels through space on the back of four elephants which themselves stand on the shell of Great A’Tuin, the sky turtle.
The wind howled.
It was a warm spring night when a fist knocked at the door so hard that the hinges bent.
Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.
When the storm came, it hit the hills like a hammer.
It came crackling over the hills, like an invisible fog.
Why was it, Tiffany Aching wondered, that people liked noise so much?
The rumor spread through the city like wildfire (which had quite often spread through Ankh-Morpork since its citizens had learned the words “fire insurance”).
The wind howled.
According to the First Scroll of Wen the Eternally Surprised, Wen stepped out of the cave where he had received enlightenment and into the dawning light of the first day of the rest of his life.
Now consider the tortoise and the eagle.
Rats!
They say the world is flat and supported on the back of four elephants who themselves stand on the back of a giant turtle.
The bees of Death are big and black, they buzz low and somber, they keep their honey in combs of wax as white as altar candles.
This is where the dragons went.
This is a story about magic and where it goes and perhaps more importantly where it comes from and why, although it doesn’t pretend to answer all or any of these questions.
THE FLOTILLAS OF THE DEAD sailed around the world on underwater rivers.
It was midnight in Ankh-Morpork’s Royal Art Museum.
It was a moonless night, which was good for the purposes of Solid Jackson.
The goblin experience of the world is the cult or perhaps religion of Unggue.
Polly cut off her hair in front of the mirror, feeling slightly guilty about not feeling very guilty about doing so.
Against the stars a turtle passes, carrying four elephants on its shell.
There was a man and he had eight sons.
The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn’t sure it was worth all the effort.
Once upon a time, a girl named September grew very tired indeed of her parents' house, where  she washed the same pink and yellow teacups and matching gravy boats every day, slept on the same  embroidered pillow, and played with the same small and amiable dog.
Papa explains the war like this: "When the elephants dance, the chickens must be careful."
In my earliest memory, my grandfather is bald as a stone when he takes me to see the tigers.
We are on our way to Budapest: Bastard and Chipo and Godknows and Sbho and Stina and me.
I remember well the first time I saw the magic of the Plainspeople.
 Call me Ishmael.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
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.
Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure.
It was a pleasure to burn.
It began with the day when it was almost the Fifth of November, and a doubt arose in some breast - Robert's, I fancy - as to the quality of the fireworks laid in for the Guy Fawkes celebration.
The child's world changed late one afternoon, though she didn't know it.
The citadel of Troizen, where the palace stands, was built by giants before anyone remembers.
It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future.
It was dolphin weather, when I sailed into Piraeus with my comrades of the Cretan bull-ring.
Trade season came around again.
Oh damn!' said Lord Peter Wimsey at Piccadilly Circus.
Lord Peter Wimsey stretched himself luxuriously between the sheets provided by the Hôtel Meurice.
That's torn it!' said Lord Peter Wimsey.
Grant lay on his high white cot and stared at the ceiling.
Logan didn't have to open his eyes to know that morning had arrived.
It was six o'clock of a March morning, and still dark.
Moscow can be a cold, hard place in the winter.
No one knew for certain when the trouble started at the Colgan School.
The hottest day of the summer so far was drawing to a close and a drowsy silence lay over the large, square houses of Privet Drive.
His birth certificate reads Muzikayise McCarthy, but nobody calls him that except his grandfather and anyone looking for a busted lip.
The end is not the end.
The sun is not the sun.
I walk to the bus station by myself.
Imagine this: You're in your favorite bookstore, scanning the shelves.
It was a Monday of all days when it happened.
Gregor had pressed his forehead against the screen for so long, he could feel a pattern of tiny checks above his eyebrows.
When Gregor opened his eyes he had the distinct impression someone was watching him.
Even if she hadn't been the last person to walk through the turnstile at Warren Street tube station, Jack Barker would have noticed the tall, slender woman in the navy-blue, tigh-length jacket with a matching pleated skirt short enough to reveal a well-turned ankle.
Gregor stared in the bathroom mirror for a minute, steeling himself.
Gregor sat on his bed tracing the scars with his fingertips.
Gregor's back pressed into the cold stone floor as he stared up at the words on the ceiling.
I suppose a lot of teenage girls feel invisible sometimes, like they just disappear.
"Just be yourself," my mother said, as if that were easy.
"We're moving."
"Targets acquired, ten o'clock."
"Where am I?"
The water was still as we walked beside it.
Four marble gargoyles glared down from the roof of the stately home in San Francisco's Sea Cliff district.
THE FIRST RULE OF ESPIONAGE was the one that the Agency never taught you. 
THE MOON BLEW UP WITHOUT WARNING AND FOR NO APPARENT reason.
The two men appeared out of nowhere, a few yards apart in the narrow, moonlit lane.
Tony Stark, former enfant terrible of the ballet world, is back.
Had he but known that before the day was over he would discover the hidden dimensions of the universe, Kit might have been better prepared.
The heel of my white kidskin boot ripped a six-inch gash in the hem of my skirt as I whipped around the corner.
It was nearing midnight and the Prime Minister was sitting alone in his office, reading a long memo that was slipping through his brain without leaving the slightest trace of meaning behind.
The phenomenon known as ley leaping or ley travel is an endeavour fraught with complication and error.
The villagers of Little Hangleton still called it "the Riddle House," even though it had been many years since the Riddle family had lived there.
The pianist’s hands glided across the keys, spreading out to left and right, fingers striking keys in unison.
Harry Potter was a highly unusual boy in many ways.
Is there any sensation equal to that produced by the first lover and the first proposal coming to a girl in a large family of girls?
Not for the first time, an argument had broken out over breakfast at number four, Privet Drive.
School is the armpit of life.
The rabbit nosed its way carefully through the tall, dry grass.
My husband died, suddenly, on a cold, dark night wrapped in ice, on a dead-end road, in our bed. 
It was on a sunny summer day in June that my brother got religion. 
Every day the boys woke when the lights came on at 0600.
THE CHANGELING'S DECISION TO STEAL A DRAGON AND ESCAPE was born, though she did not know it then, the night the children met to plot the death of their supervisor.
Honoured godfather, with those words I begin the journal I engaged myself to keep for you - no words could be more suitable!
Dr. Nahum Fischelson paced back and forth in his garret room in Market Street, Warsaw.
Secunits don't care about the news.
It really was a hell of a blast.
Who was blowing on the nape of my neck?
THE YOUNG CANADIAN, WHO COULD NOT HAVE BEEN MORE than fifteen, had hesitated too long.
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.
MARCUS SUND CAME AWAKE ALL AT ONCE.
My computer is winking at me knowingly when I sit down at my desk.
I lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of the Bitchun Society, to learn ten languages; to compose three symphonies; to realize my boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World; to see the death of the workplace and of work.
My name is Kathy H.
Snowman wakes before dawn.
Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.
"No! I don't want the mangosteen."
Polly sighed and laid her book face down on her bed.
This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.
I have been acquainted with the smell of death.
Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Nicholas Espinoza was too old to be at a Communist party.
I have lived for a very long time however you measure it, but I never grew old before. 
Very few people  know that Pico della Mirandola stole the head of the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
She turned into a tree.
We are tourists.
The tide was going out.
When I die, I will leave nothing but junk.
There was no wind; sea flat as a plate met sky the same colour as the water.
Hebe,' the old man called.
Nicholas Thornby peered needle-eyed into the delicatessen.
I thought you said you had a car?
On parting with Edmund, Poppy Carew sank into a state of mind where physical need and emotion ceased as though she had been pole-axed.
Three hours after she had graduated from high school, Izzy sat on a park bench next to her art teacher, Mr. Jackson, and told him that she was pregnant.
Richard kept his head down.
One day you know more dead people than live ones.
The call came at 12:03.
She stood at the bus stop, shuffling her feet.
Don't get in the car.
"Someone bloody famous," said the hoarse voice on the end of the line, "better've died, Strike."
Some things start before other things.
My name is Melisande Stokes and this is my story.
I inherited my brother's life.
There is a pile of clothing on the side of the train tracks.
It was only a duck pond, out at the back of the farm.
Hot, thought the Parisians.
Shadow had done three years in prison.
It begins, as most things begin, with a song.
They set a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair.
The ghost was her father's parting gift, presented by a black-clad secretary in a departure lounge at Narita.
The courier presses his forehead against layers of glass, argon, high-impact plastic.
Death and rebirth played out across the heavens, every star a furnace of creation and an inferno of destruction.
After Slitscan, Laney heard about another job from Rydell, the night security man at the Chateau.
Brunsgatte towered around him like a badly-ordered dream.
Through this evening's tide of faces unregistered, unrecognized, amid hurrying black shoes, furled umbrellas, the crowd descending like a single organism into the station's airless heart, comes Shinya Yamazaki, his notebook clasped beneath his arm like the egg case of some modest but moderately successful marine species.
Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.
"Rausch," said the voice in Hollis Henry's cell.
Inchmale hailed a cab for her, the kind that had always been black, when she'd first known this city.
They didn't think Flynne's brother had PTSD, but that sometimes the haptics glitched him.
Last night's delivery was easier than the others.
It was a balmy November day in Stalingrad, 14 below, 12 feet of snow, near-blizzard conditions.
Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you.
It's freezing -- an extraordinary 0 Fahrenheit -- and it's snowing, and in the language that is no longer mine, the snow is qanik -- big, almost weightless crystals falling in clumps and covering the ground with a layer of pulverized white frost.
Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede jacket, sneakers and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia.
"He's all right."
The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers.
There had been a great deal of snow that December, followed by hard frost.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Well hello, Peter Pascoe!
The snapshots had become almost as dim as memories.
No one knew how it came about that Dalziel was making a speech.
All nights should be so dark, all winters so warm, all headlights so dazzling.
Died on me finally.
The gulls swept over Dover.
All right.
This much we know: that the Innensburg bloom began with a single spore; that Immune response was sluggish and ineffective; that the first witness on the scene, one Holger Sanchez Mach, broke the nearest emergency glass, dropped two magnums and a witch's tit, and died.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
Hayden Griffin was plucking a fish when the gravity bell rang.
...it was green, all green, all over me, choking, the water, then boiling at first, and roaring, and seething, till all settled down, cooling, clearing, and my sight up drifting with the few last bubbles, till through the glassy water I see the sky clearly, and the sun bright as a lemon, and birds with wings wide as a windmill's sails slowly drifting round it, and over the bank's rim small dark faces peering, timid as beasts at their watering, nostrils sniffing danger and thy eyes bright and wary, till a current turns  me over, and I drift, and still am drifting, and...
The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years -- if it ever did end -- began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.
This is what happened.
Mrs. Florence Aldermann was distressed by the evidence of neglect all around her.
The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.
On a cold and storm-racked November night, while Peter and Ellie Pascoe were still celebrating with wine and wassail the first birthday which their daughter Rose had greeted with huge indifference, three old men, who felt far from indifferent, died.
I never knew her in life.
Death?
In his fingers, the glass lay like something trapped, sweating light.
The forest was ablaze.
We smelled it long before we saw it.
Another fine mess you've got me into,' said Detective-Superintendant Andrew Dalziel.
Dear Mr. Dalziel, You don't know me.
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice -- not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
It was the best of crimes, it was the worst of crimes; it was born of love, it was spawned by greed; it was completely unplanned, it was coldly premeditated; it was an open-and-shut case, it was a locked-room mystery; it was the act of a guileless girl, it was the work of a scheming scoundrel; it was the end of an era, it was the start of an era; a man with the face of a laughing boy reigned in Washington, a man with the features of a lugubrious hound ruled in Westminster; an ex-marine got a job at a Dallas book repository, an ex-Minister of War lost a job in politics; a group known as the Beatles made their first million, a group known as the Great Train Robbers made their first two million; it was the time when those who had fought to save the world began to surrender it to those they had fought to save it for; Dixon of Dock Green was giving way to Z-Cars, Bond to Smiley, the Monsignors to the Maharishis, Matt Dillon to Bob Dylan, l.s.d. to LSD, as the sunset glow of the old Golden Age imploded into the psychedelic dawn of the new Age of Glitz.
The man came in without knocking.
This all started when Joe Sixsmith came sneaking out of a small side door at St Monkey's.
Christmas.
The Boyling Corner Chapel Choir sped across the heart of England like a nest of singing birds and as they crossed the Welsh border there was a spontaneous outburst of 'We'll Keep A Welcome in the Hillsides.'
Joe Sixsmith was adrift in space.
"There he is!"
I possess the Englishman's usual ambivalent attitude to the police.
It is a truthe fairly universally acknowledged that all men are born equal, but the family Guillemard, pointing to the contra-evidence of their own absence from the Baronetage, have long been settled in Yorkshire without allowing such philosophical quibbles to distress or vex them.
Monday morning, start of a new week, air bright as ice in a crystal glass, brandy-gold sun pouring from delft-blue sky, the old bracken glowing on the rolling moors, the trees still pied with their unblasted leaves, the pastures still green with their unmuddied grass, as October runs into November and thinks it's September still.
The day they drowned Dendale I were seven years old.
When I go to see my father, he doesn't know me.
Hi, there.
That's it, man.
The war had been over for three weeks.
On July 8th, 1992, a small girl woke up in her bed in her family house in the Australian state of Victoria and knew exactly who she was.
never much of a street
Hi Cass!
Dear friend, I am writing to you because she said you listen and understand and didn't try to sleep with that person at that party even though you could have.
Summer 1963; Profumo disgraced; Ward dead; The Beatles' Please Please Me top album; Luther King having his dream; JFK fast approaching the end of his; the Cold War at its chilliest; the Wind of Change blowing ever more strongly through Colonial Africa, with its rising blasts already being felt across the Gate of Tears in British-controlled Aden.
Midnight.
As she woke up in the pod, she remembered three things.
I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him.
The building has gold columns and a massive doorway, a mural depicting Giants, with bodies sticking out of their mouths like limp cigarettes.
Harry was kicking it at the store when he met Mr. Yates.
They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles.
I sat back in my chair, jabbed the cap onto my pen, threw it into the drawer, and abandoned myself to the flood of satisfaction, relief, and anticipation that was let loose by that simple action.
Once there was a forest of hickory and beech, sprucy-pine, birch and oak.
If radio is the medium of the ugly person, then I can live my life as a voice and the world will be perfect.
The envelope slapped down onto the desk ten inches from my much-abused eyes, instantly obscuring the black lines of Hebrew letters that had begun to quiver an hour before.
From my first breath in this world, all I wanted was a good set of lungs and the air to fill them with - given circumstances, you might presume, for an American baby of the twentieth century.
In the world of the Dunelands, Amara was sleeping.
A DC8 droned above.
The telegram in my hand read: RUSSELL NEED YOU IN DEVONSHIRE. IF FREE TAKE EARLIEST TRAIN CORYTON. IF NOT FREE COME ANYWAY. BRING COMPASS. HOLMES
Rain fell that night, a fine, whispering rain.
During the final week of December 1918, shortly before my nineteenth birthday, I vanished into British-occupied Palestine in the company of my friend and mentor Sherlock Holmes.
Home, my soul sighed.
Hack first heard about Jennifer Government at the watercooler.
Once upon a time, in a lush tropical land of agricultural riches and shining white buildings, there was a young queen who spent the night tied up in a tent, panicking.
Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.
It was only a duck pond, out at the back of the farm.
The dreams began when we left Bombay.
It was a dramatic setting for a human sacrifice, give my murderer credit.
"The easthound bays at night," Jolly said.
I remember being born.
Kate Martinelli had been in any number of weird places during her years as a cop.
It was 7 minutes after midnight.
In the old days, in the years that have gone before us, the land and sea felt a great emptiness, a yearning.
Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we?
I am not as I once was.
I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
My great-grandmother Morrison fixed a book rest to her spinning wheel so that she could read while she was spinning, or so the story goes.
As homecomings go, it was not auspicious.
"Well, boy," the ringmaster said.
Two clever London gentlemen.
Alicia didn't feel well.
There is nothing more human than the ghost story.
Honestly, Holmes?
All bois, except one, become grownups. 
The wind howls, the rain comes down in sheets, and Patty is still dead.
The girls were never present for the entrance interviews.
The big man had the brains of a tortoise, but even he was beginning to look alarmed.
People who knew Chester and Serena Wolcott socially would have placed money on the idea that the couple would never choose to have children.
"It's a rock, Holmes."
Irony comes in many flavours, sweet to bitter.
How five crows managed to lift a twenty-pound baby boy into the air was beyond Prue, but that was certainly the least of her worries.
It was a dumb thing to do but it wasn't that dumb.
Sam Vimes sighed when he heard the scream, but he finished shaving before he did anything about it. 
I am Moth, a girl from the lowest part of Chrystie Street, born to a slum-house mystic and the man who broke her heart.
Thud...that was the sound the heavy club made as it connected with the head.
The goblin experience of the world is the cult or perhaps religion of Unggue.
The flotillas of the dead sailed around the world on underwater rivers.
They lay in the dark, guarding.
It is hard to understand nothing, but the multiverse is full of it.
This is a story about memory.
It came crackling over the hills, like an invisible fog.
When the storm came, it hit the hills like a hammer.
Why was it, Tiffany Aching wondered, that people liked noise so much?
It was born in the darkness of the Circle Sea; at first just a soft floating thing, washed back and forth by tide after tide.
This is the story of the Going Home.
And so the nomes settled down in their new home, quite certain that everything was going to be All Right.
Let the eye of your imagination be a camera...
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
It was midnight in Ankh-Morpork's Royal Art Museum.
Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
Harry Potter was a highly unusual boy in many ways.
Not for the first time, an argument had broken out over breakfast at number four, Privet Drive.
The villagers of Little Hangleton still called it "the Riddle House," even though it had been many years since the Riddle family had lived there.
The hottest day of the summer so far was drawing to a close and a drowsy silence lay over the large, square houses of Privet Drive.
It was nearing midnight and the Prime Minister was sitting alone in his office, reading a long memo that was slipping through his brain without leaving the slightest trace of meaning behind.
The two men appeared out of nowhere, a few yards apart in the narrow, moonlit lane.
When I was 12 years old, I hid under a table and heard my sister kill a king. 
The bells of St. Mark's were ringing changes up on the mountain when Bud skated over to the mod parlor to update his skull gun.
Two tires fly.
Enoch rounds the corner just as the executioner raises the noose above the woman's head.
He was not merely awakened, but detonated out of an uncommonly long and repetitive dream.
"Men half your age and double your weight have been slain on these wastes by Extremity of Cold," said the Earl of Lostwithel, Lord Warden of the Stannaries, and Rider of the Forest and Chase of Dartmoor, to one of his fellow-travelers.l
"Do your neighbors burn one another alive?"  was how Fraa Orolo began his conversation with Artisan Flec.
The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.
"Test... Test... Testing for real. Let's see if you work now, baby."
There are times even now, when I awake at four o'clock in the morning with the terrible fear that I have overslept; when I imagine that my father is waiting for me in the room below the darkened stairs or that the shorebound men are tossing pebbles against my window while blowing their hands and stomping their feet impatiently on the frozen steadfast earth.
You want stories of Siris, do you?
In a distant and second-hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part...
It was night again.
On the twenty-eighth day of June, 1960, which is the planned day of my deliverance, I awake at exactly six A.M. to find myself on my eighteenth birthday, listening to the ringing of the bells from the Catholic church which I now attend only reluctantly on Sundays.
It was a nice day.
At midnight he looked up at the neon Coca-Cola clock and realized with a taut emptiness that he had already stayed too late and perhaps was even now forever lost.
It is evening during the summer that I am ten years old and I am on a train with my parents as it rushes toward the end of eastern Nova Scotia.
"We'll just have to sell him," I remember my mother saying with finality.
Now in the early evening the sun is flashing everything in gold.
I am speaking now of a July in the early 1970s and it is in the morning just after the sun has risen following a night of heavy rains.
It is August now, towards the end, and the weather can no longer be trusted.
I am speaking here of a time when I was eleven and lived with my family on our small farm on the west coast of Cape Breton.
It was the summer after the seventh grade that saw me truly smitten with the calf club wish.
I am writing this in December.
He thought of himself, in the middle of that April, as a man who had made it through another winter.
Once there was a family with a Highland name who lived beside the sea.
I don't remember when I first heard the story but I remember the first time I heard it and remembered it.
All day the rain fell upon the island and she waited.
In the early morning he was awakened by the dog's pulling at the Condon's woollen blanket, which was the top covering upon his bed.
I realized we were different, really different, on a rainy morning in 1987.
I suppose that my mother could have been a witch if she had chosen to.
Here is an account of a few years in the life of Quoyle, born in Brooklyn and raised in a shuffle of dreary upstate towns.
I warned you I am a stubborn old man.
Mabel had known there would be silence.
Mariam was five years old the first time she heard the word harami.
Most of the crowd at Mallorys Bar & Sleep over in Delta Sector had no idea what was really going on.
The night before Geraden come for her, Terisa Morgan had a dream—one of the few she could ever remember.
Aleksey Fyodovorich Karamazov was the third son of a landowner in our district, Fyodor Pavolovich Karamazov, so noted in his time (and even now still recollected among us) for his tragic and fishy death, which occurred just thirteen years ago and which I shall report in its proper context.
I am he, who once with an immortal man did journey.
It was a warm afternoon in early September when I first met the Illustrated Man.
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.
It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice in the other end asking for someone he was not.
I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.
"Junior!" bellowed Pater.
The early morning streetcar, swaying and rattling along its tracks, did as much to divert my attention from the book I was reading as the contents of the book itself.
The visiphone chimed when Peri had just gotten into her dinner gown.
Dare I say it?
Jupiter--the magnificent planet with a diameter of 86,500 miles, having 119 times the surface and 1,300 times the volume of the earth--lay beneath them.
Lurine, was pretty, petite, and eighteen.
The career of Hawk Carse, taken broadly, divides itself into three main phases, and it is with the Ku Sui adventures of the second phase that we have been concerned in this intimate narrative.
With many expressions of sympathy and interest Edith listened to the story of my dream.
The happiness of some lives is distributed pretty evenly over the whole stretch from the cradle to the grave, while that of others comes all at once, glorifying some particular epoch and leaving the rest in shadow.
If the following pages are ever to see the light of day it will be because they have been stolen from me.
Cautiously the young flight engineer stretched his cramped legs across some gadgets in his crowded little compartment.
The telescreen lit up promptly at eight a.m. Smiling Brad came on with his usual greeting.
It was a week before the Lhari ship went into warp-drive, and all that time young Bart Steele had stayed in his cabin. 
Beyond the spaceport gates, the men of the Kharsa were hunting down a thief.
I had been asleep when a terrific noise awoke me.
I am a very old man; how old I do not know.
As I stood upon the bluff before my cottage on that clear cold night in the early part of March, 1886, the noble Hudson flowing like the grey and silent spectre of a dead river below me, I felt again the strange, compelling influence of the mighty god of war, my beloved Mars, which for ten long and lonesome years I had implored with outstretched arms to carry me back to my lost love.
In the shadows of the forest that flanks the crimson plain by the side of the Lost Sea of Korus in the Valley Dor, beneath the hurtling moons of Mars, speeding their meteoric way close above the bosom of the dying planet, I crept stealthily along the trail of a shadowy form that hugged the darker places with a persistency that proclaimed the sinister nature of its errand.
Upon a massive bench of polished ersite beneath the gorgeous blooms of a giant pimalia a woman sat.
Shea had just beaten me at chess, as usual, and, also as usual, I had gleaned what questionable satisfaction I might by twitting him with this indication of failing mentality by calling his attention for the nth time to that theory, propounded by certain scientists, which is based upon the assertion that phenomenal chess players are always found to be from the ranks of children under twelve, adults over seventy-two or the mentally defective—a theory that is lightly ignored upon those rare occasions that I win.
Several years had elapsed since I had found the opportunity to do any big-game hunting; for at last I had my plans almost perfected for a return to my old stamping-grounds in northern Africa, where in other days I had had excellent sport in pursuit of the king of beasts.
In the first place please bear in mind that I do not expect you to believe this story.
It must have been a little after three o'clock in the afternoon that it happened—the afternoon of June 3rd, 1916.
I am forced to admit that even though I had traveled a long distance to place Bowen Tyler's manuscript in the hands of his father, I was still a trifle skeptical as to its sincerity, since I could not but recall that it had not been many years since Bowen had been one of the most notorious practical jokers of his alma mater.
This is the tale of Bradley after he left Fort Dinosaur upon the west coast of the great lake that is in the center of the island.
Since earliest childhood I have been strangely fascinated by the mystery surrounding the history of the last days of twentieth century Europe. 
As he dropped the last grisly fragment of the dismembered and mutilated body into the small vat of nitric acid that was to devour every trace of the horrid evidence which might easily send him to the gallows, the man sank weakly into a chair and throwing his body forward upon his great, teak desk buried his face in his arms, breaking into dry, moaning sobs.
Here is a story that has lain dormant for seven hundred years.
Once upon a time in Colorado lived a man named Abednego Danner and his wife, Matilda.
When Agustus came out on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake – not a very big one.
Those who appreciate ginseng—either for its supposed medicinal qualities, or for its distinctive flavor—are willing to pay inordinately high prices for it.
On they went, singing “Rest Eternal”, And whenever they stopped, their feet, the horses, and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing. 
Since daybreak the small city called Margaron, the Pearl, had been hearing dull thumps from outside its walls, the sound of a giant patiently threshing grain with a flail made from a whole fir-tree.
Dark and dank. 
A host of sparrows were hopping through the bright-berried pyracantha outside the kitchen window
Outside the rain beat in horizontal brush strokes across the shrubbery.
God wasn’t answering tonight.
The soldier was supposed to come in for debriefing and reset, but there was nowhere to go and no one to debrief him.
It's an unseasonably warm winter morning, and I am in a good mood.
“When James asked me to be the best man at his wedding, I didn’t know what to say at first."
I shut the door of the old Victorian behind me, and the stuffy atmosphere closed in: overheated, dry, and redolent of mothballs.
Nora was feeling mixed about the soiree she’d gotten herself an invite to. She’d been assured it’d help her career to be seen there, and she would be noticed and noted despite the mask.
“I can’t believe you did that!” Evelyn said to her roommate. “Naked online?”
It had been months since Riley and Teddi’s first bondage session, and both girls were silently eager for more.
Nova bounced onto the stage erected in the middle of the field, her dual colored cotton candy hair, tied into pigtails, floating around her head, her naked form befitting an avatar of whatever Goddess of Female Nudity the spritely woman glorified. Her shapely breasts bounced unbound.
It is an unusual practice Jamie adopted. At work, running errands, even in her apartment, she remained fully dressed, and wouldn’t even humor the thought of casually removing even a single item of clothing. Why would she? It’s indecent.
Work as a pizza delivery driver can be very interesting, in both good ways and bad.
Dead dwarves don't dance!
The truth, Max exclaimed, gesturing wildly at his presentation, is that no one really likes sandwiches. 
A ship appeared on the horizon, which, this being Montana, was disconcerting. 
Love is like a circus, I cried, and meant it, even though I didn’t know why. 
I headed through the door, down the street, up a tree, and out on a limb. 
A short, angry man approached me and handed me a poison gun. 
And there before him he saw a giant, pulsating, rotating eye, lidless and thoughtless, listening to everything it saw, but missing the point. 
Imagine a perfect sphere, about four inches across, made of a warm, shiny metal. Now 
Never stand on a chair with wheels. 
It takes a big man to admit he’s actually two kids in a trench coat. 
Every day, my best friend greets me at the door, barking and wagging his tail. 
Survivors of the plane crash told reporters that conditions inside the wreckage were tedious and scary, especially during times of great humidity. 
Did you ever get the feeling that someone was sneaking up behind you? 
Coming to life wasn't the problem. Having sex was.
We were wanderers, aimless, and me the worst of all. 
You would think that it would be impossible to find anything new in the world, creatures that no man has seen before, one-of-a-kind oddities in which nature has taken a backseat to the coursing pulse of the fantastical and the marvelous.
The five small craft passed from the shadow, emerging with the suddenness of coins thrown into sunlight.
Veldt to scrub to fields to farms to these first tumbling houses that rise from the earth.
I am not as I once was.
The stains of rust seemed to map blood seas on the black, pocked surface of Mock's Vane.
The boy on the table had been lucky.
Lobsters are said to live forever; love is sadly not a lobster.
Bad luck, as my mentor and surrogate father, Herbie Mott, used to say, arrives on the wind.
It was the fifth clone ship to go out from Moonbase on Project Consciousness and he leaned forward to watch it carefully as his duty demanded. 
My name is Lionel Savage, I am twenty-two years old, I am a poet, and I do not love my wife
It was midnight to the second with a full moon overhead when three women were being killed in three separate locations.
I will never forget the day my family got cut off from the Internet.
Attending Burning Man made me simultaneously one of the most photographed people on the planet and one of the least surveilled humans in the modern world.
Of the eight golf courses that beautified the desolate stretches of Oahu, all of which were within driving distance of Honolulu, the Manapula Country CLun was one of the best - as green as some mammoth pool table, with a clear look at Pearl Harbor to the north and Diamond Head to the south. 
It was early in January, just after the turn of the year, when Anton Cormoris began writing his letters to the girl in the restaurant, and at first it seemed the most natural thing in the world.
Maggi struggled up the hill, swapping her bulging briefcase from hand to hand every five yards.
I can't believe I am once more on the rack of romance.
At first dawn the swathes of rain drifting eastwards across the Channel parted long enough to show that the chase had altered course.
But I put it to you, my lord, that prize-money is of essential importance to the Navy.
Captain Aubrey of the Royal Navy lived in a part of Hampshire well supplied with sea-officers, some of whom had reached flag-rank in Rodney's day while others were still waiting for their first command.
The breakfast-parlour was the most cheerful room in Ashgrove Cottage, and although the builders had ruined the garden with heaps of sand and unslaked lime and bricks, and although the damp walls of the new wing in which this parlour stood still smelt of plaster, the sun poured in, blazing on the covered silver dishes and lighting the face of Sophie Aubrey as she sat there waiting for her husband.
The warm monsoon blew gently from the east, wafting HMS Leopard into the bay of Pulo Batang.
The long harbour of Halifax in Nova Scotia on a long, long summer's day, and two frigates gliding iin on the tide of flood under their topsails alone: the first, since she had belonged to the United States navy until a few days before, wore the Stars and Stripes under a white ensign; the second showed no more than her own shabby colours, for she was HMS Shannon, the winner in that short and bloody action with the Chesapeake.
Marriage was once represented as a field of battle rather than a bed of roses, and perhaps there are some who may still support this view; but just as Dr. Maturin had made a far more unsuitable match than most, so he set about dealing with the situation in a far more compendious, peaceable and efficacious way than the great majority of husbands.
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.
Mrs. Merriam came to her back window, which saw Mrs. Fielding’s house and Pepper Street beyond, and looked anxiously down Pepper Street.
A gentle breeze from the north-east after a night of rain, and the washed sky over Malta had a particular quality in its light that sharpened the lines of the noble buildings, bringing out all the virtue of the stone; the air too was a delight to breathe, and the city of Valletta was as cheerful as though it were fortunate in love or as though it had suddenly heard good news. 
Mr. Arnold Waite–husband, parent, man of his word–invariably leaned back in his chair after his second cup of breakfast coffee and looked with some disbelief at his wife and two children.
Our house is old, and noisy, and full. When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books; we also own assorted beds and tables and chairs and rocking horses and lamps and doll dresses and shop models and paint brushes and literally thousands of socks.
Although the museum was well known to be a seat of enormous learning, its foundations had begun to sag.
I do not now have the slightest understanding of the events which got us out of one big white house which we rented into another, bigger white house which we own, at least in part.
After the funeral they came back to the house, now indisputably Mrs. Halloran’s.
My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood.
Pass the word for Captain Aubrey, pass the word for Captain Aubrey,' cried a sequence of voices, at first dim and muffled far aft on the flagship's maindeck, then growing louder and more distinct as the call wafted up to the quarterdeck and so along the gangway to the forecastle, where Captain Aubrey stood by the starboard thirty-two-pounder carronade contemplating the Emperor of Morocco's purple galley as it lay off Jumper's Bastion with the vast grey and tawny Rock of Gibraltar soaring behind it. while Mr. Blake, once a puny member of his midshipman's berth but now a tall, stout lieutenant almost as massive as his former captain, exxplained the new carriage he had invented, a carriage that should enable carronades to fire twice as fast, with  no fear of oversetting, twice as far and with perfect accuracy, thus virtually putting an end to war. 
I always believe in eating when I can.
The West Indies squadron lay off Bridgetown, sheltered from the north-east tradewind and basking in the brilliant sun.
The whole affair began so very quietly.
Marise had never once seen the sun, or breathed fresh air.
Ever since Jack Aubrey had been dismissed from the service, ever since his name, with its now meaningless seniority, had been struck off the list of post-captains, it had seemed to him that he was living in a radically different world; everything was perfectly familiar, from the smell of seawater and tarred rigging to the gentle heave of the deck under his feet, but the essence was gone and he was a stranger.
Why is London like Budapest?
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
In spite of the hurry, many wives and many sweethearts had come to see the ship off, and those members of her company who were not taken up with sailing her on her difficult course close-hauled to the brisk south-east breeze, watched the white flutter of their handkerchiefs far across the water until Black Point hid them entirely, shut them right out.
A hundred and fifty-seven castaways on a desert island in the South China Sea, the survivors of the wreck of HMS Diane, which had struck upon an uncharted rock and had there been shattered by a great typhoon some days later: a hundred and fifty-seven, but as they sat there round the edge of a flat bare piece of ground between high-water mark and the beginning of the forest they sounded like the full complement of a ship of the line, for this was Sunday afternoon, and the starboard watch, headed by Captain Aubrey, was engaged in a cricket-match against the Marines, under their commanding officer, Mr. Welby.
Standing at the frigate's taffrail, and indeed leaning upon it, Jack Aubrey considered her wake, stretching away neither very far nor emphatically over the smooth pure green-blue sea: a creditable furrow, however, in these light airs.
A purple ocean, vast under the sky and devoid of all visible life apart from two minute ships racing across its immensity.
Not everyone believes in mountains, yet there they are, in plain sight.
Thick weather in the chops of the Channel and a dirty night; with the strong north-east wind bringing rain from the low sky and racing cloud: Ushant somewhere away on the starboard bow, the Scillies to larboard, but never a light, never a star to be seen, and no observation for the last four days.
The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at three o’clock.
Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
Rain, rain, rain . . . my mother put her head through the window to let the neighbour know that I was nine, and they flattered me with the consolation that my birthday had brought showers of blessing.
Sir Joseph Blaine, a heavy, yellow-faced man in a suit of grey clothes and a flannel waistcoat, walked down St James's Street, across the park, and so to the Admiralty, which he entered from behind, opening the private door with a key and making his way to the large, shabby room in which he had his official being.
Most people in this world seem to live 'in character'; they have a beginning, a middle and an end, and the three are congruous one with another and true to the rules of their type.
The sudden rearmament that followed Napoleon's escape from Elba had done little to thin the ranks of unemployed sea-officers by the early spring of 1815.
Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we?
He walked as far as the hedge that signalled the edge of the airfield.
Beyond the horizon of the trees it was too black to see the sky.
My grandfather, the knife fighter, killed two Germans before he was eighteen.
Spring is here.
It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.
I was born with water on the brain.
Punting the prairie dog into the library was a mistake.
The Surprise, lying well out in the channel with Gibraltar half a mile away on her starboard quarter, lying at a single anchor with her head to the freshening north-west breeze, piped all hands at four bells in the afternoon watch; and at the cheerful sound her tender Ringle, detatched once more on a private errand for Lord Keith, cheered with the utmost good will, while the Surprises turned out with a wonderful readiness, laughing, beaming and thumping one another on the back in spite of a strong promise of rain and a heavy sea running already.
Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde’s Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.
Time seems to pass.
That was the year they murdered our president in Dallas.
Veldt to scrub to fields to farms to these first tumbling houses that rise from the earth.
"They say that when your head gets chopped off, it can still see and hear for a few seconds, so I'll have to go with beheading," said Spider Lee to Lulu Garou.
On one of our last car trips, near the end of my father's life as a man, we stopped by a river, and we took a walk to its banks, where we sat in the shade of an old oak tree.
I am a coffee-broker, and live at No. 37 Laurier Canal, Amsterdam.
It is only ten miles beyond the city that the river loses its momentum, drooling into the brackish estuary that feeds Iron Bay.
I wake up on a pile of smoldering garbage and leaves in the old Hollywood Forever cemetery behind the Paramount Studio lot on Melrose, though these last details don't come to me until later.
In years gone, women and men are cutting a line across the dirtland and dragging history with them.
Imagine shoving a cattle prod up a rhino's ass, shouting "April fool!", and hoping the rhino thinks it's funny.
In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women.
"Tell me," says the Frenchman.
I punch the tunes into the jukebox and make sure it's turned up loud.
"You know, Ms. Landry, you have the best skin I've ever seen on a corpse," Ember Denning told the body lying before her.
Footsteps.
I'm in a window seat at Donut Universe eating heart-crippling lumps of deep-fried dough with the Devil.
Freshly plowed earth and the perfume of women scented the night air.
You must go back with me to the autumn of 1827.
Everything I've worked for, dreamed about, studied, and planned...everything I've suffered and sacrificed and paid for with tears and strife.
Tell me about a complicated man
Ambrose had said she was a widow, and Ballard could only guess how her husband must have worked himself into an early grave trying to remain master of his household with such a wife.
When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.
You'd think the end of the world would be exciting, but this apocalypse is about as much fun as dental surgery.
I break his wrists so I don't have to break his neck.
The Gate was hidden among the moons of the sixth planet, and no one native to that solar system knew it when it powered up and the ship came through.
Thomas Abbot is taling about the end of the world, but I can't keep my eyes open.
One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister.
So far, being dead is about as much fun as a barbed-wire G-string.
The young man aimed his crossbow at the water, ready to fire a bolt of solid iron at the first glimpse of flesh beneath the surface.
For three straight nights Zoe dreamed about the black dog.
The angel, majestic in gossamer robes, stood on a mountaintop, taking it all in.
The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry.
The sixth floor of the Department of Peculiar Science looked exactly like an ordinary office in an ordinary office building and not the slightest bit like the home of a highly secret government agency.
On the day of the miracle, Isabel was kneeling at the cliff's edge, tending the small, newly made driftwood cross.
"Yield to me, Master of Crows, and I will make you ruler of kingdoms."
It started at one thirty on a cold Tuesday morning in January when Martin Turner, street performer and, in his own words, apprentice gigolo, tripped over a body in front of the West Portico of St. Paul's at Covent Garden.
Last summer I happened to be crossing the plains of Iowa in a season of intense heat, and it was my good fortune to have for a traveling companion James Quayle Burden—Jim Burden, as we still call him in the West.
They shoot the white girl first.
Olivia Blake stood half-naked in the rain and tried to think that she was dreaming.
He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
Anne Wilson stood at the shack's single grimy window and watched a tiny speck in the brilliant blue sky come closer, growing steadily larger until it became what she'd been hoping for—a single-engine plane.
Reid Landers leaned against the brick wall in a sliver of shade, shifting his rifle uneasily as the transgressors threw trash on the fire.
One of the problems with being a witch is when you ask the universe a question, it generally gives you an answer.
Five figures formed a pentagram around a freshly dug mound.
The odds weren't in our favour.
For a long time I used to go to bed early.
I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other.
In the same year, and on the same day of the same month, that his Sacred Majesty King George, the third of the name, came to his crown and kingdom, I was placed and settled as the minister of Dalmailing.
This is the Discworld, which travels through space on the back of four elephants which themselves stand on the shell of Great A'Tuin, the sky turtle.
The wind howled.
Like a school of jewel-toned tropical fish on the reef, the crowd in the marketplace suddenly veered away as QuiTai stepped off the veranda of the sunset-pink building into the town square.
This is a story about magic and where it goes and perhaps more importantly where it comes from and why, although it doesn't pretend to answer all or any of these questions.
The eviction notice was hanging on the door when they got back from the hospital.
My dog had made a point on a piece of fallow-ground, and led the curate and me two or three hundred yards over that and some stubble adjoining, in a breathless state of expectation, on a burning first of September.
The wind whistled through the high passes as we picked our way up the trail.
Brittany Morgan knew she was a good mother, no matter what other people said.
Mara came home on a Wednesday with a mild sunburn and a bank receipt for eighty-three thousand dollars stuffed indifferently in the front pocket of her jeans.
They say the world is flat and supported on the back of four elephants who themselves stand on the back of a giant turtle.
It was a moonless night, which was good for the purposes of Solid Jackson.
When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen.
It was a warm spring night when a fist knocked at the door so hard that the hinges bent.
Adam twisted up his nose.
You must go back with me to the autumn of 1827.
Corporal Carrot, Ankh-Morpork City Guard (Night Watch), sat down in his nightshirt, took up his pencil, sucked the end for a moment, and then wrote: "Dearest Mume and Dad, Well here is another fine Turnup for the Books, for I have been made Corporal!!
The only way to survive boys is to put them on the Ledge as often as possible.
This is where the dragons went.
I awake to cold and near darkness like I do every morning.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
One day, when he was naughty, Mr. Bunnsy looked over the hedge into Farmer Fred's field and saw it was full of fresh green lettuces.
They called themselves the Munrungs.
The topmost of the Penobscot Bay lighthouse was barely visible, the morning sun reflecting off its watchful eye.
That day, I had a bagel for breakfast and sold my soul to the devil.
I awake every morning with ink on my hands.
My working relationship with Lucifer began on a rainy Monday.
Leather was dreadful stuff to wear in the rain.
On the day that everything changed, Brent Foster's biggest concern was getting an hour to himself.
Roscommon came and laid waste to the garden an hour after dawn, about the time I usually get out of bed and he usually passes out on the shoulder of some freeway.
Dad twisted away from the steering wheel and glared, the veins in his leathery neck and temple bulging.
Reid wakes in darkness.
What in the name of Zeus ever possessed her to buy such a ghastly armoire?
On Laira's tenth birthday, the crone dragged her outside to see her mother burned at the stake.
The body lay naked and facedown, a deathly gray, spatters of blood staining the snow around it.
Something walloped me in the gut.
The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory.
It was a nice day.
Sarah Browning hurried through the halls of C. D. Napier High School, her head down.
Crap!
The Herdmans were absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world.
Against the stars a turtle passes, carrying four elephants on its shell.
Silence fell in the rickety shanty of Dooney's tavern as O'Brien prepared for the duel.
This is where the gods play games with the lives of men, on a board which is at one and the same time a simple playing area and the whole world.
Estrella sat in the waiting room of her alpha's auto repair garage and tried not to throw up her lunch.
In a distant and second-hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part...
"Of course," they told him in all honesty, "you will be a slave."
The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn't sure it was worth all the effort.
Max Drummond sat in the old stuffed chair, sketching the snow boots piled up by the fireplace while half watching Miami Vice.
Bradley Chalkers sat at his desk in the back of the room--last seat, last row.
Her father's hunters had found her.
There was a man and he had eight sons.
My mother shut the front door and looked over at me.
The bees of Death are big and black, they buzz low and sombre, they keep their honey in combs of wax as white as altar candles.
It felt like the motorcycle had become a part of his body—a part that made him whole.
Nothing but stars, scattered across the blackness as though the Creator had smashed the windscreen of his car and hadn't bothered to stop to sweep up the pieces.
They watched the multiple independent re-entry vehicles approach in the night's sky, illuminated by a string of bright lights along their exteriors.
Watch...this is space.
Now consider the tortoise and the eagle.
Having conducted his evolutionary business with unprecedented success, mankind soon changed the face of the earth to suit his own purposes.
Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.
The warm June night breeze wound through the gently swaying Georgia pines, making their needle boughs hiss like the whisk of industrious brooms dragging slowly across a cabin floor.
According to the First Scroll of Wen the Eternally Surprised, Wen stepped out of the cave where he had received enlightenment and into the dawning light of the first day of the rest of his life.
Nella tried not to think about the hundreds of people nearby, all rotting in their sleep, but the raspy hum of the flies was almost overwhelming.
The last time Amethyst Goldsmith saw her king, she was five years old and he was about to have his head severed from his body.
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, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way— in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
The Morris dance is common to all inhabited worlds in the multiverse.
This is the bright candlelit room where the lifetimers are stored - shelf upon shelf of them. squat hourglasses, one for every living person, pouring their fine sand from the future into the past.
Now read on...When does it start?
Through the shredded black clouds a fire moved like a dying star, falling back to earth - the earth, that is, of the Discworld - but unlike any star had ever done before, it somehow managed to steer its fall, sometimes rising, sometimes twisting, but inevitably heading down.
The wind howled.
I've started to drive more cautiously since I was told I only have six months to live.
When Joe Evers arrived, his squad was slready donning their vests and checking their weapons.
When he first sees her, Raf is sitting on a washing machine about to swallow an eighth of a gram of what is apparently a mixture of speed, monosodium glutamate, and an experimental social anxiety disorder medication for dogs.
Idea for a novel: we have a banker rob his own bank
Sitting on the edge of the bed, Blanche stoops to rip at the laces of her gaiters.
They did their best to be generous to Sister Flora when she left the convent, but the dresses they gave her left something to be desired.
The night Teo disappeared started off just like any other.
This is being written hastily.
It was an odd-looking vine.
The sight of a child teetering on the window ledge of room 510 turned Sara's world upside down.
Someone has cleared the ruins away, but you can still see that a house burned to the ground here, not long ago.
Joan Ashby is one of our most astonishing writers, a master of words whose profound characters slip free of the page and enter the world, breathing and enduring, finding pain or solace, even happiness, seeking a way forward, or a way out, their lives keenly and deeply observed.
The first thing I can remember in this life is my father driving his white ox, Endurance, to the sky burial platforms. 
Geneva Sweet ran an orange extension cord past Mayva Greenwood, Beloved Wife and Mother, May She Rest with Her Heavenly Father.
It's twenty past ten at night and I'm being escorted through the glass-fronted atrium of a certain office building in central London.
"There were unexpected difficulties," said the dark gray blur.
The first person I met in England was a hallucination.
I stayed up at the bar a few times but I didn't want the barman thinking that I needed someone to talk to.
In a city swollen by refugees but still m ostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her.
The bombing, for which Mr. and Mrs. Khurana were not present, was a flat, percussive event that began under the bonnet of a parked white Maruti 800, though of course that detail, that detail about the car, could only be confirmed later.
With seven days untol the beginning of the Virgil of Saint Balronas, all those with duties, debts, obligations, or any other Imperial or personal business, should be looking to discharge them.
It was like riding in a treasure chest, Ling thought. 
Their lord ans master had been carried into the trees at the opening of the day, and instead of the morning clarion, the halls of the flotilla's spacecraft had rung with a single soft mourning-chime.
It looked like any other carnival, but of course it wasn't.
Sparrow could remember five occasions when Ms Minn had taken one of her “turns” and marched off into the mountains.
The great horn sounded.
In the darkness, the Tower.
The bugler needs no alarm.
The granite was cold and rough against the grey-cloaked man’s palms.
It is said, in Imardin, that the wind has a soul, and that it wails through the narrow streets because it is grieved by what it finds there.
Do you know how magic works?
For almost as long as she could remember, Maerad had been imprisoned behind walls.
Aunty is a term of endearment (and sometimes insult) used to describe an older woman.
No! And when I say no, I mean no!
Lieutenant Morrison died as dawn broke on that Friday morning, a casualty of war.
Boop.
The stains of rust seemed to map blood seas on the black, pocked surface of Mock’s Vane.
The storm had broken.
It was a way of daring Fate.
The Immaterium.
It was an odd looking vine.
A history of the Six Duchies is of necessity a history of its ruling family, the Farseers.
The palace still shook occasionally as the earth rumbled in memory, groaned as if it would deny what had happened.
Ravens! Always the ravens.
The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.
“We should start back,” Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them.
It was little more than three miles from the Wall into the Old Kingdom, but that was enough.
It was a tale told by the newspapers in 1914 - of a spectacular find by a British Egyptologist in an isolated tomb outside of Cairo - a royal mummy of Egypt's greatest monarch and, beside his painted sarcophagus, a vast collection of ancient poisons and a journal in Latin, written in the time of Cleopatra, comprising some thirteen scrolls. 
Wind howled through the night, carrying a scent that would change the world.
Eli Teague was eight and a half years old the first time he met Harry Pritchard.
“That is my decision. We need not discuss it,” said the man at the desk.
It was night again.
I bounded over the gray, dusty terrain toward the huge dome of Conrad Bubble.
When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
He was an easy mark.
Logen plunged through the trees, bare feet slipping and sliding on the wet earth, the slush, the wet pine needles, breath rasping in his chest, blood thumping in his head.
We sail into the night.
I was just a baby when Grandma Matilda took me away from my mother.
In the autumn season, hawks, falcons, and eagles followed an ancient path through the sky on their journey south for the winter, the same path their ancestors had flown since they first took wing in ages long dark to memory.
The sun was already sinking into the deep green of the hills to the west of the valley, the red and gray-pink of its shadows touching the corners of the land, when Flick Ohmsford began his descent.
There were prodigies and portents enough, One-Eye says.
For the past two weeks the simple building had been his safe house, but now Thren Felhorn distrusted its protection as he limped through the door.
Jaumé was in his father’s barn when the curse broke free of its dormancy on the easternmost rim of the Seven Kingdoms.
Thirty-two hours of my life are missing.
The monster watched from the shadows as the armed men, torches aloft, entered the darkness of the mountain.
He was lost when he came to us, and I fear the silver spoons he stole from us didn’t save him when he ran away and went up into the high domains.
At the height of the long wet summer of the Seventy-Seventh Year of Sendovani, the Thiefmaker of Camorr paid a sudden and unannounced visit to the Eyeless Priest at the Temple of Perelandro, desperately hoping to sell him the Lamora boy.
At the time the strangers came, the Manth people were still living in the low mat-walled shelters that they had carried with them in their hunting days.
Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley.
In a distant and second-hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part…
Sometimes, I worry that I’m not the hero everyone thinks I am.
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
Kip crawled toward the battlefield in the darkness, the mist pressing down, blotting out sound, scattering sunlight.
Azoth squatted in the alley, cold mud squishing through his bare toes.
I was dozing when I heard the scream.
Deep in the belly of the volcano, my talons grip the baking rock.
Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls.
There was once a dragon.
She came out of the store just in time to see her young son playing on the sidewalk directly in the path of the grey, gaunt man who strode down the centre of the walk like a mechanical derelict.
The beasts are coming.
Adele Manners gave her room one last look.
Mum said the fiends usually came after midnight.
A flat beach of rock lit by the distant stars.
Forest litter crunched under Evnis’ feet, his breath misting as he whispered a curse.
The line of Aunt Tate's jaw was fierce and unyielding, like a hammered steel length of railroad track, but her eyes were soft and puffy from furtive crying.
Malcom Cousins groaned in spite of himself.
I remember being born.
When Douglas Armstrong had his first consultation with Thistle McCloud, he had no intention of murdering his wife
Here's what I think: We've all been wounded by war.
Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we?
Aisling’s mother died at midsummer.
The wind blew out of the northwest in dry, fierce gusts, sweeping across the face of the Gray Lands.
Skane was built on superstition.
Locked in darkness that surrounded me like a coffin, I had nothing to distract me from my memories.
On the second Sabbat of Twelfthmoon, in the city of Weep, a girl fell from the sky.
Luker had sworn never to return to this place.
They gathered at the car park in the hour before dawn and waited to be told what to do.
Bon Agorin writhed on his deathbed, his wings beating as if he would fly to his new life in his old body.
I pluck at my crimson tunic, tenting the lightweight linen away from my sticky skin.
It started with a nightmare...
Here, my lady?
The girl's head rested on a small pile of orange-and-brown leaves.
When I was seven winters of age, my mother caught me in the hearth stacking red-hot coals with my bare hands.
I have been dreaming of wolves.
I have been unhappy for many years now.
Even when there are no prisoners, I can still hear the screams.
My big brother reaches home in the dark hours before dawn, when even ghosts take their rest.
There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made.
Ava Lee was in bed, flat on her back, with her head propped up by three pillows.
I don't have to look up to know Mom is making another surprise visit.
There are two kinds of people in the world, those who leave home, and those who don't.
Girrrl - Before there was Dorian and before there was Hector, there was 1980 - the year that things began to change.
My father was a king and the son of kings.
Ian Rutledge drove through the night, his mind only partly on the road unwinding before him.
The magic in that country was so thick and tenacious that it settled over the land like chalk-dust and over floors and shelves like slightly sticky plaster-dust.
She could not remember a time when she had not known the story; she had grown up knowing it.
She scowled at her glass of orange juice.
Train journeys, Nicola decided, were awfully dull.
Because she was a princess she had a pegasus.
"Jeeves," I said, "may I speak frankly?"
Because she was Chalice she stood at the front door with the Grand Seneschal, the Overlord's agent and the Prelate, all of whom were carefully ignoring her.
It is a moonless night, dark and rare, and the heat is oppressive, the kind of heat where a deep breath leaves you unsatisfied, suspicious that there was nothing life-giving at all in what you've inhaled, and you are left air-hungry, wet at the pits, forehead greasy with sweat, wishing for the night to be over, for your daughters to exhaust their energy, to cool their dense, hot centers enough to sleep for one more night in this summer that seems to stretch into your future like a planetary ring full of debris, circling forever around something it can't escape.
I often think of what Hendrich said to me, over a century ago, in his New York apartment.
Tommy Beresford removed his overcoat in the hall of the flat.
He noticed the woman on their way to dinner.
The evening when we first heard Sparsholt's name seems the best place to start this little memoir.
Eldridge Tyler was driving a long straight two-lane road in Nebraska when his cell phone rang.
No love like old love.
It was a tough decision.
It was the summer that men first walked on the moon.
Planet Earth rolled on in ever decreasing circles around the sun
As I turned to lean my shovel against the rusted gray of the car, I looked in passing down into the grave I had dug, and saw there, along the face or wall, in trembling roots, the path I had traveled these several months taking the census in the farthest districts.
Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days up-river from the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, a manchild was born to Omoro and Binta Kinte.
The Cuban customs officer lifted an eyebrow at the bridal gown - a white satin bodice with tulle appliques, sheer sleeves, and a two-foot train - and took a long, suspicious look at the couple.
My name is Amber Reynolds.
I am a murderer.
Though one of them may have greeted the prospect of a new day with more fervor than the other, the fact remained that for both of them, it started out ordinary.
The girl came into the room with a darting movement like a swallow, looked round her with the same birdlike quickness, and then ran across the polished floor to where a young man sat on a sofa with one leg laid along it.
This is not a conventional cookbook.
Imagine that you have to break someone's arm.
As I was a stranger in Olondria, I knew nothing of the splendor of its coasts, nor of Bain, the Harbor City, whose lights and colors spill into the ocean like a cataract of roses. 
The week before I left my family and Florida and the rest of my minor life to go to boarding school in Alabama, my mother insisted on throwing me a going-away party.
Nyx sold her womb somewhere between Punjai and Faleen, on the edge of the desert. 
An artificial peninsula juts into lake Erie
From the beginning he was a stumbling block, the Professor
It began in the old and golden days of England, in a time when all the hedgerows were green and the roads dusty, when hawthorn and wild roses bloomed, when big-bellied landlords brewed rich October ale at a penny a pint for rakish high-booted cavaliers with jingling spurs and long rapiers, when squires ate roast beef and belched and damned the Dutch over their claret while their faithful hounds slumbered on the rushes by the hearth, when summers were long and warm and drowsy, with honeysuckle and hollyhocks by cottage walls, when winter nights were clear and sharp with frost-rimmed moons shining on the silent snow, and Claud Duval and Swift Nick Nevison lurked in the bosky thickets, teeth gleaming beneath their masks as they heard the rumble of coaches bearing paunchy well-lined nabobs and bright-eyed ladies with powdered hair who would gladly tread a measure by the wayside with the gallant tobyman, and bestow a kiss to save their husbands’ guineas; an England where good King Charles lounged amiably on his throne, and scandalised Mr Pepys (or was it Mr Evelyn?) by climbing walls to ogle Pretty Nell; where gallants roistered and diced away their fathers’ fortunes; where beaming yokels in spotless smocks made hay in the sunshine and ate bread and cheese and quaffed foaming tankards fit to do G. K. Chesterton’s heart good; where threadbare pedlars with sharp eyes and long noses shared their morning bacon with weary travellers in dew-pearled woods and discoursed endlessly of ‘Hudibras’ and the glories of nature; where burly earringed smugglers brought their stealthy sloops into midnight coves, and stowed their hard-run cargoes of Hollands and Brussels and fragrant Virginia in clammy caverns; where the poachers of Lincolnshire lifted hares and pheasants by the bushel and buffeted gamekeepers and jumped o’er everywhere…
The man in grey decided to take the Glen suite of diamonds at midnight.
The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.
Irresolute, no, shivering, I'd crashed a party in the private dining room of a hotel.
That was when I saw the Pendulum.
I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte.
The high chandeliers in the Great Hall of Lincoln’s Inn were ablaze with candles, for it was late afternoon when the play began.
Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting V under the more flexible V of his mouth.
Roger, aged seven, and no longer the youngest of the family, ran in wide zigzags, to and fro, across the steep field that sloped up from the lake to Holly Howe, the farm where they were staying for part of the summer holidays.
“It is the fifth consecutive day of protests at the Chatterset oilfield, where fracking processes have been started less than a month ago. Incentive for the protest are a series of unusual earthquakes, protesters told our reporter, Molly Cannigan, who is on site at this moment. Let’s switch to Molly and see what is going on.”
The Minotaur sits on an empty pickle bucket blowing smoke through bullish nostrils. 
I was born in the reign of King George VI, backstage at South London's old Brixton Empire during a lull in the Battle of Britain.
I am one of the great inventors of my age.
I am a child of my century and as old as the century.
It had been born in uncertainty and was a child of telemetry, and its birth pangs had culminated at a late meeting in early autumn in the White House when an issue that had simmered long between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Department of Defense finally came to a head.
The time machine was a sphere full of milky fluid in which the traveller floats enclosed in a rubber suit, breathing through a mask attached to a hose leading into the wall of the machine.
I am at last able to move my right hand for extended periods of time.
When not tending New York holdings, Guy Grand was generally, as he expressed it, "on the go."
The doomsday mankind had feared since Hiroshima and awaited since Eniwetok dawned with the indignity of running noses, headaches, and a slight rise in employee absenteeism.
A city's blank white concrete slabs, the giant ones ringed by the less giant, gave space in their midst to a broad pink-floored plaza, a playground in which some two hundred young children played and exercised under the care of a dozen supervisors in white coveralls.
The palace is as large as a good-sized town, for through the centuries its outbuildings, its lodges, its guesthouses, the mansions of its lords and ladies in waiting, have been linked by covered ways, and those covered ways roofed, in turn, so that here and there we find corridors within corridors, like conduits in a tunnel, houses within rooms, those rooms within castles, those castles within artificial caverns, the whole roofed again with tiles of gold and platinum and silver, marble and mother-of-pearl, so that the palace glares with a thousand colours in the sunlight, shimmers constantly in the moonlight, its walls appearing to undulate, its roofs to rise and fall like a glamorous tide, its towers and minarets lifting like the masts and hulks of sinking ships.
It was dawn, and the zombies were stumbling through the parking lot, streaming toward the massive beige box at the far end.
The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault.
A young man stands in his bedroom.
He was lost when he came to us, and I fear the silver spoons he stole from us didn't save him when he ran away and went up into the high mountains.
The first thing I can remember clearly is writing the way into the secret room.
Something was upsetting the angels.
Torak woke with a jolt from a sleep he'd never meant to have.
The one-eyed black cat called Majicou sat between a rusting cage and two sacks of stale grain on a shelf at the top of a shop on Cutting Lane.
"Your grandfather," said Vanyel's brawny, fifteen-year-old cousin Radavel, "was crazy."
The sky was overcast, a solid gray sheet that seemed to hang just barely above the treetops, with no sign of a break in the clouds anywhere.
Mouldering bone crumbled beneath their boots as Lord Margus and Vargul Ashnazai lowered themselves down into the tiny chamber beneath the earthen mound.
It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened.
The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.
The phone was ringing.
Everyone thought she had made it up and she had tolerated more taunting and teasing from other children, more lectures and punishments from grown-ups, than any eleven-year-old should have to bear.
Verity danced circles around the living room, her amateurish pirouettes and unsteady leaps accompanied by cheers and exultations from the horde of Aeslin mice perched on the back of the couch.
Alex eased himself around the open stable door, his heart beating so hard that it felt like it was going to break in two.
Alex knelt in front of his new terrarium, peering through the glass as he searched for a sign of his latest pet.
Verity stood with her hands folded in front of her and her feet turned out in first position, watching her father read her report card.
She could not remember a time when she had not known the story; she had grown up knowing it.
Kneeling on one knee, I peered through the long, frosted blades of grass in the meadow, clutching the bow in my hand and watching the dense trees at the other end of the clearing.
She scowled at her glass of orange juice.
The demon sat back in the seat it had carved in the stem of the giant mushroom.
Because she was Chalice she stood at the front door with the Grand Seneschal, the Overlord's agent and the Prelate, all of whom were carefully ignoring her.
Many years later she remembered how her parents had looked to her when she was a small child: her father as tall as a tree, and merry and bright and golden, with her beautiful black-haired mother at his side.
The dark elf sat on the barren mountainside, watching anxiously as the line of red grew above the eastern horizon.
The monster lumbered along the quiet corridors of the Underdark, its eight scaly legs occasionally scuffing the stone.
Linderwall was a large kingdom, just east of the Mountains of Morning, where philosophers were highly respected and the number five was fashionable.
"That is my decision."
It was little more than three miles from the Wall into the Old Kingdom, but that was enough.
I've been scared to have sex with Stacy ever since I discovered her vagina was haunted.
Our Dragon doesn't eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley.
Never does a star grace this land with a poet's light of twinkling mysteries, nor does the sun send to here its rays of warmth and life.
The Red Union had been attacking the headquarters of the April Twenty-eight Brigade for two days.
Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we?
I stopped the car, got out and took off my sunglasses.
The black stock of Anka's crossbow was made of plastic, while the strings were chrome steel, operated by a single motion of a noiselessly sliding lever.
Dr. Maxfield Shnibitz was no slave to a single discipline.
Once upon a time, in a far-off land, there lived a princess who developed an unfortunate social problem.
Once there was a queen, in the Land of the Green Sun, who arose from the Royal Bed in the morning, looked into the Royal Mirror, and saw a stalk of celery growing out the top of her head.
Elisa Lam was a highly normal person. Well, she was certainly not entirely normal, and in fact, she would be quite offended to read of herself being described as "a highly normal person". Wouldn't we all?
I was late for my appointment with a dead man.
There was a screaming across the sky.
Nothing hurled the priceless ornamental vase through the window.
Horrified at the implications of what he had just witnessed, Zerrakhi climbed thoughtfully down inside the tower.
To walk around the Gzarondar Mountain is a chance to consider hundreds of features that keep this place unique in the world.
Trapped.
Newly installed electric lights blazed from atop the department store, theater, and even the street corners where ordinary gas lamps had burned just a month ago.
I elected to have Christmas dinner in hell and took my lover with me.
Sharks swirled around me, waiting only for the scent of blood to attack.
Pa was dead.
Darkness and silence all about, and nothing, nothing, nothing within it.
I stood amidst the press of bodies at the Nathaniel R. Ladysmith museum, desperately wishing I were elsewhere.
Most of the staff blame me.
The wind strengthened from over the ocean, coiling around the slender figure standing atop a craggy rock.
“Are you sure this is going to work?” Persephone asked.
The year 1866 was marked by a strange occurence, an unexplained and inexplicable phenomenon that surely no one has forgotten.
Patient is covered in blood, bruising, and torn clothes.
Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father.
My family didn’t own a calendar, but I always knew when June arrived.
The army crept like a dark stain across the horizon. 
It was clearly going to be a bad crossing.
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
Call me Ishmael
The small boys came early to the hanging 
I find it quite hard to get things done.
She got to the top of the high hill first.
Something in the river haunted the island between the city and the border.
By reading past this point you agree that you are accountable to the council.
Under flickering streetlights, A walked alone for the first time since she saved Tamee.
Crowded and noisy, the floor of the Large Council resembled the bustle of a marketplace more than a place of governance.
I dream again that I am lost in the tunnels of our cities.
Mikra was born on the first day of the war.
West was almost done with her shift when she heard the loud sound of the long buzzer.
The key was hidden in plain sight.
A little after three in the morning, thomas burst out of the house into the cool night air and down the front steps toward the quiet suburban street.
Therianthropes - that's what they called them, but they weren't just throwbacks to Circe or Skin-walkers.
The protesters barricaded the entrance to the New York Stock Exchange, effectively silencing the opening bell of trading for the day.
Fuck my snooze alarm.
"Is there anything else, Mauve?"
Dr. Rene Reynolds had spent years mapping the neural networks of the human brain, using everything from nuclear magnetic resonance scanners to high-speed computers that recorded the firing order of each individual neuron.
Yasmin Abraham Martin Odinga drove across the border at noon.
"Greedy" is the word that comes to mind.
Kunju, your mom said she knew you wanted to be born.
When Star Wars premiered, in 1977, it swept the nation like a fever.
On a bright afternoon in early summer a few years ago, my wife and I took our tiny new daughter out on a picnic.
You always love the awkward child best, don't you?
"Implied violence", says the boss, "is our bread and butter."
Henry Griffin, eighth baron of Kirkenwood, listened to the irregular rhythm of his heart.
You would think I had enough troubles, wouldn't you? I was finally free after thousands of years, released from my prison and ready to spread chaos and insanity across the earth, only to be stopped in less than a day by a mere handful of colorful, goody-goody, near-juvenile mares. 
I turned my face into the rising wind.
"And so, your highness, that is why we must spend the tax surplus on the new Canterlot hoofball fields! It would draw in additional revenue and increase our city's splendor twenty-fold!"
Here’s the thing about pain.  Pain hurts.  Pain hurts a lot.
The longest day of my life was the day, about three months ago now, when I ended up trapped in a time loop in the middle of a war zone. I don’t know how long it lasted exactly, but on that day I got to experience being choked, stabbed, eaten, burned, mind controlled, eviscerated, decapitated, falling to my death, cut into pieces, run through, disintegrated, immolated, and having changeling eggs laid in my brain.
The multiverse hates me. It’s the only rational conclusion I can draw that fits all of the available data.
The West Manehattan University grounds were impeccable, to say the least. Perched atop a huge plateau of grassland just outside the city proper, it was a marvel of engineering and art. The most obvious features were the pegasus lecture theatres and labs that floated above the rest of the campus; the large bushy court in the centre, dotted with trees and a small stream, and from which the rest of the university radiated outwards along two main paths that intersected in the middle; and of course the vast array of abstract art pieces littered at seemingly random places throughout the court.
Look over here; here, under the olive-trees – that's right, by the pile of broken stones and the cracked statues of old gods.
“Perhaps I should consider wearing crowns more often. They really are smashing, though a tad ostentatious.” 
The Shaper listened to the song of the steel as her hooves worked the bellows. It was a song of heat, a song of change, a song of hidden strength waiting to be revealed. The Shaper listened and heated the forge until that song reached its peak, the point where all potential was revealed and any more would lead to ruin. She slowed, letting the heat suffuse the steel without adding any more, until the whole of it was humming with its sweet music. It would not do to rush.
“I need you to teach me the ways of motherhood!”  Of all the things Twilight expected Luna to say to her, that was most definitely not one of them.
Unmitigated.  Unprecedented.  Unabashed.  Unsalvageable.  Disaster.  The Gala was a disaster.  It was, Prince Blueblood reflected as he dragged himself to bed, "Truly, the worst night ever."  Collapsing face first into the pillows, his body shook with a resounding sigh.  At least it was over.
Blood slowly trickled from the changeling’s nose, dribbling onto the ground. Her ears were ringing, her head was pounding, and her blue eyes were foggy and unfocused. She had been close to the epicentre of the love blast, and as such had worn the worst of it.
After 22 weeks of travel, I have finally arrived in orbit around planet Omega Centauri II. It’s strange, being the only person on a vessel originally designed for a crew of thirty. But the mission required an arrow class transport.
It was a quiet day, at least by Ponyville standards. No grand events were scheduled, nothing was in major need of repairs, no papers had to be completed, and – most importantly – absolutely nothing was crawling out of the woodwork. For the first time in what seemed like a very long while indeed, nothing whatsoever was expected of me, and I, Twilight Sparkle, was going to make the most of it.
“Soup again?”  The whining, high-pitched voice of Swarm rang out in the kitchen. The small filly huffed, bouncing up to put her hooves on the counter, trying to peer into the pan holding what appeared to be more soup. “This is the third time this week!”
“You’re going to die if you keep going,” said the ghost of Star Swirl the Bearded.
“Rarity! We’re going out now!” Her mother’s voice floated up the stairs. “Please take care of Sweetie Belle! We’ll be back in four hours or so!”
Twilight Sparkle paced nervously across her bedroom, her still-unfamiliar wings fluttering wildly in distress. “Deep breaths,” she told herself, but her lungs refused to take her advice. “You can do this,” she lied to herself, hoping that repeating it would make it truth.
he invitation had gone like this:     Dear Octavia, I know I thanked you before, but you really saved us when you filled in for the band last Nightmare Night. You didn't have to dress in costume either, you know; everyone was impressed with how you went whole-hog for us. We sure loved your playing too. Now, we've got the Apple family reunion coming up, and it's shaping up to be a doozy. I know you aren't technically an Apple, but we think of you as family all the same, considering those summers you spent with us. So I figured I oughta be able to invite you as well. You're welcome to bring your fiddle too (iff'n you feel like it, that is.) We'd love it if you played a spell for us.  -Applejack     ...And now Octavia found herself crouching beneath the front window of the Ponyville Dry Goods store, peering furtively through the glass. Its faint patina of dust did little to obscure the pony strolling along the opposite side of the street. Her heart was pounding, her blood a rush of shock and panic thrumming in her ears.
With a flick of her horn, Celestia opened the door to her private chambers. After slipping inside, the sun princess collapsed onto the comfortable pile of cushions that occupied the floor. She lifted a hoof to her face, rubbing her nose for a moment before nudging at her crown, letting it slide off and roll a few inches away while she rested her eyes.
The atmosphere in Canterlot was a strange mix of nervousness and excitement. On one hoof, there was to be a royal wedding, which promised to be an event to remember for years. On the other hoof, the purple colour mixed into the sunlight was a constant reminder of the shield surrounding the city, and the threat it implied.
Warden limped along the line of vibrant Crystal Ice Berries. They were some of the last Crystal Ice Berries in the entirety of Equestria. After the Crystal Empire disappeared, they had become almost extinct. Short of the Crystal Empire coming back, they would continue to be extremely exotic, and extremely rare. They didn’t look akin to regular crystal berries, whereas the normal crystal berries were a solid colour with a sheen and a faceted surface, Crystal Ice berries looked like a coloured ice orb, slightly transparent. Small rainbows painted the rows of berries, where the weak northern sunlight lanced through the berries and split into starbursts of colour.
"Quem reginae volunt perdere, dementant prius." — Classical Equestrian proverb, roughly translated: "Whom the princesses would destroy, they first drive mad." Their royal highnesses could not be reached for comment regarding how often this must have occurred to warrant its own proverb.
The afterlife was everything I thought it would be. A serene feeling of absolute bliss filled my weightless soul as I drifted towards the purest white light I had ever seen. We have all heard stories of near-death experiences and they aren’t far off the mark. High above me, but so tantalizingly close, a heavenly radiance glowed as warm and inviting as a fire in winter. All around me was nothingness, but I wasn’t afraid. The void was neither cold nor terrifying because I know what awaited me. I only wished that I could move faster, to welcome the approaching light with open arms and a smile on my face.
Carousel Boutique was currently a seamstress's nightmare.  There was a reason for this. Not three minutes ago, the proprietor of the establishment had a visit from a very influential customer. Said customer had congratulated said proprietor on a commissioned piece that was made for an upcoming agriculture exhibition. They were impressed enough, that they wanted the proprietor to join them at the exhibition, and showcase their wares.  The proprietor had said yes.  Now the proprietor is wondering what in Celestia's great kingdom she's gotten herself into. Let's watch, shall we?
“Four-hundred and thirty five errors.” Those noble eyes had never once quit scanning the corrected document since Gaberdine had brought it to her, and he squelched a small feeling of triumph at the thought that Her Highness truly appreciated his work on the yearly budget.
Not for the first or last time, the recently renamed Ponyville Public Library And Royal Palace was hosting an event of historic importance. It was questionable whether any of the participants realized the significance of this moment. Still, as the nearly full moon followed its course toward the starry western sky over the peaceful village, this was the very first time in Equestria's long and storied history that four alicorn princesses sat around the same table and drank tea together.
Contrary to popular belief, not every day in Canterlot was a dream come true.  From the evening sky obscured by dark cloudscapes, through lampposts battered by the howling wind, down to the streets resounding with thunder and pitter-patter of rain, the magnificent Jewel of Equestria along with its citizens endured the hardships planned for tonight. Those few misinformed ponies who got caught outdoors without raincoats or umbrellas had no choice but to shelter themselves at the expensive cafés where for a price of a coffee they were free to curse the dreadful conditions to their hearts’ content.
April in Kyoto is a glorious season
“Hurry up, everypony! She's gonna leave us behind!”  Three colts, two fillies, and one young dragon trotted down the dusty and dark halls of the old and dilapidated Castle of the Two Sisters, trying to keep up with their overly enthusiastic tour guide. It was easy to tell which of the foals had already taken the annual Nightmare Night tour before and which ones hadn’t judging by their proximity to the only two adults. The ones who had taken the tour several times already hung back, admiring the decor or taking notes for an extra credit essay for Cheerilee. Unfortunately, none of them could take notes as fast as Princess Twilight Sparkle could talk.
My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, and I'm a wizard. No, don't roll your eyes, I'm serious. Things that go bump in the night are real, and in Chicago I'm the only one who can handle them. Most of my work comes from the police. When a vampire leaves a dead victim or a faerie steals a child, normal investigative methods don't work. I think in the paperwork I'm listed as a psychic consultant. Today, though, I was just visiting Edinburgh, the wizards' capital. The higher-ups of the White Council wanted me to hand in my report over the duel with Ortega personally. I grimaced. The Council was not my favorite group of people, and I knew they were going to rake me over the coals for the way the duel went south. Despite my dread, I was making good time. I was about half an hour from the end of the Way when everything went wrong...
There was a whisper of wind.
Bob, it's been almost two years since the impact. Two years of tiny machines, semi-biological in nature, swarming in the uncounted trillions from the impact crater, tearing our world apart atom by atom and rebuilding it. Animal, vegetable, mineral, all terrestrial matter that those alien nano-machines encountered, being torn apart and rebuilt as... something else. 
Main Course stood at the edge of a cordoned-off section of a Manehattan street, watching his life burn to the ground.
"...and, figurin' that this here ain't exactly Apple Buck Season, I can only chalk up the farm's most recent success to them weather ponies and their fancy hoofwork in helpin' the fields get rain extra early. Which just goes to show that, when yer wantin' to make the best of things—to seize the day, as it were—it's a might bit hard to do it by oneself. Teamwork really does make the world go round, Yer Highness."
The midnight sky was bright, unnaturally so. The stars lit the world like lamps and the moon was as brilliant as a searchlight. A fitting description, as the master of the night was indeed on the hunt. Soldiers flocked the streets of the royal city and all the inhabitants were ordered to clear the streets and remain inside their homes. Any unfortunate soul to be found on the streets was deemed a possible rebel and was to be detained. Detainment for suspected rebels usually included an ‘interrogation’ by the infamous Blackcloaks.
Spike sat on his little stool behind the check out counter of the library, his forehead pressed firmly against the wood in a desperate attempt to become one with the tree.
Rarity did not believe in fairytales.  As much as she loved to read them, she knew no dashing savior would come and woo her off her hooves, she knew no dragons guarded kidnapped damsels-in-distress, and she was positive the tale of The Princess in the Library was nothing but a myth.
Rainbow Dash fluttered her wings as she landed, her hooves sinking into the deep snow just outside Sugarcube Corner. She whipped her mane and lifted up her flight goggles before trotting into the warm, cozy interior of the bakery.
It seems to have begun the way all trends do, with whim meeting opportunity.
Marley was dead, to begin with.
"We should start back," Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them.
This is the first murder that the Wells & Wong Detective Society has ever investigated, so it is a good thing Daisy bought me a new casebook.
At the time I first realized I might be fictional, my weekdays were spent at a publicly funded institution on the north side of Indianapolis called White River High School, where I was required to eat lunch at a particular time - between 12:37 P.M. and 1:14 P.M. - by forces so much larger than myself that I couldn't even begin to identify them.
We outrode today, into the Hardscrabble, just Fisk and I.
When I was young, I collected postcards
When the bullets start flying, it's only a matter of time before fear catches up with a soldier.
The last of the spring storms was always the most violent, and this one was a monster, lashing the desolate mountainside with wind and rain. 
"There needs to be a war going on somewhere, Sergeant Vasquez."
The Red Union had been attacking the headquarters of the April Twenty-eighth brigade for two days.
I shall clasp my hands together and bow to the corners of the world.
I am the princess Harueme, daughter of Fujiwara no Enyu and the emperor we now call Go-Sanjō.
I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
It occurred as far back as February 15, 1850.
It was the deep dark, unexplored except for robotic visitors.
I was the principal witness to events' unfolding, and they were undoubtedly historic.
So it's real simple," Mouse was saying.
The morning air still smelled of smoke.
It's hard to get lost when you're coming home from work.
I'm sorry, Mr.
My name is Stephanie Plum and I was born and raised in the Chambersburg section of Trenton, where the top male activities are scarfing pastries and pork rinds and growing love handles. 
According to the sheet of paper given to him at the front desk, Alex was assigned to live in D Hall, room 31, with his roommate “Patrick Doherty.”
In retrospect, it was probably the overdose that convinced him something had to change, but not in the way people might think.
The racing car jerked convulsively, leapt, arced into the air like the spine of a prisoner interrogated by electric torture.
The first time it happened was the first night at school.
 He looked about as enthusiastic about being awake as someone who falls off a dock looks enthusiastic about being in the water.
The first time Patrick passed out on his couch, they were supposed to be working on a project for school.
Those months, the months before she disappeared, were the best months.
Henry and I dug the hole seven feet deep.
Stories can start pretty much anywhere, when you get right down to it.
It was one of those summer evenings where everything felt sepia-toned, where anything and everything you did was both glorious and entirely correct.
At a window overlooking a garden in Kent, Brian Page sat amid a clutter of open books at the writing-table, and felt a strong distaste for work.
It was dusk when he came to the Ferry.
As they would murmur at his funeral, Dr. M. Bruce Fleckstein was one of the finest periodontists on Long Island.
Salah-ed-din, Commander of the Faithful, the king Strong to Aid, Sovereign of the East, sat at night in his palace at Damascus and brooded on the wonderful ways of God, by Whom he had been lifted to his high estate.
Costain entered the service station and stopped when he saw Quill standing there, not even pretending to look at the chocolate bars displayed in front of him.
Shadow had done three years in prison.
Imagine a movie so incomprehensible that you find yourself compelled to watch it over and over again.
At five o'clock that morning reveille was sounded, as usual, by the blows of a hammer on a length of rail hanging up near the staff quarters.
Class ended in five minutes and all I could think was, an hour is too long for lunch.
Begin here: Yllia imperator, first of her name, shoved face-down in the reflecting pool with a knee between her shoulderblades, the bright red curve of her murderer’s Judiciary cloak feathering through the water, as good as blood.
It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.
A young man stands in his bedroom.
It was evening when C Company made its halt in the ruined village.
i wonder where i'll float next?
Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.
Just once, I saw a real shooting star.
Now this isn't a Heterodyne story like your mama tells you when she tucks you into bed at night…. Well, not exactly.
My father used to carry me down the hall to my room after I came home from the hospital
Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt.
Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt. If you already happen to know the awful secret behind the universe, feel free to skip ahead.
Our story opens where countless stories have ended in the last twenty-six years: with an idiot—in this case, my brother Shaun—deciding it would be a good idea to go out and poke a zombie with a stick to see what happens
CG: ALRIGHT. STOP TOUCHING YOURSELF INAPPROPRIATELY AND HEARKEN TO MY CALL. 
Every evening she wakes you up too early, singing the songs of the fishering girls
X: Legislacerator Sandrz, Marjet. The culling team is in the process of confirming all witnesses.
Your name is KARKAT VANTAS and your LIFE IS OVER. AGAIN.
Sollux Captor was a low-atmosphere cargo hauler full of stolen mining equipment the first time he died.
You know how sometimes when you’re drifting off to sleep you feel that jolt, like you were falling and caught yourself at the last second?
The clouds explode, and then the desert blooms
People usually didn’t say anything when they returned their tapes to the Video Hut: in a single and somewhat graceful movement they’d approach the counter, slide the tapes toward whoever was stationed beyond the register, and wheel back toward the door.
COUNTER/Weight hangs in the center of the Golden Branch star sector: a forked path where the Perseus and Sagittarius arms come together.
There is a dirt road that runs from Velas to Rosemarrow.
Rose is sixteen when a meteor smashes into a mountain just fifty miles from her house on a dusty April morning.
A screaming comes across the sky
I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. 
Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.
In the beginning were the howlers.
There is damage.
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
Taran wanted to make a sword; but Coll, charged with the practical side of his education, decided on horseshoes.
They came into the yard on a cloud of red dust, four young aristocrats burning with indignation and wine, and they went into the potters' work shed and hauled the woman out by her hair.
The massive carrion bird plummeted groundward, casting a cool shadow that rapidly engulfed the entire Lashing Lane
"Walk faster if you can, what-hey," Daronpu Gen muttered
"Are ye sure ye won't ride all the way into the city?" Kale hardly heard the farmer's question as she stood beside his wagon-load of barley grain.
In the beginning was a castle high on a craggy precipice.
A lone red deer was grazing across the glen, swaying through the deep tangle of heather that covered the hillside.
Elantris was beautiful, once.
The heat came with the devil.
It was a nice day.
Retvenko leaned against the bar and tucked his nose into his dirty shot glass.
Joost had two problems: the moon and his mustache.
It was night again. 
I'm pretty much fucked.
Crouching in the darkness of the closet, I stilled as footsteps approached.
The hot air pressed against my face as I entered the glass factory.
Worry and dread clawed at my stomach.
"That's pathetic, Yelena," Dax complained.
"We're here," Irys said.
Locked in darkness that surrounded me like a coffin, I had nothing to distract me from my memories.
Kell wore a very peculiar coat.
It was now or never.
Fletcher opened his eyes, but all he saw was darkness.
A kaleidoscope of violet seared across Fletcher's vision.
"Drat," said Mercy Porter, balancing the tray on a concrete cherub as she tugged at the latch on the Garden Apartment gate.
The impossible happens once to each of us.
A fug of tobacco smoke and damp clammy air hit her as she entered the cafe.
She wanted him.
Claire Marcourt should have gone to bed hours ago.
Shirley was giving Moon the caller-on-hold signal when he came through the newsroom door.
In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three.
The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit.
The body lay naked and facedown, a deathly gray, spatters of blood staining the snow around it.
The body lay naked and facedown, a deathly gray, spatters of blood staining the snow around it.
You didn't see their faces from where you hid behind the maintenance grate.
Imnea knew when she awoke that Death was waiting for her.
It was a nice day.
"Considering the circumstances, you could use another lieutenant."
One moment asleep.
The voices woke her up.
She wondered why she was afraid to go home.
For more than a thousand years, the Mirror of Souls waited for the return of magic that would awaken it and allow it to finish its work.
"I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one."
Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal Range... come look: the hysterical crashing of tributaries as they merge into the Wakonda Auga River...
From the black ship spilled all manner of tall Kabliw--men from the South land, men from a world past the barrier of stunted trees that Sjennon-irk's people called the Hackle's of the Dog.
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
He'd had so many names over the centuries, so many new identities that he could scarcely remember who he had originally been.
* Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
I can't believe we're doing this.
There was lipstick on his cheek.
Getting dressed was always the hardest part of the afternoon.
The six hoverboards slipped among the trees with the lightning grace of playing cards thrown flat and spinning.
The order observed in painting a landscape—once the canvas has been prepared—is as follows: First, one draws it, dividing it into three or four distances or planes.
"Moggle," Aya whispered. "You awake?"
"Moggle," Aya whispered. "You awake?"
The gods were coming.
The battlefield was silent
In Scotland, between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Tay, lies the Kingdom of Fife—known to certain lovers of that land simply as "The Kingdom."
Ryan Azarcon went to meet his dealer in Austro Station's richest, busiest shopping district, known to its younger patrons as the Market--but not for the many tech, clothing, and jewelry shops available. Here in the Market you could buy anything, or anyone, if you knew where to look or who to kiss.
The halls of Bixby High School were always hideously bright on the first day of school.
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
Backlight by a blazing orange sunset, the floating rabbit was an eeries sight.
I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites.
She scowled at her glass of orange juice.
The house stood on a slight rise just on the edge of the village.
She could not remember a time when she had not known the story; she had grown up knowing it.
You'll understand this story better if I tell you a lie.
I'm pretty much fucked.
That fool of a fairy Lucinda did not intend to lay a curse on me.
Pawnshops in Night Vale work like this.
We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.
Rain pattered steadily through the leaves of the wood and dripped to the ground below.
In Styria we, though by no means magnificent people, inhabit a castle, or schloss.
My brother Ellis and I played a game when we traveled.
On the last Monday of her life, Helen Young returned from the doctor's and made herself a cup of tea.
On the last Monday of her life, Helen Young returned from the doctor's and made herself a cup of tea.
I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen.
The first time my future vanished was July 19, 2034.
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
We rowed out through the harbor, past bobbing boats weeping rust from their seams, past juries of silent seabirds roosting atop the barnacled remains of sunken docks, past fishermen who lowered their nets to stare frozenly as we slipped by, uncertain whether we were real or imagined; a procession of waterborne ghosts, or ghosts soon to be.
The monster stood not a tongue's length away, eyes fixed on our throats, shriveled brain crowded with fantasies of murder.
"Tonight we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man."
"I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one."
With a last furtive glance behind him, the grey man began to climb down the ladder.
Burdock leaned his elbows on the warm steel of his tank.
Raucous laghter shook every cup and tankard in the bar.
On the morning of April 24, an hour past dawn, a man named Palmer Stoat shot a rare African black rhinoceros.
Locke Lamora stood on the pier in Tal Verrar with the hot wind of a burning ship at his back and the cold bite of a loaded crossbow's bolt at his neck.
In 1972 I was sixteen - young, my father said, to be traveling with him on his diplomatic missions.
Place ten dozen hungry orphan thieves in a dank burrow of vaults and tunnels beneath what used to be a graveyard, put them under the supervision of one partly crippled old man, and you will soon find that governing them becomes a delicate business.
Norman Bates heard the noise and a shock went through him.
A mile below the lowest cloud, rock breaches water and the sea begins.
Master Lü-tsu said, That which exists through itself is called the Way (Tao).
The conceptory was non-sentient software, as ancient as Konishi polis itself.
The children of the embassy all saw the boat land.
In dust and blood -- with the sharp tang of terror stark in his nostrils -- a man's mind will sometimes pull forth odd relevancies.
In the beginning was a graph, more like diamond than graphite.
There's a hospital room at the end of a life where someone, right in the middle of the floor, has pitched a green tent.
The Changeling’s decision to steal a dragon and escape was born, though she did not know it then, the night the children met to plot the death of their supervisor.
The dragons came at dawn, flying low and in formation, their jets so thunderous they shook the ground like the great throbbing heartbeat of the world.
My mother's a prostitute.
The evening sky was streaked with purple, the color of torn plums, and a light rain had started to fall when I came to the end of the blacktop road that cut through twenty miles of thick, almost impenetrable scrub oak and pine and stopped at the front gate of Angola penitentiary.
Martha Abbot woke up on the seventh day of April and sat straight up in bed with her eyes wide open.
It is not true that the dead cannot be folded.
We parked the car in front of the parish jail and listened to the rain beat on the roof.
The Red Union had been attacking the headquarters of the April Twenty-eighth Brigade for two days.
Oh, my.
Years ago, in state documents, Vachel Carmouche was always referred to as the electrician, never as the executioner.
Most people were surprised to hear that pointe shoes had not always been a feature of ballet and had only come into common use within the last century.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
I gently lower Kitty’s bound body into the corner, sitting her up against the wall so she has a clear view of the bed.
It's only half an hour since someone - Robyn I think - said we should write everything down, and it's only twenty-nine minutes since I got chosen, and for those twenty-nine minutes I've had everyone crowded around me gazing at the blank page and yelling ideas and advice.
Growing up during the 1940s in New Iberia, down on the Gulf Coast, I never doubted how the world worked.
Down in the strange hooves of Pontypool's tanning horses scratches one of Ontario's thinnest winds.
In the early 1980s, when I was still going steady with Jim Beam straight-up and a beer back, I became part of an exchange program between NOPD and a training academy for police cadets in Dade County, Florida.
"TOM!"
My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, an 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.
Clete Purcel had heard of people who sleep without dreaming, but either because of the era and neighborhood in which he had grown up, or the later experiences that had come to define his life, he could not think of sleep as anything other than an uncontrolled descent into a basement where the gargoyles turned somersaults like circus midgets.
Tell me about a complicated man.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, at a time when Western civilization was declining too rapidly for comfort and yet too slowly to be very exciting, much of the world sat on the edge of an increasingly expensive theater seat, waiting - with various combinations of dread, hope, and ennui - for something momentous to occur.
The captain was silhouetted on horseback like a piece of burnt iron against the sun.
It was a bright, defrosted, pussy-willow day at the onset of spring, and the newlyweds were driving cross-country in a large roast turkey.
Three men and a boy sat in the dark in a battered 1958 Ford on a shale road that wound along the base of the mountain.
Her name was Caroline Frances Hubert, and she had three claims to fame.
It was an unseasonably warm October morning, better suited for a stroll than a stride, but Ganak Pawar and his daughter maintained their usual quick pace up the east side of Manhattan.
Jose Canucci.
After the spring rains when the first hot days of summer begin, the inland waters of the Gulf of Mexico turn smoky-green from the floating seaweed, fading to dark blue beyond the sandbars where the great white pelicans dive for fish.
It is the finest outhouse in the Dakotas.
I was just off Southwest Pass, between Pecan and Marsh islands, with the green, whitecapping water of the Gulf Stream to the south and the long, flat expanse of the Louisiana coastline behind me—which is really not a coastline at all but instead a huge wetlands area of sawgrass, dead cypress strung with wisps of moss, and a maze of canals and bayous that are choked with Japanese water lilies whose purple flowers audibly pop in the morning and whose root systems can wind around your propeller shaft like cable wire.
The sky had gone black at sunset, and the storm had churned inland from the Gulf and drenched New Iberia and littered East Main with leaves and tree branches from the long canopy of oaks that covered the street from the old brick post office to the drawbridge over Bayou Teche at the edge of town.
The woman stood in the far corner of the dimly lit room, hiding in the shadows like a fish in gray water
War was declared at 11:15 and Mary North signed up at noon.
Hmm. No. I'm telling this wrong
All you really need to know about the Paris Ritz is this: By the middle of 1937, Coco Chanel was living in a handsome suite on the third floor, and the bartender-- an intuitive mixologist named Frank Meier-- had invented the Bloody Mary 16 summers earlier to cure a Hemingway hangover.
None of it would have happened if Spider Barnes hadn't tied one on at Eddy's two nights before the Aurora was due to set sail.
We didn't like to gossip; we loved to gossip.
Some people used to believe that there was an elephant graveyard-- a place that old and sick elephants would travel to die.
The first time Caesar approached Cora about running north, she said no.
A private plane sits on a runway in Martha's Vineyard, forward stairs deployed.
I love Thursday nights.
Well before his arrival in Cincinnati, everyone knew that Chip Bingley was looking for a wife.
"It's time for you to go home," Obi-Wan Kenobi said.
Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes.
Mr. Hungerton, her father, really was the most tactless person upon earth-- a fluffy, feathery, untidy cockatoo of a man, perfectly good-natured, but absolutely centered upon his own silly self.
Hobbling home under a mackerel sky, I came upon a group of children.
My mother used to tell me about the ocean.
Death was hiding in Kaspar's pocket.
Two children had Tinwelint then, Dairon and Tinuviel, and Tinuviel was a maiden, and the most beautiful of all the maidens of the hidden Elves, and indeed few have been so fair, for her mother was a fay, a daughter of the Gods; but Dairon was then a boy strong and merry, and above all things he delighted to play upon a pipe of reeds or other woodland instruments, and he is named now among the three most magic players of the Elves, and the others are Tinfang Warble and Ivare who plays beside the sea.
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.  
Upon her butler's announcing the arrival of Mr. Ravenscar, Lady Mablethorpe, who had been dozing over a novel from the Circulating Library, sat up with a jerk, and raised a hand to her disheveled cap.
It was dusk when the London to Little Hampton stage-coach lurched into the village of Billingshurst, and a cold mist was beginning to creep knee-high over the dimly seen countryside. 
Lady Winwood being denied, the morning called inquired with some anxiety for Miss Winwood, or, in fact, for any of the young ladies.
Few events inspire more speculation than long and unexplained pauses in the activities of famous people.
The library at Fontley Priory, like most of the principal apartments in the sprawling building, looked to the south-east, commanding a prospect of informal gardens and a plantation of poplars, which acted as a wind-break and screened from view the monotony of the fen beyond. 
A mile above Oz, the Witch balanced on the wind's forward edge, as if sher were a green fleck of the land itself, flug up and sent wheeling away by the turbulent air.
"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.
I went back to the Devon School not long ago, and found it looking oddly newer than when I was a student there fifteen years before.
The image of the spiritual founding of America that generations of Americans have grown up with was created, oddly enough, by a poet of limited talents (to put it in the most magnanimous possible way) who lived two centuries after the event in a country three thousand miles away.
Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond
Dear Leo, I love beginnings.
By the time I was seventeen, in junior college, and living on fruit snatched from neighborhood trees and Top Ramen, I no longer thought God was the creaks rising from the wood floor.
I am a very old man; how old I do not know.
No one had seen her naked until her death.
Unrepaired and swollen with rain, the gate in the orchard wall refused to move until Cameron put his full weight against it and pushed, hard.
A pair of fierce but beautiful eyes look out from the dull green undergrowth of conifers and ferns that bound the edges of mud flats and riverbeds.
By human standards it could not possibly have been artificial: It was the size of a world.
"I was born to be an explorer. There never was any decision to make. I couldn't do anything else and be happy. . . . The desire to see new places, to discover new facts -- the curiosity of life always has been a resistless driving force in me."
Szeth-son-son-Vallano wore white on the day he was to kill a king.
In the sikence of the shrine, I bowed to the corpse on the altar: a minor member of the Imperial Family, who had died in a boating accident on Lake Texcoco.
On February 24, 1815, the lookout at Notre-Dame de la Garde signalled the arrival of the three-master Pharaon, coming from Smyrna, Trieste and Naples.
I gelt it when it happened, even from where I was: sitting atop the platform of my pyramid temple, so high that the city below seemed a mere child's toy.
"So of course," wrote Betty Flanders, pressing her heels rather deeper in the sand, "there was nothing for it but to leave."
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. 
The elderly passenger sitting on the north-window side of that inexorably moving railway coach, next to an empty seat and facing two empty ones, was none other than Professor Timofey Pnin. 
The last day was by far the longest and most drawn out. 
Mr. Phileas Fogg lived, in 1872, at No. 7, Saville Row, Burlington Gardens, the house in which Sheridan died in 1814.
The office of the university president looked like the front parlor of a successful Victorian whorehouse.
Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes. 
The door starts shaking.
She had no legs when I first met Irene.
Merle wore diamonds like other women wore costume jewels.
The place never changed.
The ringing of the phone jerked me from my sleep.
Muad'dib's Imperial reign generated more history than any other era in human history.
In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.
My father had a face that could stop a clock.
It begins, as most things begin, with a song.
By the river Piedra I sat down and wept.
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning.
That was when I saw the Pendulum.
There was a man named Lessingham dwelt in an old low house in Wastdale, set in a gray old garden where yew-trees flourished that had seen Vikings in Copeland in their seedling time.
A young man walks down by the banks of the Blackwater under the full cold moon.
Captain Crozier comes up on deck to find his ship under attack by celestial ghosts.
It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills.
The house was on Dresden Avenue in the Oak Noll section of Pasadena, a big solid cool-looking house with burgundy  brick walls, a terra cotta tile roof, and a white stone trim.
The Treloar Building was, and is, on Olive Street, near Sixth, on the west side.
The pebbled glass door panel is lettered in flaked black paint: "Philip Marlowe... Investigations."
The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was dunk in a Rolls-Royce Silve Wraith outside the terrace of the Dancers.
So it was in him, then -- an inherited fighting instinct, a driving intensity to kill.
A sharp clip-clop of iron-shod hoofs deadened and died away, and clouds of yellow dust drifted from under the cottonwoods out over the sage.
One afternoon, far out on the sub-baked waste of sage, we made camp near a clump of withered pinon trees.
Saul Laski lay among the soon-to-die in a camp of death and thought about life.
I first heard of Antonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America.
Class ended in five minutes and all I could think was, an hour is too long for lunch.
Damn me, damn them, damn it all.
Damn me, damn them, damn it all.
How does it go?  The first lesson, something even the uninitiated know.  For life to flourish on the most basic level, it requires four elements.  Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen.
It was a bright, cold day in April and the bells were striking thirteen.
Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again
to wound the autumnal city. So howled out for the world to give him a name. The in-dark answered with wind.
A lone a last a loved a long the 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.
A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie.
Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle: it didn’t matter what. She was in the white corner and that was that.
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, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.
All stories are love stories.
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.
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
The primroses were over.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
You better not never tell nobody but God.
Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.
Tap-dancing child abuser. That’s what The Sunday New York Times from March 8, 1993, had called Vivi.
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.
It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
1801 - I have just returned from a visit to my landlord - the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
As the Manager of the Performance sits before the curtain on the boards, and, looks into the Fair, a feeling of profound melancholy comes over him in his survey of the bustling place.
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the riverbank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book', thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversation?
Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn
Where's Papa going with that axe?' said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.
All children, except one, grow up.
If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.
This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.
Amergo Bonasera sat in New York Criminal Court Number 3 and waited for justice; vengeance on the men who had so cruelly hurt his daughter, who had tried to dishonor her.
The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking as it seemed from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand
Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.
No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be a heroine.
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space
It was love at first sight.
It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills.
No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were being scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while.
Like the brief doomed flare of exploding suns that registers dimly on blind men's eyes, the beginning of the horror passed almost unnoticed; in the shriek of what followed, in fact, was forgotten and perhaps not connected to the horror at all.
To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.
On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back.
For a long time, I went to bed early.
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
All this happened, more or less.
It’s freezing - an extraordinary 0 Fahrenfeit - and it's snowing, and in the language that is no longer mine, the snow is qanik - big, almost weightless crystals falling in clumps and covering the ground with a layer of pulverized white frost.
If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die.
Conventions, like clichés, have a way of surviving their own usefulness.
Marley was dead, to begin with.
It was a diamond all right, shining in the grass half a dozen feet from the the blue brick wall.
It was dark by the time I reached Bonn, and I forced myself not to succumb to the series of mechanical actions which had taken hold of me in five years of traveling back and forth: down the station steps, up the station steps, put down my suitcase, take my ticket out of my coat pocket, pick up my suitcase, hand in my ticket, cross over to the newstand, buy the evening newspaper, go outside and signal for a taxi.
Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.
I've been called Bone all my life, but my name's Ruth Anne.
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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.
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.
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
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.
The sun shone, having no alternative.
There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it.
It was a pleasure to burn.
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.
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
It was the day my grandmother exploded.
They shoot the white girl first.
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.
The moment one learns English, complications set in.
When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.
We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
Stonewiser Sariah knew she was dying, murdered, she surmised, and not by the stones she clutched in her hands as was often the fate of unwary stonewisers.
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.
The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.
Three children lay on the rocks at the water's edge.
I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
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.
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.
The magic in that country was so thick and tenacious that it settled over the land like chalk-dust and over floors and shelves like slightly sticky plaster-dust.
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.
Her earliest memory was of waking from the dream.
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.
A small vagrant breeze came from nowhere and barely flicked the feather tips as the arrow sped on its way.
I begin with writing the first sentence - and trusting to Almighty God for the second.
Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.
Sarcasm is armour, Saffron thought, and imagined she was donning a suit of it, plate by gleaming, snark-laden plate.
I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.
In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together.
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.
Terence crept nervously through the forest, glancing often over his shoulder.
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.
The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.
Terence squinted down the shaft of a freshly carved arrow and twirled it in his fingers to make sure it was straight.
"To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die."
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.
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.
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
At the time the strangers came, the Manth people were still living in the low mat-walled shelters that they had carried with them in their hunting days.
One never knows when the blow may fall.
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.
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.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
On a clear day the island can bee seen from the mainland, the long ridge of its tree-ringed hill breaking the horizon to the south.
Albard lay undiscovered among the ruins for three days and nights.
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.
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane
They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.
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.
"She won't be angry with me," said Alicia.
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.
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.
Imo set out one day to catch some fish, but there was no sea.
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.
It was, of course, a beautiful day, a Company brochure day.
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.
The first time I read the ad, I choked and curse and spat and threw the paper to the floor.
It was like so, but wasn't.
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.
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."
There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.
At our Divine Lady's command I, Qiturah, Honored Mother of Verdred Temple and most reverent scrip to the Goddess Ithyris, have taken up quill and ink to chronicle the events leading up to the dark days of the recent Monderan Rebellion.
Lisette Toutournier sighed.
I had been a junior partner in the firm of Veeley, Carr & Raymond, attorneys and counsellors at law, for about a year, when one morning, in the temporary absence of both Mr. Veeley and Mr. Carr, there came into our office a young man whose whole appearance was so indicative of haste and agitation that I involuntarily rose at his approach and impetuously inquired: "What is the matter? You have no bad news to tell, I hope."
The rain falling not more than a foot and a half from the geographical tip of the nose outjutting from the face in the doorway had in it a quality of falsely apologetic but, nevertheless, stubbornly persistent despair.
It was in Warwick Castle that I came across the curious stranger whom I am going to talk about.
Call me Jonah.
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own.
She was standing on Westminster Bridge.
"Do you mean," Sir Giles said, "that the thing never gets smaller?"
The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.
It's almost impossible to pinpoint the beginning of a fad.
Mr. Dunworthy opened the door to the laboratory and his spectacles promptly steamed up.
There were five of us - Carruthers and the new recruit and myself, and Mr. Spivens and the verger.
Colin tried the door, but it was locked.
"I heard a noice," Mrs. Davenport said, "and then I was moving through this tunnel."
Linderwall was a large kingdom, just east of the Mountains of Morning, where philosophers were highly respected and the number five was fashionable.
The King of the Enchanted Forest was twenty years old and lived in a rambling, scrambling, mixed-up castle somewhere near the center of his domain.
Deep in the Enchanted Forest, in a neat gray house with a wide porch and a red roof, lived the witch Morwen and her nine cats.
Mother taught me to be polite to dragons.
Everybody knows that a seventh son is lucky.
Being a heroine is nowhere near the fun folks make it out to be.
It is a true thing that the Far West is a strange and dangerous place.
The Widow Arden and her two daughters lived in a one-room cottage just outside the village of Mortlak, less than a mile from the river Thames.
I suppose that if I were to blame our involvement on anyone (which I see no reason to do), I would be compelled to say that it was all Aunt Charlotte's fault.
Dearest Kate, It is dreadfully flat here since you have been gone, and it only makes it worse to imagine all the things I shall be missing.
Rafaela Cortes spent the morning barefoot, sweeping both dead and living things from over and under beds, from behind doors and shutters, through archways, along the veranda - sweeping them all across the deep shadows and luminous sunlight carpeting the cool tile floors.
"Gemma, tell your story again," Shana begged, putting her arms around her grandmother and breathing in that special smell of talcum and lemon that seemed to belong only to her.
"I'm tired of remembering," Hannah said to her mother as she climbed into the car.
"You have not found Evelyn Rand."
You'll understand this story better if I tell you a lie.
All the way there David had saved this moment for himself, struggling not to peek until the proper time came.
A fug of tobacco smoke and damp clammy air hit her as she entered the cafe.
The worm glued to the tarmac is as long as a snake.
By day, the Nicollet Mall winds through Minneapolis like a paved canal.
Not everyone believes in mountains, yet there they are, in plain sight.
Robert Kemble, Earl of Macclesfield, had never been given to flights of fancy, but when he saw the girl by the lake, he fell instantly in love.
William Dunford snorted with disgust as he watched his friends gaze longingly into each other's eyes.
Eleanor Lyndon was minding her own business when Charles Wycombe, Earl of Billington, fell - quite literally - into her life.
The name Isolde Ophelia Goodnight did rather spell a life of tragedy.
Jacob Ahn saw blank faces around him.
Marcus Tullius Cicero winced when the hot plaster was placed on his chest by his physician, and in the somewhat pettish voice of a semi-invalid he demanded, "What is that stink?"
We all grow up with images of single life.
In each of our lives, there are people who change the way we look at the world around us so fundamentally that, after we meet, we wonder how we ever got by without them.
It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.
"If I were a man,..." that was what pretty little Mollie Mathewson always said when Gerald would not do what she wanted him to--which was seldom.
In her soft-carpeted, thick-curtained, richly furnished chamber, Mrs. Marroner lay sobbing on the wide, soft bed.
Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians.
"Why not?" said Mr. Mathews.
A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard. 
The only sin is selfishness.
James had come on to the funeral, but his wife had not; she could not leave the children--that is what he said.
The king stood in a pool of blue light, unmoored.
Near the time we both knew I would have to leave him, it was hard to tell which flashes were lightning and which came from the energy weapons of the Invisibles.
From July of his sophomore year in college until the following January, all Tsukuru Tazaki could think about was dying.
Sir Henry Wallace sat at his ease in his favorite chair--carved wood with a straight, rigid back and a worn rose-colored cushioned seat--in front of the fireplace in his bedroom
My father used to carry me down the hall to my room after I came home from the hospital.
All children, except one, grow up.
Below the serpents, the beds of weeds swayed gently in the changing tide.
The London air was full of smog and filth.
Some things start before other things.
What about a teakettle?
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.
This book contains the records left us by a man whom we called the Steppenwolf, an expression he often used himself.
I know I'm not an ordinary ten-sear-old kid.
The flat perched at the top of the house, little more than a lean-to riveted to Mrs Puri's ceiling.
Mr Dunworthy opened the door to the laboratory and his spectacles promptly steamed up.
Max would never forget that faraway summer when, almost by chance, he discovered magic.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Occasionally, Juan Diego would make a point of saying, "I'm a Mexican—I was born in Mexico, I grew up there."
Dear Irving Oil, I am writing to apply for a job with your company, and I have included my resume for your review.
Oleander Koh strode across the dead city, humming softly to himself.
This time there would be no witnesses.
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.
One evening, it was toward the end of October, Harry Arno said to the woman he'd been seeing on and off the past few years, "I've made a decision. I'm going to tell you something I've never told anyone before in my life."
She stopped counting the dead an hour ago.
May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month.
The boy's name was Santiago.
Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch-hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage, there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one.
Throughout the book are many brief news stories involving current, sometimes novel, applications of fluid phenomena.
It was a warm spring night when a fist knocked at the door so hard that the hinges bent
It was a moonless night, which was good for the purposes of Solid Jackson
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings
Left Munich at 8:35 p.m., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late.
Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable.
There were five of us--Carruthers and the new recruit and myself, and Mr. Spivens and the verger.
On the way out to Tempe I saw a dead jackal in the road
The phone sang as I was looking over the defense's motion to dismiss.
When a star collapses, it sort of falls in on itself.
The Monday before spring break I told my English Lit class we were going to do Shakespeare
"You've got to talk to him," Chris said.
"Is the will here?" he said.
On Wednesday Elizabeth's next-door neighbor came over.
It was in the late Cretaceous that predators reached their full flowering
"I want you to come with me to the airport, Dr. Lejeune," Dr. Young said.
The night Jack joined our post, Vi was late.
I got to Hollywood around one-thirty and started trying to check into the Rialto
Of course the first thing I looked for was the fire watch stone.
I should not have come, Anne thought, clutching her gloved hands in her lap.
"Is it the end of the world?" Megan asked.
The first thing my new roommate did was tell me her life story.
I should be happy.
There was a letter from the Clearys at the post office.
Laynie had to go to the bathroom again.
We are near the spiraldown.
None of the others were any help.
What throwed me off about this guy was the way he looked.
Reverend Hoyt knew immediately what Natalie wanted.
"Do you suppose Walter Hunt would have invented the safety pin if he had known that punk rockers would stick them through their cheeks?" Mr. Mowan said.
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend.
Pedron Niall's aged gaze wandered about his private audience chamber, but dark eyes hazed with thought saw nothing.
The man who called himself Bors, at least in this place, sneered at the low murmuring that rolled around the vaulted chamber like the soft gabble of geese.
The palace still shook occasionally as the earth rumbled in memory, groaned as if it would deny what had happened.
A small party of elves reached the road marker at the edge of the Gilt Leaf Wood an hour after sundown
This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.
I heard the mailman approach my office door, half an hour earlier than normal
We sail into the night.
The granite was cold and rough against the gray-cloaked man's palms
"I don't believe it, of course," said Golan Trevize, standing on the wide steps of Seldon Hall and looking out over the city as it sparkled in the sunlight.
Once, in a kingdom called Delain, there was a king with two sons.
The night was rank with the smell of man.
"Dragons," said Mollander
The day was grey and bitter cold, and the dogs would not take the scent
The comet's tail spread across the dawn, a red slash that bled above the crags of Dragonstone like a wound in the pink and purple sky.
"We should start back," Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them.
There was once a little princess whose father was king over a great country full of mountains and valleys.
A sudden snow shower put an end to hockey practice
The big kitchen of the Murrys' house was bright and warm, curtains drawn agains the dark outside, against the rain driving past the house from the northeast.
The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.
I will weep no more for the lost, asleep in their water graves.
She was squinting at the thermometer in the white light coming through the window.
Tommy Dort went into the captain's room with his last pair of stereophotos and said: "I'm through, sir. These are the last two photos I can take."
Two miles out of town on a main road, the lunch room drew trucking trade because there was plenty of space to park the huge trailer trucks.
There have been all kinds of notions and guesses as to how it would end.
The Professor was congratulating Earth's first visitor from another planet on his wisdom at getting in touch with a cultural anthropologist before contacting any other scientists (or governments, God forbid!), and in learning English from radio and TV before landing from his orbit-parked rocket, when the Martian stood up and said hesitantly, "Excuse me, please, but where is it?"
The disabled cruiser came in low, fast, and almost out of control
First, there were two planets looted of their ores, mined and gutted and left there naked for the crows of space to pick.
Fire exploded over summer night lawns.
Narrator: We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own
For fifteen years now, the Hurrians had maintained their base on the other side of the moon.
There is a sweet little horror story that is only two sentences long.
The photon storm struck without warning, pouncing upon the Ship from behind a bank of giant red stars
I collapsed joints and hung up to talk with Dak-whirr.
Wax crept along the ragged fence in a crouch, his boots scraping the dry ground.
"I see..." said the vampire thoughtfully, and slowly he walked across the room toward the window.
This is a story about magic and where it goes and perhaps more importantly where it comes from and why, although it doesn't pretend to answer all or any of these questions.
The bees of Death are big and black, they buzz low and somber, they keep their honey in combs of wax as white as alter candles.
The flotillas of the dead sailed around the world on underwater rivers
Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.
Now read on...
Polly cut off her hair in front of the mirror, feeling slightly guilty about not feeling very guilty about doing so
Sam Vimes sighed when he heard the scream, but he finished shaving before he did anything about it.
The rumor spread through the city like wildfire (which had quite often spread through Ankh-Morpork since its citizens had learned the words "fire insurance").
Now consider the tortoise and the eagle.
It was a dumb thing to do but it wasn't that dumb.
Traveller died of lockjaw two days after Robert E. Lee died.
Mr. Dunworthy opened the door to the laboratory and his spectacles promptly steamed up.
On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as man busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might study the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
The year 1866 was signalised by a remarkable incident, a mysterious and inexplicable phenomenon, which doubtless no one has yet forgotten.
Aragorn sped on up the hill.
This book is largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history.
Kalak rounded a rocky stone ridge and stumbled to a stop before the body of a dying thunderclast.
In the autumn season, hawks, falcons, and eagles followed an ancient path through the sky on their journey south for the winter, the same path their ancestors had flown since the first took wing in ages long dark to memory.
Pioneer Geneticist Dr. Phillip Laredo leaned into an early morning breeze that skidded off the choppy whitecaps of the Hudson River.
Sophronia intended to pull the dumbwaiter up from the kitchen to outside the front parlor on the ground floor, where Mrs. Barnaclegoose was taking tea.
The man in the fog was watching her.
My father had a face that could stop a clock.
The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm.
Poppy set down one of the mermaid dolls close to the stretch of asphalt road that represented the Blackest Sea.
His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a country boy who had never seen Trantor before.
The Galactic Empire Was Falling.
The First Galactic Empire had endured for tens of thousands of years.
Rocking gently under the full moon, the Falkland Advanced Petroleum survey ship rested in the harbor at Stanley.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created.
The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
A large flying craft moved swiftly across the surface of an astoundingly beautiful sea.
The history of the Galaxy has got a little muddled, for a number of reasons: partly because those who are trying to keep track of it have got a little muddled, but also because some very muddling things have been happening anyway.
Nicholas Orloff inserted a monocle in his left eye with all the incorruptible Briticism of a Russian educated at Oxford and said reproachfully, "But, my dear Mr. Secretary! Half a billion dollars!"
The Campus of Arcturus University, on Arcturus' second planet, Eron, is a dull place during mid-year vacations and, moreover, a hot one, so that Myron Tubal, sophomore, found life boring and uncomfortable.
Brand Gorla smiled uncomfortably, "These things exaggerate, you know."
"But that wasn't it, either," said Dr. Calvin thoughtfully.
Here's a puzzle for you, if you like.
It began the same night it ended.
In the end, any particular planet must die.
From the doorway of the short corridor between the only two rooms in the travel-head of the spaceship, Mario Esteban Rioz watched sourly as Ted Long adjusted the video dials painstakingly. 
Louis Peyton never discussed publicly the methods by which he had bested the police of Earth in a dozen duels of wits and bluff, with the psychoprobe always waiting and always foiled.
The asteroid belt is large and its human occupancy small.
Herman Chouns was a man of hunches.
A kind of peace had endured for a century and people had forgotten what anything else was like.
I couldn't tell you my real name if I wanted to, and, under the circumstances, I don't want to.
The United States Robot and Mechanical Men, Inc., as defendants in the case, had influence enough to force a closed-doors trial without a jury.
United States Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc., had a problem.
There was no question that Montie Stein had, through clever fraud, stolen better than $100,000.
First time?
The annual ritual was all set.
My husband, Lancelot, always reads the paper at breakfast.
"There she is again," said Lillian Wright as she adjusted the venetian blinds carefully.
Arthur Trent heard them quite clearly.
Call me Jonah.
The original combination of catastrophes had taken place five years ago--five revolutions of this planet, HC-12549d by the charts, and nameless otherwise.
Karl Jennings knew he was going to die.
In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.
James Priss-I suppose I ought to say Professor James Priss, though everyone is sure to know whom I mean even without the title--always spoke slowly.
Jack Weaver came out of the vitals of Multivac looking utterly worn and disgusted.
For the first time in the history of United States Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc., a robot had been destroyed through accident on Earth itself.
The Earth was one large park.
The sky above the port was the color of television, turned to a dead channel.
Lije Baley had just ecided to relight his pipe, when the door of his office opened without a preliminary knock, or announcement, of any kind.
Space was black; black all around in every direction.
The coldsleep itself was dreamless.
The very last person anyone would expect to be a murderer was Mrs. Avis Lardner.
They were brothers.
Keith Harriman, who had for twelve years now been Director of Research at United States Robot and Mechanical Men, Inc., found that he was not at all certain whether he was doing right.
The whole world was interested.
Andrew Martin said, "Thank you," and took the seat offered him.
Jerome Bishop, composer and trombonist, had never been in a mental hospital before.
Ben Estes knew he was going to die and it didn't make him feel any better to know that that was the chance he had lived with all these years.
July 4, 2076--and for the third time the accident of the conventional system of numeration, based on powers of ten, had brought the last two igits of the year back to the fateful 76 that had seen the birth of the nation.
 It was the last letter in Irene Redfield’s little pile of morning mail. 
In the attic where the rain touch the roof softly on spring days and where you could feel the mantle of the snow outside, a few inches away, and December nights, a thousand times great grandmere existed.
It was 4 o’clock when the ceremony was over and the carriages begin to arrive.
I am an invisible man.
He– for there could be no doubt of his sex, does the fashion of the time did something to disguise it Dash was in the active slicing at the head of a moor which swung from the rafters.
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.
I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
I was born dead.
Since he was eleven, when the terrible thing happened, he had been Chahina instead of Hasan
SCREECH!
"There are dragons in the twins' vegetable garden."
THis is the first page of the Book of the Dark, written some six hundred years ago in Berila, on Enlad
In the west of Havnor, among hills forested with oak and chestnut, is the town of Glade.
It was raining again, and the wizard of Re Albi was sorely tempted to make a weather spell, just a little, small spell, to send the rain on round the mountain.
The island of Semel lies north and west across the Pelnish Sea from Havnor, south and west of the Enlades
Her father's ancestors had owned a wide, rich domain on the wide, rich island of Way
Her father's ancestors had owned a wide, rich domain on the wide, rich island of Way
It was early afternoon, but as ever the daytime City was enveloped in gray mist.
Here at the Qualified Users and Negotiators of Time Travel Universal Ministry, we must fiercely discourage any further interest in time travel.
Footprints--footprints--the footprints of one dead.
Never having tried keeping a diary before, it will be amusing to see whether I have enough mental energy to go on with it.
Leaning pipe in mouth on the engine-room rail, I was dreamily watching the rhythmic movement of the huge engines of the Canadian Pacific liner Montauk, on which I was returning to Glasgow after a business visit to Ottawa
And so, Charlton, you're going to spend part of the Long at Rosemount Abbey.
The unhappy madman, Stanley Barton, is dead.
I have loved mirrors from my very earliest years.
You weren't worried about the first call, were you Miss Marker?
My dear old Chum,--Before you leave England for the East I claim the redemption of a promise you made to me some time ago that you would give me the pleasure of a week or two of you company.
I companioned Edward on many walking tours before I discovered that he had a positive phobia about woods.
A beam of pale gold light cut the blue smoke-dimmed atmosphere of the Kasbek, a beam that was focused on the arched door set under the staircase through which the artistes of the cabaret made their interest.
Now, on the night when I took my watch, I discovered that there was no moon, and, save for such light as the fire threw, the hill top was in darkness.
"What I can never understand about your Church," said Doctor Taylor, "Is the manner in which it is so uncompromisingly condemns spiritualism."
It was the return of the road-breaking battalion with their accursed compressed-air drills which made Mr Horrocks's greying hairs bristle with determination.
It's not that I don't believe in what you call horror, it's just that I don't believe in your interpretation.
Rudolph Reeve sat by himself on the Old Long Barrow on Pallinghurst Common
"Of course, I don't pretend to be aesthetic and all that," said Heyling in that voice of half contemptuous indifference that often marks the rivalry between Science and Art, "but I must say that this folk-song and dance business strikes me as pretty complete rot."
The dreariness of the place was beyond expression.
It was about ten o'clock on a November morning in the little village of Blea-on-the-Sands.
I woke to the patter of rain on canvas, with the feel of my first husband's kiss on my lips.
I am an indefatigable note-taker.
When Patricia was six years old, she found a wounded bird.
The Reverend Dr. Hall was in his study making up the entries for the year in the parish register: it being his custom to note baptisms, weddings and burials in a paper book as they occurred, and in the last days of December to write them out fairly in the vellum book that was kept in the parish closet.
The Reverend Dr. Hall was in his study making up the entries for the year in the parish register: it being his custom to note baptisms, weddings and burials in a paper book as they occurred, and in the last days of December to write them out fairly in the vellum book that was kept in the parish closet.
I remember being born.
Later than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof.
There was once a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself — not just sometimes, but always.
In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.
I returned to myself.
I was unconscious.
When I try to write it down it dies: I find myself speaking with my father's polished, thoughtful voice.
Time is earth and water.
"Now single up all lines!"
I didn't ask to be a celebrity.
It is the immensity, I believe.
October was in the chair, so it was chilly that evening, and the leaves were red and orange and tumbled from the trees that circled the grove.
Somewhere in the night, someone was writing.
I like things to be story-shaped.
There are still clubs in London.
In every way that counted, I was dead.
"Time is fluid here," said the demon.
You can call me a bastard if you like.
My own children delight in hearing true tales from my childhood: The Time My Father Threatened to Arrest the Traffic Cop, How I Broke My Sister's Front Teeth Twice, When I Pretended to be Twins, and even The Day I Accidentally Killed the Gerbil
"So," said the young priest.
To begin at the end: I arranged the thin slice of pickled ginger, pink and translucent, on top of the pale yellowtail flesh, and dipped the whole arrangement--ginger, fish, and vinegared rice--into the soy sauce, flesh-side down, and then I devoured it in a couple of bites.
She seems so cool, so focused, so quiet, yet her eyes remain fixed upon the horizon.
It is February the fourteenth, at that hour of the morning when all the children have been taken to school and all the husbands have driven themselves to work or been dropped, steambreathing and greatcoated at the rail station at the edge of the town for the Great Commute, when I pin my heart to Missy's front door.
She has the dream again that night.
I am in bed, now.
What do you want?
This is a true story, pretty much.
An affliction, morbid in its intensity, unfortunate in its scope, afflicting those who habitually and pathalogically catalogue and construct diseases.
I suppose I could claim that I had always suspected that the world was a cheap and shoddy sham, a bad cover for something deeper and weirder and infinitely more strange, and that, in some way, I already knew the truth.
The men lock Roxy in the cupboard when they do it.
I guess I've been following Scarlet for a long time now.
"Come on," said Vic.
Selena had been in The George with Laurie and Sandra all afternoon, celebrating Laurie’s promotion and bitching about some madam muck in Sandra’s cordon bleu class and inevitably going over the Johnny saga for the millionth time. 
They were a rich and a rowdy bunch at the Epicurean Club in those days.
When Salma peers into her daughter’s coffee cup, she knows instantly she must lie.
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.
On my tenth birthday, six months before she sleepwalked into the river, Mom burned the rabbit cake. 
"If you ask me," said the little man to Shadow, "you're something of a monster."
The music all that morning had been of the militant type that had dominated the airwaves for the past few weeks; but to the discerning ear there was a grim undertone to it that hadn't been there since the very start of the alien invasion.
For the past eight years, always starting on August twelfth, Ruth Young lost her voice.
I DIDN’T KNOW HOW LONG I had been in the king’s prison. 
He was asleep, but woke at the sound of the key turning in the lock. 
On an alternate world, two million steps from Earth.
Angels were falling all over the place.
Miles returned to consciousness with his eyes still closed.
There was a town, and there was a girl, and there was a theft.
The two men appeared out of nowhere, a few yards apart in the narrow, moonlit lane.
Cazaril heard the mounted horsemen on the road before he saw them. 
It was nearing midnight and the Prime Minister was sitting alone in his office, reading a long memo that was slipping through his brain without leaving the slightest trace of meaning behind.
Ista leaned forward between the crenellations atop the gate tower, the stone gritty beneath her pale hands, and watched in numb exhaustion as the final mourning party cleared the castle gate below.
Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
I had my recurring dream last night. 
Maybe he should have been more worried about the ghost detector going off.
Alive! Still alive. Alive … again.
Cullen ran through the redwood forest, grabbing frantically at his chest.
He remembered much of his stay in the womb.
Slipped into my first metamorphosis so quietly that no one noticed. 
Will tugged at his mother's hand and said, "Come on, come on..."
Doro discovered the woman by accident when he went to see what was left of one of his seed villages
Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.
I was in my bedroom reading a novel when somebody came banging on the door really loud, like the police. 
THE SHIP HAD BEEN destroyed five days before. 
This is a story of war and a man who was forced by his fate from Troy's shores to Italy -- he who was tossed across land and sea by Juno's deep wrath and that of the savage gods.
"Sh'gall is out on other Weyr business," Moreta told Nesso for the third time, beginning to loosen her sweat-and oil-stained tunic as a hint.
THE SUN HAD NOT been up long enough to burn off the cold dampness of morning when Teray and Iray left their dormitory room at Redhill School for the last time.
Once upon a time, in a far-off land, I was kidnapped by a gang of fearless yet terrified young men with so much impossible hope beating inside their bodies it burned their very skin and strengthened their will right through their bones.
"Probe reports coming through, sir," Sallah Telgar announced without taking her eyes from the flickering lights on her terminal.
Judy Rhines decided to take the footpath through the pasture.
The AIvas felt its sensors responding to a renewal of power from the solar panels on the roof above it.
Let's start with the end of the world, why don’t we? 
Hmm. No. I'm telling this wrong. 
All this happened, more or less.
Call me Jonah.
Time grows short, my love. 
It's almost impossible to pinpoint the beginning of a fad.
Pippin looked out from the shelter of Gandalf's cloak.
I'm pretty much fucked.
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
Erc the Speckled, the guard at the entrance of Rath na Riogh, the royal enclosure of the great Palace of Tara, knew the man whom he had challenged in the darkness.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary Bishop from America were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome.
Thirty or forty years ago, in one of those grey towns along the Burlington railroad, which are so much greyer today than they were then, there was a house well known from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere.
Last summer I happened to be crossing the plains of Iowa in a season of intense heat, and it was my good fortune to have for my traveling companion James Quayle Burden--Jim Burden, as we still call him in the West.
I am not as I once was. 
Mr Salteena was an elderly man of 42 and was fond of asking people to stay with him.
There were two hundred and fifty-six places where a man could hide within his own flesh. 
An ash-gray dog with a white blaze on its forehead burst onto the rough terrain of the market on the first Sunday in December, knocked down tables of fried food, overturned Indians' stalls and lottery kiosks, and bit four people who happened to cross its path.
In the dark of dreams, a soul can die.
The temple dedicated to his worship was located below the castle's walls and ramparts, below the towers and spires, below the great hall with its moldering tapestries, below even the dungeons.
I didn’t want to go to Paris.
“So now get up.”
Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt.
By noon Michael and Merope still hadn't returned from Stepney, and Polly was beginning to get really worried.
By noon Michael and Merope still hadn't returned from Stepney, and Polly was beginning to get really worried.
Colin tried the door, but it was locked.
In these dungeons the darkness was complete, but Katsa had a map in her mind.
The family of Dashwood had been long settled in Sussex.
Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. 
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
As I was a stranger in Olondria, I knew nothing of the splendor of its coasts, nor of Bain, the Harbor City, whose lights and colors spill into the ocean like a cataract of roses. 
About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward of Huntington, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet's lady, with all the comforts and consequences of a handsome house and large income.
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be a heroine.
Sir Walter Elliott, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed.
My dear Brother - I can no longer refuse myself the pleasure of profiting by your kind invitation when we last parted of spending some weeks with you at Churchhill, and, therefore, if quite convenient to you and Mrs Vernon to receive me at present, I shall hope within a few days to be introduced to a sister whom I have so long desired to be acquainted with.
Teddy Xanakis would have to steal the painting.
The city was silently bloating in the hot sun, rotting like the thousands of bodies that lay where they had fallen in street battles.
Marcus Lucianus Valerian walked through a maze of streets in the Eternal City, hoping to find a sanctuary of peace within himself.
Physically exhausted, pride bruised, Atretes had had enough.
So, then.
I am to wear white and green, as a Tudor princess.
The younger set were meeting in Ethel Garner's summerhouse to make plans for an automobile ride and an all-day picnic which was arranged for the next week.
When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.
I was never particularly keen on my job before the day I got shot and nearly lost it, along with my life.
In 1815 Monsieur Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of Digne.
It was one of those Septembers when it seemed that the summer would never end.
In the days when the spinning wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses--and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread lace, had their toy spinning wheels of polished oak--there might be seen in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid, undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny countryfolk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race.
The child's world changed late one afternoon, though she didn’t know it.
It was in June of 1935 that I came home from my ranch in South America for a stay of about six months.
On the day we’re the last people to see indie kid Finn alive, we’re all sprawled together in the Field, talking about love and stomachs.
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
Fleur took the small roads, the rutted paths through the woods traversing slough edge and heavy underbrush, trackless, unmapped, unknown and always bearing east.
On the first Monday of the month of April, 1626, the market-town of Meung, in which the author of the "Romance of the Rose" was born, appeared to be in as perfect a state of revolution as if the Huguenots had just made a second Rochelle of it.
Fidelis walked home from the great war in twelve days and slept thirty-eight hours once he crawled into his childhood bed.
May it please heaven that the reader, emboldened and having for the time being become as fierce as what he is reading, should, without being led astray, find his rugged and treacherous way across the desolate swamps of these sombre and poison-filled pages; for, unless he brings to his reading a rigorous logic and a tautness of mind equal at least to his wariness, the deadly emanations of this book will dissolve his soul as water does sugar.
Come home, Tenar!
A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories.
It was in the spring of the year 1894 that all London was interested, and the fashionable world dismayed, by the murder of the Honourable Ronald Adair under most unusual and inexplicable circumstances.
"From the point of view of the criminal expert," said Mr. Sherlock Holmes, "London has become a singularly uninteresting city since the death of the late lamented Professor Moriarty."
"You believe pretty thoroughly in these things, or you wouldn't abandon the eternal triangle and the other stock subjects of the modern novelists to write the story of Gilles de Rais," and after a silence Des Hermies added, "I do not object to the latrine; hospital; and workshop vocabulary of naturalism.
Holmes had been seated for some hours in silence with his long, thin back curved over a chemical vessel in which he was brewing a particularly malodorous product.
From the years 1894 to 1901 inclusive, Mr. Sherlock Holmes was a very busy man.
We have had some dramatic entrances and exits upon our small stage at Baker Street, but I cannot recollect anything more sudden and startling than the first appearance of Thorneycroft Huxtable, M.A., Ph.D., etc.
I have never known my friend to be in better form, both mental and physical, than in the year '95.
It is years since the incidents of which I speak took place, and yet it is with diffidence that I allude to them.
It was no very unusual thing for Mr. Lestrade, of Scotland Yard, to look in upon us of an evening, and his visits were welcome to Sherlock Holmes, for they enabled him to keep in touch with all that was going on at the police headquarters.
It was in the year '95 that a combination of events, into which I need not enter, caused Mr. Sherlock Holmes and myself to spend some weeks in one of our great university towns, and it was during this time that the small but instructive adventure which I am about to relate befell us.
When I look at the three massive manuscript volumes which contain our work for the year 1894, I confess that it is very difficult for me, out of such a wealth of material, to select the cases which are most interesting in themselves, and at the same time most conducive to a display of those peculiar powers for which my friend was famous.
On Saturday, September 10th, the English Protector Somerset and his army met the combined Scottish forces on the field of Pinkie, outside Edinburgh, and smashed them to pieces in a defeat as dire as any the Scots had suffered since Flodden. 
We were fairly accustomed to receive weird telegrams at Baker Street, but I have a particular recollection of one which reached us on a gloomy February morning, some seven or eight years ago, and gave Mr. Sherlock Holmes a puzzled quarter of an hour.
It was on a bitterly cold night and frosty morning, towards the end of the winter of '97, that I was awakened by a tugging at my shoulder.
I had intended "The Adventure of the Abbey Grange" to be the last of those exploits of my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, which I should ever communicate to the public.
"I am inclined to think--" said I.
I find it recorded in my notebook that it was a bleak and windy day towards the end of March in the year 1892.
In choosing a few typical cases which illustrate the remarkable mental qualities of my friend, Sherlock Holmes, I have endeavoured, as far as possible, to select those which presented the minimum of sensationalism, while offering a fair field for his talents.
There are those who require witnesses to their doom.
I AM A COWARD
The lunch hour in the coworkers' cafeteria at Frankenburg's had reached its peak
I do my banking at the Archimedes Trust Association.
I was jerked awake by the silent alarm vibrating my skull.
It was the week following Easter in Reading and no-one could remember the last sunny day.
I’ve been locked up for 264 days.
I was at the spaceport an hour early on the day my clone-sister was to arrive from Luna.
First the colors.
Jordon looked up from the log of the day's transmissions and noted with annoyance that Treemonisha was lying with her legs half-buried in the computer console.
A thief is a lot like a wizard.
It took perseverance, alertness, and a willingness to break the rules to watch the sunrise in Tharsis Canyon.
Never buy anything at a secondhand organbank.
Sailing in toward a rendezvous with Janus, Barnum and Bailey encountered a giant, pulsing quarter note.
It was schoolday at the Kenya disneyland.
It was the year of the fourth non-depression.
Kinraddie lands had been won by a Norman childe, Cospatric de Gondeshil, in the days of William the Lyon, when gryphons and such-like beasts still roamed the Scots countryside and folk would waken in their beds to hear the children screaming, with a great wolf-beast, come through the hide window, tearing at their throats.
The borough of Segget stands under the Mounth, on the southern side, in the Mearns Howe, Fordoun lies near and Drumlithie nearer, you can see the Laurencekirk lights of a night glimmer and glow as the mists come down.
All around her the street walls were dripping in fog as Chris Colquohoun made her way up the Gallowgate, yellow fog that hung tiny veils on her eyelashes, curled wet, and had in her throat the acrid taste of an ancient smoke.
I had desired to visit the Hebrides, or Western Islands of Scotland, so long, that I scarcely remember how the wish was originally excited; and was in the Autumn of the year 1773 induced to undertake the journey, by finding in Mr. Boswell a companion, whose acuteness would help my inquiry, and whose gaiety of conversation and civility of manners are sufficient to counteract the inconveniences of travel, in countries less hospitable than we have passed.
Dr Johnson had for many years given me hopes that we should go together, and visit the Hebrides.
Erik sat on the edge of the bed, slowly stroking his cock
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
Jesus Christ is the only way to know God and to get to heaven to live in peace forever.
Y'all need Jesus.
Jesus Christ, I think upon your sacrifice; you became nothing, poured out to death.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
Now these are the names of the children of Israel, which came into Egypt; every man and his household came with Jacob.
And the Lord called unto Moses, and spake unto him out of the tabernacle of the congregation, saying,
And the Lord spake unto Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the tabernacle of the congregation, on the first day of the second month, in the second year after they were come out of the land of Egypt, saying,
These be the words which Moses spake unto all Israel on this side Jordan in the wilderness, in the plain over against the Red sea, between Paran, and Tophel, and Laban, and Hazeroth, and Dizahab.
Now after the death of Moses the servant of the Lord it came to pass, that the Lord spake unto Joshua the son of Nun, Moses' minister, saying,
Now after the death of Joshua it came to pass, that the children of Israel asked the Lord, saying, Who shall go up for us against the Canaanites first, to fight against them?
Now it came to pass in the days when the judges ruled, that there was a famine in the land.
Now there was a certain man of Ramathaimzophim, of mount Ephraim, and his name was Elkanah, the son of Jeroham, the son of Elihu, the son of Tohu, the son of Zuph, an Ephrathite: And he had two wives; the name of the one was Hannah, and the name of the other Peninnah: and Peninnah had children, but Hannah had no children.
 Now it came to pass after the death of Saul, when David was returned from the slaughter of the Amalekites, and David had abode two days in Ziklag; it came even to pass on the third day, that, behold, a man came out of the camp from Saul with his clothes rent, and earth upon his head: and so it was, when he came to David, that he fell to the earth, and did obeisance.
Now king David was old and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat.
 A screaming comes across the sky.
Kurt was walking down the hall towards Home Ec when he saw Sam Evans standing at his locker, practically hiding his face in it, and felt a flash of pity.
The intense interest aroused in the public by what was known at the time as ``The Styles Case'' has now somewhat subsided.
Call me Ishmael.
Tarissa whispered a hope out loud before looking up at the sky.
Reif Sevrance of Clan Blackhail was out shooting ice hares in the Badlands with his brother Drey when his father and chief were slain back at camp.
The diamond pipe was hot and stinking, and when the water hit the walls the rock exploded, spraying the diggers with a cloud of dust and steam.
The fog was thick, muffling sound and sight.
"Just coffee, please."
Sunlight picked out motes of dust, and burnished mellow wood to match Arianne Seaforth's hair as she strolled through the Southern Nomarch's library.
Wow – feels like forever since I've written.
Even ignoring his nightmare predicament, Fallon DeVries would be glad to get to the Arkathan and away from the ritual of saying goodnight to an idealised statue of his mother and sister.
Where the FUCK am I????
April Fool's Day.
It's one thing to decide to save the universe, another altogether to find a way to go about it.
Madeleine Cost's world was a tight, close space, a triangular tube tilted so her head lay lower than her feet.
Looking north, Gentian Calder could make out the shadow of land.
After a morning spent sorting through the previous Champion's library, both Soren Armitage and the aide lent her by the Chancellor were so dust-laden that they were beginning to blend into their surroundings.
Ash Lenthard struggled to hide her rage.
Laura Devlin's first two months on her new world were full and hectic.
ShooTHuMP!
Locke-Ober's restaurant is on Winter Place, which is an alley off Winter Street just down from the Common.
Griff Tenning, kneeling on his seat, strained to see through to the windows of the airship's forward compartment, but there were heads, a potted palm, and a very round man in the way.
Sunlight on metal.
Hands gripping her wrists.
I have diligently collected everything I have been able to discover concerning the story of poor Werther, and here present it to you in the knowledge that you will be grateful for it.
I have diligently collected everything I have been able to discover concerning the story of poor Werther, and here present it to you in the knowledge that you will be grateful for it.
How happy I am that I am gone! My dear friend, what a thing is the heart of man!
In the Year 1815 Monseigneur Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of Digne.
" 	 When Mr. Hiram B. Otis, the American Minister, bought Canterville Chase, every one told him he was doing a very foolish thing, as there was no doubt at all that the place was haunted."
" 	 Nita slipped out the back door of the beach house, careful not to let the rickety screen door slam, and for a second stood silently on the back porch in the darkness."
Alive!
"Hey, there’s somebody in the driveway!"
He remembered much of his stay in the womb.
I slipped into my first metamorphosis so quietly that no one noticed.
Patel went slowly up the gray concrete stairs to the elevated Docklands Light Railway Station at Island Gardens; he took them one at a time, rather than two or three at once as he usually did. 
At just before 5 P.M. on a weekday, the upper-track level of Grand Central Terminal looks much as it does at any other time of day: a striped gray landscape of long concrete islands stretching away from you into a dry, iron-smelling night, under the relentless fluorescent glow of the long lines of overhead lighting.
There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Iluvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made.
For a week, Mr. R. Childan had been anxiously watching the mail.
Luke trades big.
Herewiss sat cross-legged on the parquest floor, his back braced against the wall, his eyes closed, and concentrated.
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.
By day, the Nicollet Mall winds through Minneapolis like a paved canal.
Men in their lives go on different ways; generals, statesmen, saints and even immortals begin as ordinary people.
It was a nice day.
The Red Union had been attacking the headquarters of the April Twenty-Eighth Brigade for two days.
The brown ant had already forgotten its home.
For seven nights in a row Mrs. Zimmerman had seen weird things in her front parlor.
The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.
Two tires fly.
Amerigo Bonasera sat in New York Criminal Court Number 3 and waited for justice; vengeance on the men who had so cruelly hurt his daughter, who had tried to dishonor her.
Eyes mark the shape of the city.
When I closed my eyes, the scent of the wind wafted up toward me.
She waited on tables as usual that day, her twentieth birthday.
A friend of mine has a habit of going to the zoo whenever there's a typhoon.
That afternoon she asked him, "Is that an old habit, the way you talk to yourself?"
All the stories you've been telling tonight seem to fall into two categories.
I was born in 1949, entered junior high in 1961, and college in 1967. 
Two rafts were anchored offshore like twin islands. 
There were four kangaroos in the cage - one male, two females, and a newborn baby kangaroo.
When I reached the bottom of a narrow concrete stairway, I found myself in a corridor that stretched on forever straight ahead - a long corridor with ceilings so high the passageway felt more like a dried-up drainage canal than a corridor.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
I bought a newspaper at the harbor and came across an article about an old woman who had been eaten by cats.
It started on a perfectly beautiful SUnday afternoon in July - the very first Sunday afternoon in July.
Thanks to his rare talent for keeping a diary over an extended period of time without missing a single day, he was able to cite the exact date his vomiting started and the exact date it stopped.
The first week of August hangs at the top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in it's turning.
"A huge wave nearly swept me away," said the seventh man, almost whispering.
1971 was the Year of Spaghetti.
Tony Takitani's real name was really that: Tony Takitani
Half awake, I was reading the morning paper when an ad down in one corner caught my eye: "Celebrated Sharpie Cakes, Manufacturer Seeking New Products. Major Informational Seminar."
My husband's an Ice Man.
They ran across the little restaurant entirely by accident.
Once upon a time - more like fifteen years ago, actually - I lived in a privately run dorm for college students in Tokyo.
The "I" here, you should know, means me, Haruki Murakami, the author of the story.
Sachi lost her nineteen-year-old son to a big shark that attacked him when he was surfing in Hanalei Bay.
"My husband's father was run over by a streetcar three years ago and died," the woman said, and paused.
Junpei was sixteen years old when his father made the following pronouncement.
Recently she'd had trouble remembering her own name.
The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.
A mile above Oz, the Witch balanced on the wind's forward edge, as if she were a green fleck of the land itself, flung up and sent wheeling away by the turbulent air.
In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.
Margaret had been discovering all her life that grownups were disappointing conversationalists.
Tom!'
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.
Miss Jane Marple was sitting by her window.
"Take all this business about Kenya," said Major Palgrave.
In the afternoons it was the custom of Miss Jane Marple to unfold her second newspaper.
Mrs. McGillicuddy panted along the platform in the wake of the porter carrying her suitcase.
Mrs. Bantry was dreaming.
Why is it always mother-fucking zombies?
Tony sighed and turned off the TV.
Once I was just like you, well mostly, it was about four hundred years ago, so I didn't have a computer or a cell phone, nothing like that. 
"Damian we don't think this is the best idea."
Once upon a time Daniel Swordfish had been one of the richest men in the world.
On a cold and overcast Thursday in March of 1850 my mother was laid to rest in Highgate Cemetery, and on that same day I met my cousin Niles.
No one knows how the arteries and nerves of the man next to you make him see you and the world that surrounds you both.
It was the beginning of the nd of the world but not everyone noticed right away. 
Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith.
When not tending New York holdings, Guy Grand was generally, as he expressed it, "on the go."
"I've read many books," said Professor Mephesto, with an odd finality, wearily flattening his hands on the podium, addressing the seventy-six sophomores who sat in easy reverence, immortalizing his every phrase with their pads and pens, and now, as always, giving him the confidence to slowly, artfully dramatize his words, to pause, shrug, frown, gaze abstractly at the ceiling, allow a wan wistful smile to play at his lips and repeat quietly, "many books..."
The gravel pit was about a mile east of town, and the size of a small lake, and so deep that boys under sixteen were forbidden by their parents to swim there.
I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train...
I am made out of water.
A fog can drift in from outside and get you; it can invade.
His job, as always, bored him.
My friend Nicholas Brady, who in his own mind helped save the world, was born in Chicago in 1928 but then moved right to California.
A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.
Peter Trilling watched quietly as the other children played in the dust by the side of the porch.
From the cold-storage locker at the rear of the store, Victor Nielson wheeled a cart of winter potatoes to the vegetable section of the produce department.
On Tuesday, October 11, 1988, the Jason Taverner Show ran thirty seconds short.
At three-thirty a.m. on the night of June 5, 1992, the top telepath in the Sol System fell off the map in offices of Runciter Associates in New York City.
It had been such an agreeable day until then.
Mostly, she was a woman who loved scandal—and lived by it.
Well, they are all gone now, all but me: all those clear-eyed, clear-thinking people—people with their heads in the clouds and their feet firmly on the ground—who comprise the editorial staff of the Pacific City Courier.
My earliest recollections are of being pinched.
I shook the rain from my hat and walked into the room.
When you sit at home comfortably folded up in a chair beside a fire, have you ever thought what goes on outside there?
The guy was dead as hell.
The body floated in the sludge that sluiced through the dank sewers.
Blue ice encased the continent from horizon to horizon, scoured to a gritty shine by gale-forced winds ripping shards across the frozen landscape.
The king died too slowly atop his wedding bed.
Harry Masterson would be dead in thirteen minutes.
Few in the Abwehr's military intelligence knew his true name or even his intent here on British soil.
Lille is dead.
The skull of the monster slowly revealed itself.
The ravens were the first sign.
I want a refund from ancestry.com
The secret entrance to the headquarters of the Septemberist Society could only be reached by submarine.
The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.
On February the 1st 1887, the Lady Vain was lost by collision with a derelict when about the latitude 1° S. and longitude 107° W.
Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.
The stranger came early in February one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking as it seemed from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand.
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost a narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that they are not mended again.
I've never touched myself
"Well, Mrs. Warren, I cannot see that you have any particular cause for uneasiness, nor do I understand why I, whose time is of some value, should interfere in the matter."
In the third week of November, in the year 1895, a dense yellow fog settled down upon London.
Mrs. Hudson, the landlady of Sherlock Holmes, was a long-suffering woman.
"But why Turkish?" asked Mr. Sherlock Holmes, gazing fixedly at my boots.
In recording from time to time some of the curious experiences and interesting recollections which I associate with my long and intimate friendship with Sherlock Holmes, I have continually been faced by difficulties caused by his own aversion to publicity
It was nine o'clock at night upon the second of August--the most terrible August in this history of the world.
"It can't hurt now," was Mr. Sherlock Holmes's comment when, for the tenth time in as many years, I asked his leave to reveal the following narrative.
The ideas of my friend Watson, though limited, are exceedingly pertinacious.
It was pleasant to Dr. Watson to find himself once more in the untidy room of the first floor in Baker Street which had been the sarting point of so many remarkable adventures.
I don't think that any of my adventures with Mr. Sherlock Holmes opened quite so abruptly, or so dramatically, as that which I associate with the Three Gables.
Holmes had read carefully a note which the last post had brought him.
It may have been a comedy, or it may have been a tragedy.
As a Hollywood star, I’ve had my disagreements with Science. 
Somewhere in the vaults of the bank of Cox and Co., at Charing Cross, there is a travel-worn and battered tin dispatch-box with my name, John H. Watson, M.D., Late Indian Army, painted upon the lid.
Mr. Sherlock Holmes was always of opinion that I should publish the singular facts connected with Professor Presbury, if only to dispel once for all the ugly rumours which some twenty years ago agitated the university and were echoed in the learned societies of London.
It is a most singular thing that a problem which was certainly as abstruse and unusual as any which I have faced in my long professional career should have come to me after my retirement, and be brought, as it were, to my very door.
When one considers that Mr. Sherlock Holmes was in active practice for twenty-three years, and that during seventeen of these I was allowed to cooperate with him and to keep notes of his doings, it will be clear that I have a mass of material at my command.
Sherlock Holmes had been bending for a long time over a low-power microscope.
Sherlock Holmes was in a melancholy and philosophic mood that morning.
"I should certainly do it," said Sherlock Holmes.
Watson had been watching his companion intently ever since he had sat down to the breakfast table.
They say the world is flat and supported on the back of four elephants who themselves stand on the back of a giant turtle.
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression ‘As pretty as an airport.'
Where's Papa going with that axe?' said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
Sam Vimes sighed when he heard the scream, but he finished shaving before he did anything about it.
The first words that are read by seekers of enlightenment in the secret, gong-banging, yeti-haunted valleys near the hub of the world, are when they look into The Life of Wen the Eternally Surprised.
The year that Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette.
Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.
The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status, or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we all believe that we are above-average drivers.
In the late twentieth century, the field of biotechnology and genetic engineering has positioned itself to become one of the great technological revolutions of human history.
  This book recounts the five-day history of a major American scientific crisis. 
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice ‘without pictures or conversations?’
TO Mrs. Saville, England  You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.
In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market town or rural port, which by some is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly known by the name of Tarry Town.
One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. 
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.
It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.
All states, all powers, that have held and hold rule over men have been and are either republics or principalities.
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. 
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, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way— in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.  
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.
The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex.
MRS. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde’s Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.
The intense interest aroused in the public by what was known at the time as "The Styles Case" has now somewhat subsided. 
Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed.
"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.
No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine. 
About thirty years ago Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet’s lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income. 
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. 
On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.
When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. 
Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names were—  Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter.
Edith!' said Margaret, gently, 'Edith!'
It is a sin to write this.
I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away. 
Selden paused in surprise. 
In his big brightly lighted laboratory back of the throne room, the Wizard of Oz paced impatiently forth and back, his hands clasped tightly behind him.
I was born in one of the southern counties of Kentucky. 
“The Signora had no business to do it,” said Miss Bartlett, “no business at all."
My company was charming.
“Harvest is ended and summer is gone,” quoted Anne Shirley, gazing across the shorn fields dreamily.
In the days when the spinning-wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses—and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread-lace, had their toy spinning-wheels of polished oak—there might be seen in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race. 
Once on a dark winter's day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares.
The little old town of Mayenfeld is charmingly situated.
It is with a kind of fear that I begin to write the history of my life. 
This is written from memory, unfortunately. 
“Oh, Persephone, Persephone!... Surely Koré is in Hell.”
A tall, slim girl, “half-past sixteen,” with serious gray eyes and hair which her friends called auburn, had sat down on the broad red sandstone doorstep of a Prince Edward Island farmhouse one ripe afternoon in August, firmly resolved to construe so many lines of Virgil.
The new vessel, gay with swelling scarves of bunting, ornamented from stem to stern with floating flags that kissed the breeze, rested easily on the stocks. 
You must go back with me to the autumn of 1827.
The village of Watcham is not a village in the ordinary sense of the word, and yet it is a very pretty place, with a charming picturesque aspect, and of which people say, ‘What a pretty village!’ when they come upon its little landing-place on the riverside, or drive through its old-fashioned green, where some of the surrounding houses look as if they had come out of the seventeenth century, and some as if they had come out of the picture-books of Mr. Randolph Caldecott.
 wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea, and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace. 
A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron-works? 
Gliding through the blackness of deep space, the Imperial Star Destroyer Chimaera pointed its mighty arrowhead shape toward the dim star of its target system, three thousandths of a light year away.
Directly ahead, the star was a marble-sized yellow-orange ball, its intensity moderated by its distance and by the viewports' automatic sunscreens.
"Captain Pellaeon?" a voice called down the portside crew pit through the hum of background conversation.
None of us liked to be waiting in ambush, primarily because we couldn't be wholly certain we weren't the ones being set up for a hot-vape.
GRANDEUR and gallantry never appeared with more lustre in France, than in the last years of Henry the Second's reign.
It was a vast, shining globe and it cast a light of lambent topaz into space--but it was not a sun.
"Now this is what I call cold!"
Outside the small adobe hut, the sandstorm wailed like a beast in agony, refusing to die.
The Imperial Star Destroyer Chimaera slid through the black of space, its only companion the silent gas giant world of Pesitiin far below.
Have you ever tasted a Whitstable oyster?
Neither moved; neither spoke
Three kilometers beneath the surface of Yuuzhan'tar--the world once known as Coruscant--the sound of chanting drifted up a shaft nearly as wide as it was deep, the melancholy strains yearning toward the few distant stars that could be seen from the bottom.
The man who was no longer a man stood before an alien who was not what it seemed.
As she sat in the chair that was hers by right of death, she raised her eyes to the cold faraway stars.
Far, far away, on another planet, in a place called Numberland, all the Numbers live together in a big hotel.
Outside the universe, there is nothing.
"A god cannot die," Charat Karal said.
A sunrise corona limned one edge of the planet Myrkr, setting its vast northern forests alight with a verdant glow.
Blood, drifting in starlight.
Dorsk 82 ducked behind the stone steps of the quay, just in time to dodge a blaster bolt from across the water.
Lieutenant Jaina Solo rolled her X-wing fighter up on its port S-foil and shoved her throttle forward.
The Imperial Star Destroyer moved silently through the blackness of space, its lights dimmed, its huge sublight engines blazing with the urgency of its mission.
Slowly, silently, its lights a faint glitter of life amid the darkness, the Imperial Star Destroyer Chimaera glided through space.
She was beautiful and fragile and he could not count the number of times he had told her he loved her.
Sithspawn!
The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn't sure it was worth all the effort.
Naval Lieutenant Jart Eyan looked rested and cheerful.
He made no pretense at being fully human.
I would like it to be clearly understood that this book is not wacky. 
Twelve X-wing snubfighters roared down into the atmosphere.
Somehow the dead of night amplified the lightsaber's hiss, allowing it to fill the room.
This is the bright candlelit room where the life-timers are stored – shelf upon shelf of them, squat hourglasses, one for every living person, pouring their fine sand from the future into the past. 
Commander Wedge Antilles would have preferred the ceremony to be private.
There was a man and he had eight sons.
The wind howled. 
Even before his X-wing's sensors had time to scan and identify the new ship, Corran Horn knew it was trouble.
You're good, Corran, but you're no Luke Skywalker.
Now consider the tortoise and the eagle.
Nothing but stars, scattered across the blackness as though the Creator had smashed the windscreen of his car and hadn't bothered to stop to sweep up the pieces. 
Watch . . . This is space.
They may be called the Palace Guard, the City Guard, or the Patrol. 
It was a hot afternoon with a strong wind from the south, but out on the Dakota prairie in 1885 no one minded the hot sunshine or the hard winds.
Sunday afternoon was clear, and the snow-covered prairie sparkled in the sunshine.
"I don't know how to make wreaths."
The mowing machine's whirring sounded cheerfully from the old buffalo wallow south of the claim shanty, where bluestem grass stood thick and tall and Pa was cutting it for hay.
Laura was washing the dishes one morning when old Jack, lying in the sunshine on the doorstep, growled to tell her that someone was coming
It was January in northern New York State, sixty-seven years ago.
A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin.
As I sit down to write here amidst the shadows of vine-leaves under the blue sky of southern Italy, it comes to me with a certain quality of astonishment that my participation in these amazing adventures of Mr. Cavor was, after all, the outcome of the purest accident.
The dim wagon track went no further on the prairie, and Pa stopped the horses.
Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs.
In the middle years of the nineteenth century there first became abundant in this strange world of ours a class of men, men tending for the most part to become elderly, who are called, and who are very properly called, but who dislike extremely to be called "Scientists."
It was a dark and stormy night.
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
In the last days of Narnia, far up to the west beyond Lantern Waste and close beside the great waterfall, there lived an Ape.
This is the story of an adventure that happened in Narnia and Calormen and the lands between, in the Golden Age when Peter was High King in Narnia and his brother and his two sisters were King and Queens under him.
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy, and it has been told in another book called The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe how they had a remarkable adventure.
Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy.
The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it.
"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.	"
"This is the saddest story I have ever heard.	"
Call me Ishmael.
When I left my office that beautiful spring day, I had no idea what was in store for me.
 A screaming comes across the sky.
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.
This is a story about something that happened long ago when your grandfather was a child.
 Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. 
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.
"Give me something!"
I am an invisible man.
"Heretic!"
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.
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. 
The water was as warm as it was every day, streaming from the marble slot high in the wall down onto Seelah's body.
"Children of Kesh, your Protectors have come home to you!"
Their afternoon began as it always had.
You better not never tell nobody but God.
"I think... I might have ruined my life."
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. 
Time is a lover, the old saying went: a Sith lover.
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. 
They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. 
Like all Sith on Kesh during the Time of the Rot, the Hilts family had ambition.
It was love at first sight.
"Ready!"
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.	"
We're running out of time.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
You have to see the funny side of things in the army.
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.
From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that—a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.
"All this happened, more or less.	"
"Mother died today.	"
This is where the dragons went.
An abandoned auto court in the San Berdoo foothills; Buzz Meeks checked in with ninety-four thousand dollars, eighteen pounds of high-grade heroin, a 10-gauge pump, a .38 special, a .45 automatic and a switchblade he'd bought off a pachuco at the border—right before he spotted the car parked across the line: Micky Cohen goons in an LAPD unmarked, Tijuana cops standing by to bootjack a piece of his goodies, dump his body in the San Ysidro River.
In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the Army.
Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case.
Thundershowers hit just before midnight, drowning out the horn honks and noisemaker blare that usually signalled New Year's on the Strip, bringing 1950 to the West Hollywood Substation in a wave of hot squeals with meat wagon backup.
All I have is the will to remember.
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.
I had called upon my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, one day in the autumn of last year and found him in deep conversation with a very stout, florid-faced, elderly gentleman with fiery red hair.
"My dear fellow," said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, "life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent."
We were seated at breakfast one morning, my wife and I, when the maid brought in a telegram.
Horselover Fat's nervous breakdown began the day he got the phonecall from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals.
THE FORMIDABLE GLASS-AND-STEEL STRUCTURE ROSE FROM its position on Front Street like a glittering needle threading the sky.
When I glance over my notes and records of the Sherlock Holmes cases between the years '82 and '90, I am faced by so many which present strange and interesting features that it is no easy matter to know which to choose and which to leave.
It came time to put Manny in a school.
“YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME,” THE BOUNCER SAID, folding his arms across his massive chest.
“Just coffee, please.”
Isa Whitney, brother of the late Elias Whitney, D.D., Principal of the Theological College of St. George's, was much addicted to opium.
THE COLD SNAP OF THE PREVIOUS WEEK WAS OVER; THE SUN was shining brightly as Clary hurried across Luke’s dusty front yard, the hood of her jacket up to keep her hair from blowing across her face.
“How much longer will the verdict take, do you think?” Clary asked.
I had called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes upon the second morning after Christmas, with the intention of wishing him the compliments of the season.
Barefoot conducts his seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito.
It was on a still evening in June, that Laura Montreville left her father's cottage, in the little village of Glenalbert, to begin a solitary ramble.
I have heard it remarked, that he who writes his own history ought to possess Irish humour, Scotch prudence, and English sincerity;—the first, that his work may be read; the second that it may be read without injury to himself; the third, that the perusal of it may be profitable to others.
On glancing over my notes of the seventy odd cases in which I have during the last eight years studied the methods of my friend Sherlock Holmes, I find many tragic, some comic, a large number merely strange, but none commonplace; for, working as he did rather for the love of his art than for the acquirement of wealth, he refused to associate himself with any investigation which did not tend towards the unusual, and even the fantastic.
A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.
Of all the problems which have been submitted to my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes for solution during the years of our intimacy, there were only two which I was the means of introducing to his notice, that of Mr. Hatherley's thumb, and that of Colonel Warburton's madness.
The girl came toward him across the silent room.
The Lord St. Simon marriage, and its curious termination, have long ceased to be a subject of interest in those exalted circles in which the unfortunate bridegroom moves.
Once upon a time, more years ago than anybody can remember, before the first hotel had been built or the first Englishman had taken a photograph of Mont Blanc and brought it home to be pasted in an album and shown after tea to his envious friends, Switzerland belonged to the Emperor of Austria, to do what he liked with.
"Holmes," said I, as I stood one morning in our bow-window looking down the street, "here is a madman coming along."
"To the man who loves art for its own sake," remarked Sherlock Holmes, tossing aside the advertisement sheet of the Daily Telegraph, "it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived."
"I am afraid, Watson, that I shall have to go," said Holmes, as we sat down together to our breakfast one morning.
Sherlock Holmes was a man who seldom took exercise for exercise's sake.
Shortly after my marriage I had bought a connection in the Paddington district.
The Marquis of ——, for a long series of years, was the first and most distinguished favourite at court: he held the most honourable employments under the crown, disposed of all places of profit as he pleased, presided at the council, and in a manner governed the whole kingdom.
For a week Mr. R. Childan had been anxiously watching tghe mail.
"I have some papers here," said my friend Sherlock HOlmes, as we sat one winter's night on either side of the fire, "which I really think, Watson, that it would be worth your while to glance over."
An anomaly which often struck me in the character of my friend Sherlock Holmes was that, although in the methods of thought he was the neatest and most methodical of mankind, and although also he affected a certain quiet primness of dress, he was nonetheless in his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever drove a fellow-lodger to distraction.
The first Wednesday in every month was a Perfectly Awful Day—a day to be awaited with dread, endured with courage and forgotten with haste. 
From the depths of phenobarbital slumber, Silvia Bohlen heard something that called.
It was some time before the health of my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes recovered from the strain caused by his immense exertions in the spring of '87.
Sheridan checked his sorrel as Jackson first held up his hand in sign of caution and then changed the gesture, pointing at something beyond the brow of the hill. 
Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair.
One summer night, a few months after my marriage, I was seated by my own hearth smoking a last pipe and nodding over a novel, for my day's work had been an exhausting one.
An ancient English Cathedral Tower?
"IT'S time to go to the station, Tom."
In glancing over the somewhat incoherent series of memoirs with which I have endeavoured to illustrate a few of the mental peculiarities of my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I have been struck by the difficulty which I have experienced in picking out examples which shall in every way answer my purpose.
Jeeves—my man, you know—is really a most extraordinary chap. 
During my long and intimate acquaintance with Mr. Sherlock Holmes I had never heard him refer to his relations, and hardly ever to his own early life.
The apteryx-shaped building, so familiar to him, gave off its usual smoky gray light as Eric Sweetscent collapsed his wheel and managed to park in the tiny stall allocated to him.
IT was the evening on which MM. Debienne and Poligny, the managers of the Opera, were giving a last gala performance to mark their retirement. 
The July which immediately succeeded my marriage was made memorable by three cases of interest, in which I had the privilege of being associated with Sherlock Holmes and of studying his methods.
As no lady or gentleman, with any claims to polite breeding, can possibly sympathize with the Chuzzlewit Family without being first assured of the extreme antiquity of the race, it is a great satisfaction to know that it undoubtedly descended in a direct line from Adam and Eve; and was, in the very earliest times, closely connected with the agricultural interest.
All this happened, more or less.
It is with a heavy heart that I take up my pen to write these the last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes was distinguished.
THERE was discord at Misrule.
BEFORE you fairly start this story I should like to give you just a word of warning.
Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he stayed up all night, was seated at the breakfast table.
I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.
Hopping a freight out of Los Angeles at high noon one day in late September 1955 I got on a gondola and lay down with my duffel bag under my head and my knees crossed and contemplated the clouds as we rolled north to Santa Barbara.
Once I was young and had so much more orientation and could talk with nervous intelligence about everything and with clarity and without as much literary preambling as this; in other words this is the story of an unself-confident man, at the same time of an egomaniac, naturally, facetious won't do—just to start at the beginning and let the truth seep out, that's what I'll do—.
The morning air off the Mojave in late winter is as clean and crisp as you'll ever breathe in Los Angeles County.
A rooftop billboard cast a flickering blue light through the studio windows.
Six garbage bags full of red cedar shavings, purchased two at a time for a dollar a bag, at midnight, at the self-serve shed at Dunstead & Daughter Custom Furniture, serving your fine cabinetry needs since 1986.
One of those days: late fall, bare black tree branches scratching at a churning gray sky, days cold, nights colder.
The room was dark.
Skip was my running-away name.
‘I’m writing a play,’ says Chris, leaning over the counter of my cash register.
Constance Sedgwick, M.D., aged twenty-six, was staring at herself critically in the long mirror.
"Boo, hoot Ow, ow; Oh! Oh! Me'll die. Boo, hoo. The pain, the pain! Boo, hoo!"
He was sitting on his heels in the cold light of the dawn, drawing pale flames through a handful of twigs and dry crushed grass.
Lieutenant Colonel Kel Brezan's general had just been tapped to deal with the Hafn invasion.
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train . . .
The old writer lived in a boxcar by the river.
What appeared to be an Old-Western shoot-out took place yesterday afternoon at the Boulder Cemetary.
in a corner of the city, inside a tall, narrow house at Number 4 rue Vauborel, on the sixth and highest floor, a sightless sixteen-year-old named Marie-Laure LeBlanc kneels over a low table covered with a model.
Farnsworth, the District Health Officer, was a man so grudging in what he asked of life that every win was a loss; yet he was not without a certain plodding persistence of effort and effectiveness in his limited area.
I was working the hole with the sailor and we did not do bad.
The morning light glittered on the glass windows and on the blades of the guillotines in the central square.
Listen to my last words anywhere.
The camera is the eye of a cruising vulture flying over an area of scrub, rubble and unfinished buildings on the outskirts of Mexico City.
It is a long trip.
Soon it would be too hot.
The dust came first.
Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash
Dreams of rivers, like scenes from a forgotten film, drift through the night, in passage between memory and desire.
Soon after three o'clock on the afternoon of April 22nd, 1973, a 35-year-old architect named Robert Maitland was driving down the high-speed exit lane of the Westway interchange in central London.
A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition - to which the patients themselves were not invited - was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses.
"Save the albatross . . . !
There's gold, Wayne, gold dust everywhere!'
At noon, when Dr Charles Ransom moored his houseboat in the entrance to the river, he saw Quilter, the idiot son of the old woman who lived in the ramshackle barge outside the yacht basin, standing on a spur of exposed rock on the opposite bank and smiling at the dead birds floating in the water below his feet.
Incredible nervous state, trepidation beyond words: to be this much in love is to be sick (and I love to be sick).
I remember it precisely: the first time I saw Robert C . . ., I was in a painful state of anguish.
I grew up very much alone, and as far back as I recall I was frightened of anything sexual.
In London, in a cellar, in a neighbourhood dive - the most squalid of unlikely places - Dirty was drunk.
Far, far away, on another planet, in a place called Numberland, all the Numbers live together in a big hotel.
All this happened, more or less.
"I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one."
The vampire Lestat here.
The blaze of the sun wrung pops of sweat from the old man's brow, yet he cupped his hands around the glass of hot sweet tea as if to warm them.
George was somewhere in the dark.
It was reliably reported by several persons that a rain of stones fell from a clear blue sky on Carlin Street in the town of Chamberlain on August 17th.
"We should start back," Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them.
"Two on the left."
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
"The whole trouble with your farm," Romano Muscari said, "is that it is too far uphill for the American suntanners, and too low for the German skiers."
Vellitt Boe was dreaming of a highway and ten million birds in an empty sky of featureless blue.
They lay in the dark, guarding.
You know me.
The flotillas of the dead sailed around the world on underwater rivers.
There is nothing more human than the ghost story.
I remember throwing away a child.
Her name was Chromis Pasqueflower Bowerbird and she had travelled a long way to make her case.
You want to know what good is?
The gull swooped by, seemed to hover a moment on unmoving wings.
I was shot down behind the German lines in September, 1939.
In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about has reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.
Why do these things always come to plague us?
Everyone who has ever flown will recall the thrill of his first flight over familiar terrain, viewing the old scenes from a new angle that imparted a strangeness and a mystery to them as of a new world; but always there was the comforting knowledge that the airport was not too far away and that even in the event of a forced landing one would know pretty well where he was and how to get home.
Six powerful figures stood on the shore of the once-great city of Metru Nui.
He was known as the Pale Man.
The bright headlights of Jack Eskridge's car cut their way through the South Dakota night, showing the narrow two-lane road stretching before him, mile after mile.
Swallows darted through the cloud of midges dancing over the mudflats.
"Has the Archmage returned?"
Peter came the fall I was six, in the middle of October.
There was a God once, of course there was.
Alex knelt in front of his new terrarium, peering through the glass as he searched for a sign of his latest pet.
It was but a sad day
Ealstan added up a long column of figures.
He was crawling on hands and knees through a world of steam, of greasy mud that sought to engulf him bodily.
The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed.
Neon lights always make the night seem warmer; it's psychological.
This is the tale of Bradley after he left Fort Dinosaur upon the west coast of the great lake that is in the center of the island.
I stood there on the beach and said, "Goody-by, Butterfly," and the ship slowly turned, then headed out toward deep water.
Madam – I sit down to give you an undeniable proof of my considering your desires as indispensable orders.
It was starting to end, after what seemed most of eternity to me.
There was a Hungarian adventurer who had astonishing beauty, infallible charm, grace, the powers of a trained actor, culture, knowledge of many tongues, aristocratic manners.
chapter one Christmas with Mom and Dad Same old bullshit. chapter two  
Once upon a time, there was a prostitute called Maria.  
I am going to call my autobiography The Fermata, even though “fermata” is only one of the many names I have for the Fold.
He practically fell on top of Rita, his hand grazing her left breast in the complete darkness.  
"Jump!"
There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives.
One dude stood all afternoon at the buffet wearing just his boxers, licking the orange dust off barbecued potato chips.
I was dozing when I heard the scream.
I gather you’re my wife,’ said the man in the waiting room.  
Love thy Neigbor? Oh, I intend to.  
The king is ready for war.
"Tell me about your wife," I say.
In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army.
It is a sad but very real truth that there is no future for relationships where spaghetti and chocolate milk does not play a major role.
I still get nightmares
As time passed the political climate changed greatly.  People started to completely forget about borderlines of sexuality, instead turning their attention to the differences between humans and unicorns.
Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case.
Mr Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he stayed up all night, was seated at the breakfast table.
"I am inclined to think -" said I.
He was born with a gift for laughter, and a sense that the world was mad.
Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza was too old to be at a Communist party.
My father had a face that could stop a clock.
Not everyone believes in mountains, yet there they are, in plain sight.
"Ember, when did your parents die, and what was the cause of death?"
I stood before a silent, watchful table, six pairs of eyes on me, keen gazes ranging from suspicious to appraising as we waited for the charges to be declared.
The world was on fire.
She was always the favored one.
Only the adversaries remained to make life interesting.
Another day, another battlefield, scattered with the cooling corpses of friend and foe alike.
I stared at the pile of boxes in my new bedroom, wishing the Internet had been hooked up.
He knew he’d lost the argument as soon as he lost his temper.
A man in the garb of a slave went up the side of that mountain that is all covered in forest, the Mountain Pelion.
Ten seconds passed between when Daemon Black took his seat and when he poked me under my shoulder blade with his trusty pen.
I wasn't sure what woke me.
I was on fire again.
Sing, goddess, of the anger of Achilleus, son of Peleus, the accursed anger which brought uncounted anguish on the Achaians and hurled down to Hades many mighty souls of heroes, making their bodies the prey to dogs and the birds' feasting: and this was the working of Zeus' will.
Back in the day, I had this plan for the off chance that I was around for the whole end-of-the-world business.
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
Joost had two problems: the moon and his mustache.
Retvenko leaned against the bar and tucked his nose into his dirty shot glass.
Before she became the Girl from Nowhere -- the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years-- she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy.
"Little Man, would you come on?
I hate First Friday.
Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond.
As usual, Julian gave her a book.
THE FOLLOWING MESSAGE HAS BEEN DECODED
A strip of road, brown as burnt sugar, and tender as old calico led to a large low house which had become a home for old folk.
I rise to my feet when he lets me.
It's that moon again, slung so fat and low in the tropical night, calling out across a curdled sky and into the quivering ears of that dear old voice in the shadows, the Dark Passenger, nestled snug in the backseat of the Dodge K-car of Dexter's hypothetical soul.
Moon.
Aragorn sped on up the hill
There's these two kids, boys, sitting close together, squished in by the big arms of an old chair 
When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.
Three hours ago I got my driver's license and all the freedom in the world was in my hands. 
The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.
a crossbill calls
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
"We should agree on some passwords."
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
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. That book was made by a Mr Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.
When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle, everybody said she was the most disagreeable looking child ever seen.
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."
“Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.
It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.
I heard the dogs barking and i knew that old man Gidharee was coming up the road.
Forty-eight hundred pounds.
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
"Try it again," Percy told me.
Autumn had come by the time I rolled through the cloverleaf and off the highway.
The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.
I flinch.
Rain fell that night, a fine, whispering rain.
Squire Trelawnay, Dr Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17-- and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.
Pilgermann here.
The year that Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette.
Yeah, I know.
A thief is a lot like a wizard. I have quick hands. And I can make things disappear. But then I stole the magician’s locus magicalicus and almost disappeared myself forever.
The most victorious and triumphant king of England, Henry the eighth of that name, in all royal virtues a prince most peerless, had of late in controversy with Charles, the right high and mighty king of Castile, weighty matters and of great importance; for the debatement and final determination whereof the king's majesty sent me ambassador into Flanders, joined in comission with Cuthbert Tunstall, a man doubtless out of comparison and whom the king's majesty of late, to the great rejoicing of all men, did prefer to the office of Master of the Rolls.
Prague, early May. The sky weighed gray over fairy-tale rooftops, and all the world was watching.
"Gramma, is that man following us?"
The night breathed through the apartment like a dark animal.
Lesson learned: if you take a Valkyrie out for coffee, you'll get stuck with the cheque and a dead body.
You think you know how this story is going to end, but you don’t. 
It was the last letter in Irene Redfield's little pile of morning mail.
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. 
I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte.
"There it goes again."
In a city called Stonetown, in a port called Stonetown Harbor, a boy named Reynie Muldoon was preparing to take an important test. 
On the second Sabbat of Twelfthmoon, in the city of Weep, a girl fell from the sky.
Life was good before I met the monster. 
The newspaper headline glared at me from a little vending machine: SEATTLE UNDER SIEGE--DEATH TOLL RISES AGAIN. 
There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.
The Austrian horses glinted in the moonlight, their riders standing tall in the saddle, swords raised.
The silence went on for a while, first comfortably, then with some tension as his own carefully-maintained poise thinned over unsettled worry.
"On the Misty scale of disasters, one to ten, where would you put it?'
The first thing we had to do was catch the Tralfamosaur.
"Once upon a time," that's how they all start isn't it?
I work in the magic industry.
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times
Here's a Valentine's Day tale.
Once, I was famous.
The deep green garden, its walls plastered with mud and hay, faced the river, with the village behind it. 
The sky was crazy.
An April night in Atlanta between thunderstorms: dark and warm and wet, sidewalks shiny with rain and slick with torn leaves and fallen azalea blossoms. 
Every town in England has a story.
“Hi, I’m Alyssa Cavanaugh. I’m the new young adult librarian. I was told to check in here…” Alyssa tried to put as much confidence into her voice as possible even as she looked around the huge library.
No one knew better than Walter Rice that the only safe place was away from other people.
You don't have to walk me to school.
I gasp roughly.
Mrs Woolf and I are hardly kindred souls taken all in all but on a room of one's own we agree.
The way you can go isn't the real way.
The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.
The rain beat down.
The boy's name was Santiago.
I will always remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard that my father had died.
I will always remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard that my father had died.
Brown vines dried and crumbled along the village Refojee-Ten's edges.
The most important email that Darcy Patel ever wrote was three paragraphs long.
The shining rim of the planet Rodeo wheeled dizzily past the observation port of the orbital transfer station.
At dusk they pour from the sky.
"Ship duty!" chortled the ensign four ahead of Miles in line.
The boy and the girl had once dreamed of ships, long ago, before they'd ever seen the True Sea.
Whatever he was, he was not quite a man.
"Now is it 'Diplomacy is the art of war pursued by other men,'" asked Ivan, "or was it the other way around?"
The birth was progressing normally.
[Pict-record white noise segues to] Darkness. 
The monster's name was Izumrud, the great worm, and there were those who claimed he had made the tunnels that ran beneath Ravka.
Otah took the blow on the ear, the flesh opening under the rod.
There's nothing quite like the sound of breaking glass and the voice of the conductor stating "ladies and gentlemen, i'm afraid we're going to be stuck here for a while," to make your monday morning commute that little bit worse.
Maia woke with his cousin’s cold fingers digging into his shoulder.
His combat drop shuttle crouched still and silent in the repairs docking bay — malevolent, to Miles's jaundiced eye.
Are you afraid of falling, baby?
This is how Yuli, son of Alehaw, came to a place called Oldorando, where his descendants flourished in the better days that were to come.
The metal feels cold against your bare feet as you step into the chamber. The soft humming of machines and soft rustling of your clothes as you step onto the small platform.
"You have a visitor, Lieutenant Vorkosigan."
TARAN WANTED to make a sword; but Coll, charged with the practical side of his education, decided on horseshoes.
The comb ran easily through the thick, indigo mane. Her lips curled in a gentle smile and her eyes closed as he worked his way through. Thoroughly and patiently, despite not having found a single hair out of place so far.
Hubert Anvil’s voice rose above the sound of the choir and full orchestra, reaching the vertex of the loftiest dome in the Old World and the western doors of the longest nave in Christendom.
The past felt like an open book in Her presence. An open book casually discarded in the fireplace, licked and scorched by the heat of the moment.
It was odd, she thought as she swatted a bug away from her face and ducked through a bush, that bounty hunting so rarely actually involved hunting bounties.
I awake as the TV suddenly gets quiet and shuts down during a commercial break. When the flood of information returns it turns out to be in the middle of a showing off a bunch of popular morning shows.
I was nervous, I suddenly realised. It surprised me, somehow. I often found myself nervous, but it was usually something that I could easily suppress and ignore, but I was trembling and fiddling with a lighter in my pocket.
"Commander, I must insist that you re-consider." There was… concern in his voice. “I have, Lieutenant. Twice.” the commander had oversight for this insurrection. “Do it.” he ordered.
It was a nice day. All the days had been nice. There had been rather more than seven of them so far, and rain hadn't been invented yet.
You carry your rage around with you like a fur coat.
The sky was overcast, a solid gray sheet that seemed to hang just barely above the treetops, with no sign of a break in the clouds anywhere.
Four-thirty on a Sunday morning is about the closest the City that Never Sleeps ever gets to turning its name untrue.
"Why ever not?"
There was a strange buzz in the air in the Temple, as if something was going to happen that the novices weren’t being told about.
"I dare you to do it," she told him, "I double dare you."
Christmas came once a month in the Open-Unsolved unit.
The house in Silverlake was dark, it's windows as empty as a dead man's eyes.
“Hey, kid.”
Superheroes were always trending.
The first indication that Peter had that something wasn't quite right:  He turned up for work an hour late, and Liz didn't even give him a hard time about it.
Nothing would bring Janie back.
“Fuck me,” Ed whined as he dragged his third suitcase from the baggage compartment.
He's cold and there are leaves stuck to his neck and there's a four inch gash in his side that he thinks he can feel his ribs through.
Pain and the sounds of a reactor were the first things Rex knew as his head cleared from -- whatever had just happened -- and half of that made no sense.
It starts in prison.
When Ben Clark emerged from the subway stairs onto a busy New York street the mid-December wind hit him full in the face, the cold evening breeze sighing through the bare branches of the trees across the street and the icicles that hung from them before snapping the awnings out of a few buildings out on the side he stood on.
“I think we have a cat under the porch again,” Jonathan says, not stirring from where he's sitting at the kitchen table.
"What will happen to me now?"
When Adam is ten years old, his father leaves
It wasn’t exactly a surprise when nobody wanted to share a tent with Arthur, but it still hurt.
 “It’s not a good idea.”
James was picking at his food from dinner, more as something to do than because of any actual interest.
Leia couldn't help but cringe at the sounds of her father yelling in the next room.
It's not that she doesn't like swimming.
Vir’tarukh jolted awake, snapping upright before she was halted by the crash harness and forced to lay back again.
They lay in the dark, guarding.
"You did this.”
The door opened, for the second time that evening, and Sokolov was fast running out of patience for the Watch.
Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond.
The pistol dug into his spine.
"Now, now. There's no need for that. I had hoped to see you again, Emily.
Danni is, first and foremost, a therapist.
The rain came down like a torrent of silver bullets.
Considering the disconcerting amount of oddness that made up her day-to-day life, Padmé supposed she really ought to have anticipated something like this.
It was his first official day as a physics teacher, and he was starting to seriously regret this whole responsible-adult-with-an-actual-job thing as he thought about the fact that in an hour’s time, he’d be standing up in front of a bunch of teenagers and trying to get them to care about physics, of all things.
Demons.
He felt vulnerable.
Peace, he supposed, shouldn't be a strange concept.
A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories.
The station is spare, sterile, and dusty. 
In the pursuit of the business of errantry, most wizards who walk the High Road past the borders of atmosphere swiftly become used to looking up into strange skies - nights with extra moons, days with extra suns, skies with (compared to the observer's homeworld) too many stars or not nearly enough.
Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes. 
You cause the death of one measly terrorist and suddenly nobody knows what to do with you.
It began as a dare, really.
Kit Rodriguez lay sprawled in the gray dirt, staring in shock at the fire-blackened book that had just landed open side down in front of him.
Steph had wanted to be a nurse, like her ma.
She was going to die because of the rutabagas.
 I  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. 
Ned had not spoken to Robert since the morning after the wedding.
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
Far to the south of the land of Ingary, in the Sultanates of Rashpuht, a young carpet merchant called Abdullah lived in the city of Zanzib.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.
"Charmain must do it," said Aunt Sepronia.
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the riverbank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book', thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversation?'
Once upon a time, a girl named September had a secret.
ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn't seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, "Be My Baby" on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
The sun hovered low over the mountains to the west, smearing the sky with streaks of crimson that pooled on the snow, making the mountaintops look as though they’d been crowned in blood.
If you were going to give a gold medal to the least delightful person on Earth, you would have to give that medal to a person named Carmelita Spats, and if you didn’t give it to her, Carmelita Spats was the sort of person who would snatch it from your hands anyway.
It was a very distinct sound, the quiet scraping of steel on stone, that first told him that his visitors had arrived, followed by a strange sort of tapping and the shuffling of feet.
First the colors.
Christmas crept into Pine Grove 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.
They murdered him.
Once upon a time, a girl named September grew very tired indeed of her parents' house, where she washed the same pink-and-yellow teacups and matching gravy boats every day, slept on the same embroidered pillow, and played with the same small and amiable dog.
If you're going to read this, don't bother.
It was 7 minutes after midnight.
In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three.
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
The last hyperspace jump had been a tricky one, starting as it did in a minor star system barely on the charts and ending in another even more obscure one.
Thunder crashed, louder than anything Hollyleaf had heard before.
Rain fell steadily, drumming on the hard black Thunderpath that led between unending rows of stone Twoleg nests.
Wind rattled the branches of the willow trees and tore the reeds from their beds.
The body lay naked and facedown, a deathly gray, spatters of blood staining the snow around it.
The sun was going down, casting deep shadows over the gorge.
Water thundered down from the mountaintop, screening the entrance to the cave with a shimmering cascade.
Brambles rustled at the edge of a wood as a cat emerged into the open.
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.
I heard the mailman approach my office door, half an hour earlier than usual.
From my window, the deep solemn massive street.
When I was little, I always wanted to be a hero.
A jagged ridge sliced across the horizon, piercing the black sky with its peaks.
Wind swept across bleak moorland, carrying with it flurries of rain.
Night lay heavily over the forest.
The children of the embassy all saw the boat land.
Once upon a time, a girl named September told a great number of lies.
This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak - the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men knowing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of bread-winning.
"Am I going to be all right?"
I'm pretty much fucked.
Except for the Marabar Caves - and they are twenty miles off - the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Mandalore burned.
She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to.
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
Captain Aubrey of the Royal Navy lived in a part of Hampshire well supplied with sea-officers, some of whom had reached flag-rank in Rodney's day while others were still waiting for their first command.
The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
The history of the Galaxy has got a little muddled, for a number of reasons: partly because those who are trying to keep track of it have got a little muddled, but also because some very muddling things have been happening anyway.
People who knew Chester and Serena Wolcott socially would have placed money on the idea that the couple would never choose to have children.
The girls were never present for the entrance interviews.
This is the story of a bloodstained boy.
The history of the town of Night Vale is long and complicated, reaching back thousands of years to the earliest indigenous people in the desert.
My father always told me, If I'm gone for three days, call the police.
The flotillas of the dead sailed around the world on underwater rivers.
"The quickest way to a man's heart," said the instructor, "is proverbially through his stomach. But if you want to get into his brain, I recommend the eye-socket."
The snow started falling on September 6th, soft noiseless flakes filling the sky like white moths, or like static interference on your TV screen – whichever metaphor, nature or technology, you find more evocative.
The night breathed through the apartment like a dark animal.
As the screams of the dying rose up toward the desert sun, Bernard's bone-white fingers clutched the cross hanging from his neck.
The darkness behind my eyelids was thick and stank of chemicals, as though someone had poured black oil inside my head.
The grease-slicked hair is a dead giveaway - no pun intended.
Fiction has led humanity to believe that the future of starflight lies in sleek, aerodynamic vessels: optimized for a medium that isn't there, yet able to move light-years in an instant
The early summer sky was the colour of cat vomit.
Getting dressed was always the hardest part of the afternoon
Doro discovered the woman by accident when he went to see what was left of one of his seed villages.
First the colours.
I'm Dan Hope, and deep inside my head I keep a list of things I want to come true.
I had my recurring dream last night.
There will be no awakening.
I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
Wind howled through the night, carrying a scent that would change the world.
There was a wall.
"From October 1976 until 1979, when I returned to Naples to live, I avoided resuming a steady relationship with Lila."
The songs of the dead are the lamentations of the living.
"I saw Lila for the last time five years ago, in the winter of 2005."
"In the spring of 1966, Lila, in a state of great agitation, entrusted to me a metal box that contained eight notebooks."
"This morning Rino telephoned."
"The foreman chatters in Meihua, the beautiful tongue, Singapore English."
"Tara Abernathy's first job as in-house counsel for the Church of Kos was to hide a body."
"J. Malachi MacCool was born in Berkeley, California, in the last decade of the Cold War, to parents who deserved better."
"Since Atlanta, she had looked out the dining-car window with a delight almost physical."
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.
For false gods, they cast long shadows.
The city had converted an elevated length of abandoned railway spur into an aerial greenway and the agent and I were walking south along it in the unseasonable warmth after an outrageously expensive celebratory meal in Chelsea that included baby octopuses the chef had literally massaged to death.
The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.
In fair Verona's streets, the sun was hot.
The idol would drown that night.
The goddess leaned over the card table and whispered, "Go all in."
The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus.
It was too late to pretend he hadn't seen her.
God wasn't answering tonight.
A white boy rode barefoot on a skateboard, towed along, hand to shoulder, by a black boy pedaling a brakeless fixed-gear bike.
Mars was empty before we came.
This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.
Schwartz didn't notice the kid during the game.
Is this me?
It was already dark when he reached the Ministry of Defence.
The hunter of night is subtle. 
Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are always good - until they're not.
I’m seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.
I awoke in the hold of the Flying Wombat.
Science has frequently destroyed my mind, but never before had it also broken dignity.
The face of God peered from the clouds, winced at the sight of what Annika and I were doing with the chess set, and slammed the clouds shut again.
Hador Goldenhead was a lord of the Edain and well-loved by the Eldar.
Arsenic, belladona, curare, sachertorte, strychnine — the deadliest poisons know to humanity, all at my fingertips — but alas! how was I to know that none of them work on robots?
The sky was fading to ultramarine in the east over Victoria Embankment when a battered Mini pulled in to the curb, not far from Blackfriars Bridge. 
In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit. 
When Mr. Bilbo Baggins announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton. 
Aragorn sped on up the hill.
The Saloon, like every other room in Arnside House, was large and lofty, and had been furnished, possibly some twenty years earlier, in what had then been the first style of elegance. 
The morning express bloated with passengers slowed to a crawl, then lurched forward suddenly, as though to resume full speed.
Mrs. Wetherby was delighted to receive a morning call from her only surviving brother, but for the first half hour of his visit she was granted no opportunity to do more than exchange a few commonplaces with him over the heads of her vociferous offspring.
At the Court of an Emperor (he lived it matters not when) there was among the many gentlewoman of the Wardrobe and Chamber one, who though she was not of very high rank was favoured far beyond all the rest; so that the great ladies of the Palace, each of whom had secretly hoped that she herself would be chosen, looked with scorn and hatred upon the upstart who had dispelled their dreams.
If you walk down the main street of Fairacre you will come before long to "The Beetle and Wedge" on the left-hand side.
A heavy grey fog lay like a pall over the mountain city at the junction of the Yangtze and Chialing rivers, and the Monument to the Victory of the War of Resistance was hidden in the dense mist.
Nita first found out about what was going to happen when she came in after a long afternoon's wizardry with Kit.
Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately overpriced shops, and the quiet, abiding air of earned grace, it was this, the lack of a smell that most appealed to her, perhaps because the other American cities she knew well had all smelled distinctly.
From the bridge of the Island Queen, which three times a week made the voyage between Obaig and the outer islands of the Hebrides, Captain Donald MacKechnie gazed across a smooth expanse of grey sea to where the rugged outline of Great Todday stood out dark against a mass of deepening cloud in which a dull red gash showed that the sun was setting behind it. 
Takezo lay among the corpses.
Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the popholes.
Part of the problem, Nita thought as she tore desperately down Rose Avenue, is that I can't keep my mouth shut.
A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories.
Our coal-bunker is old, and it stands beneath an ivy hedge, so that when I go to it in wet weather, I catch the combined smells of damp earth and decaying vegetation.
Were the tower to be laid down across the plain of Shinar, it would be two days' journey to walk from one end to the other.
A layer of ice; it feels rough against my face, but not cold.
Dividing a number by zero doesn't produce an infinitely large number as an answer.
Alive!
Your father is about to ask me the question.
He remembered much of his stay in the womb.
I slipped into my first metamorphosis so quietly that no one noticed.
Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately overpriced shops, and the quiet, abiding air of earned grace, it was this, the lack of smell, that most appealed to her, perhaps because the other American cities she knew well had all smelled distinctly.
I had my recurring dream last night.
When he was a child, Robert's favorite toy was a simple one, a clay doll that could do nothing but walk forward.
They'll make a god of her.
The sun did not shine.
One fish two fish red fish blue fish.
It has been twenty-five years since a report of original research was last submitted to our editors for this publication, making this an appropriate time to revisit the question that was so widely debated then: what is the role of human scientists in an age when the frontiers of scientific inquiry have moved beyond the comprehension of humans?
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and having lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
This is the story of a man named Neil Fisk, and how he came to love God. 
I am Turnlung.
One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister.
May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month.
Tamera Lyons, 1st-year student at Pembleton: I can't believe it.
Bill, do you think you've found yourself?
Wind thrummed across the sunlit wharf, a deep organ chord that drowned the sounds of death.
There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.
She didn't know he could die.
I fling open my bedroom curtains, and there's the thirsty sky and the wide river full of ships and boats and stuff, but I'm already thinking of Vinny's chocolaty eyes, shampoo down Vinny's back, beads of sweat on Vinny's shoulders, and Vinny's sly laugh, and by now my heart's going mental and, God, I wish I was waking up at Vinny's place in Peacock Street and not in my own stupid bedroom. 
Who was blowing on the nape of my neck?
Beyond the Indian hamlet, upon a forlorn strand, I happened on a trail of recent footprints.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
There were four of us - George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency.
Kalak rounded a rocky stone and stumbled to a stop before the body of a dying thunderclast.
It was always my parents' dream to live in New England.
Dawn was coming.
Jasnah Kholin pretended to enjoy the party, giving no indication that she intended to have one of the guests killed.
On an alternate world, two million steps from Earth:
Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we?
He began his new life standing up, surrounded by cold darkness and stale, dusty air.
Waking up begins with saying am and now.
The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
"There were unexpected difficulties," said the dark dray blur.
Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.
I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists.
The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it.
All children, except one, grow up.
"Where's Papa going with that axe?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast."
"'Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents,' grumbled Jo, lying on the rug."
Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmond, and Lucy.
Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.
The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way towards the lagoon.
The year that Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette.
Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife.
Once upon a time, a little girl named Laura traveled in a covered wagon across the giant prairie.
The most important email that Darcy Patel ever wrote was three paragraphs long.
"A wizard is a lot like a pyrotechnics," I said.
‘THEY made a silly mistake, though,’ the Professor of History said, and his smile, as Dixon watched, gradually sank beneath the surface of his features at the memory.
The primroses were over.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy lies a small un-regarded yellow sun.
The evening sky was streaked with purple, the color of torn plums, and a light rain had started to fall when I came to the end of the blacktop road that cut through twenty miles of thick, almost impenetrable scrub oak and pine and stopped at the front gate of Angola penitentiary
The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created.
T hey say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles.
The regular early morning hell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was. 
Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvelous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it.
My company was charming.
The truth is, if old Major Dover hadn't dropped dead at Taunton races, Jim would never have come to Thursgood's at all.
A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.
I am by birth a Genevese, and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic. 
Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.
Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette; unsupportedhanging high above us in the computer chamber; and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern.
It took seven years to get the letter right.
It was dawn, and the zombies were stumbling through the parking lot, streaming toward the massive beige box at the far end.
A secret is a strange thing.
The old orchard stood besieged.
The funeral was supposed to be a quiet affair, for the deceased had no friends.
It begins, as most things begin, with a song. 
Matthias cut a comical little figure as he wobbled his way along the cloisters, with his large sandals flip-flopping and his tail peeping from beneath the baggy folds of an oversized novice’s habit. 
In the great green room there was a telephone and a red balloon and a picture of—the cow jumping over the moon.
Pawn shops in Night Vale look like this.
Blue hat, green hat, red hat, oops.
I can’t believe I’m on this road again, twisting along past the lake where the white birches are dying, the disease is spreading up from the south, and I notice they now have seaplanes for hire. 
Kim walked slowly through the crowd, slipping in and out of traffic almost without thinking.
It was drowsily warm, with dozens of bees lazily buzzing through flowers and trees.
Far out in teh unchared backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
UP PUP Pup is up.
The sun did not shine.
Unearthly humps of land curved into the darkening sky like the backs of browsing pigs, like the rumps of elephants.
One fish two fish red fish blue fish.
In Captain Tinker's Garden, once upon a time, there was a Cat Club.
Fox Socks Box Knox
First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.
It was a pleasure to burn.
On the far-away Island of Sala-ma-Sond, Yertle the Turtle was king of the pond.
Rigg and Father usually set the traps together, because it was Rigg who had the knack of seeing the paths that the animals they wanted were still using.
There once was a girl-bird named Gertrude McFuzz and she had the smallest plain tail ever was.
The rabbit felt mighty important that day on top of the hill in the sun where he lay.
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once of twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' though Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'
That Sam-I-Am! That Sam-I-Am! I do not like that Sam-I-Am!
Larch often thought that if it had not been for his newborn son, he never would have survived his wife Mikra's death.
In the dungeons the darkness was complete, but Katsa had a map in her mind.
In the corner of a first-class smoking carriage, Mr Justice Wargreave, lately retired from the bench, puffed at a cigar and ran in interested eye through the political news in the Times.
Out of the gate and off for a walk went Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy and Hercules Morse as big as a horse with Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy.
Miss Ariadne Oliver had gone with a friend with whom she was staying, Judith Butler, to help with the preparations for a children's party which was to take place that same evening.
Paddington was in a mess.
It was five o'clock on a winter's morning in Syria.
Paddington sat up in bed with a puzzled expression on his face.
The lunch hour in the coworkers' cafeteria at Frankenberg;s had reached its peak.
Paddington woke with a start and after blinking several times in order to accustom his eyes to the evening light, peered round the deck of the liner Karenia with a puzzled expression on his face.
On the 24th of February, 1815, the watch-tower of Notre-Dame de la Garde signalled the arrival of the three-master Pharaon, from Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples.
These two very old people are the mother and father of Mr. Bucket.
Down by the corner of the street, where the three roads meet, and the feet of the people as they pass go "Tweet-tweet-tweet—" who comes tripping round the corner of the street?
The tramp steamer Drake plowed away from the coast of India and pushed its blunt prow into the Arabian Sea, homeward bound.
At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the toom, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin
It was only a duck pond, out at the back of the farm.
One day when Pooh Bear had nothing else to do, he thought he would do something, so he went round to Piglet's house to see what Piglet was doing.
He'd stopped trying to bring her back.
Many years later, when he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
I placed a paper shirt into the furnace.
This is my favourite book in all the world, though I have never read it.
I have a house where I go when there's too many people, I have a house where I go, where no one can be; I have a house where I go, where nobody ever says "No" where no one says anything—so there is no one but me.
Shadow had done three years in prison.
Once there was a little girl named Lucy.
Current theories on the creation of the Universe state that, if it was created at all and didn't just start, as it were, unofficially, it came into being between ten and twenty thousand million years ago.
My name is Melanie.
It begins, as most things begin, with a song.
Once upon a time there was a witch called Meg.
Shadow had done three years in prison.
This is George.
There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.
This is George.
"Wait a minute-I'm in first class"
"Oh, Amelia Bedelia, your first day of work, and I can't be here."
Frog knocked at Toad's door.
They said the only folks who belonged in Deadshot after dark were the ones who were up to no good.
One morning Toad sat in bed.
There were four of us- George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency.
Tonia drops three jasmine dragon pearls into her tall porcelain mug.
Matthias cut a comical little figure as he wobbled his way along the cloisters, with his large sandals flip-flopping and his tail peeping from beneath the baggy folds of an oversized novice's habit.
In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final carrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.
It was love at first sight.
On the day we're the last  people to see indie kid Finn alive, we're all sprawled together in the Field, talking about love and stomachs.
"Will you all be quiet!" snapped High Chancellor Querida.
When the destruction of Israel commenced, Isaac Bloch was weighing whether to kill himself or move to the Jewish Home.
Cat Chant admired his elder sister Gwendolen.
It was years before Christopher told anyone about his dreams.
Nicholas Young slumped into the nearest seat in the hotel lobby, drained from the sixteen-hour flight from Singapore, the train ride from Heathrow Airport, and trudging through the rain-soaked streets.
I may as well start with some of our deep secrets because this account will not be easy to understand without them.
The Dog Star stood beneath the Judgement Seats and raged.
It was only a duck pond, out at the back of the farm.
In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three.
"There's been an accident!" she thought.
Not a day goes by that the post does not bring me at least one letter from a young person (or sometimes one not so young) who wishes to follow in my footsteps and become a dragon naturalist.
The letter was in Earth script, unhandily scrawled in blobby blue ballpoint.
It was a nice day.
"I have been with the court all my life, traveling with the King's Progress." 
We have had Aunt Maria ever since Dad died.
I shouldn't have come to this party.
When Dr. Rachel Bell turned, she saw the man who had pushed her.
Have you ever heard of the Flying Dutchman?
There was a boy in her room.
Polly sighed and laid her book face down on her bed.
The king stood in a pool of blue light, unmoored.
When Jocelyn Brandon died- at a great age, as magicians tend to do- he left his house and his field-of-care to his grandson, Andrew Brandon Hope.
It begins, as most things begin, with a song.
First, a stone landed a metre from Viktor's foot.
My sweater was new, stinging red and ugly.
Dr Strauss says I should rite down what I think and remembir and evrey thing that happins to me from now on.
"Do come out of that dream, Moril," Lenina said.
Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest.
People my wonder how Mitt came to join in the Holand Sea Festival, carrying a bomb, and what he thought he was doing.
I want to tell of our journey down the river.
When Patricia was six years old, she found a wounded bird.
The Earl of Hannarth arrived in Aberath two days before Midsummer.
Mrs Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies' eardrops, and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde's Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs Rachel Lynde's door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.
Far below, the landscape, looking like a sea of ashes, steadily passed beneath the wings of the obsidian lion.
Lessa woke, cold.
It all started one September evening.
Terence crept nervously through the forest, glancing often over his shoulder.
The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door. 
When I scampered off the airplane during my last layover before reaching New Mouse City, I had only one thing on my mind: getting home!
The ninth day of the eighth lunar month, 1939
Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs.
Diplomats said to be linked with fugitive terrorist known as Carlos
The house was white and square and too small and too perfect.
The first one on the production team to die will be the editor.
The villagers fear him.
It was a dark and stormy night.
"Where's Papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
A dragon was trying to hide in the storm.
It was late winter in Northern Rus', the air sullen with wet that was neither rain nor snow.
My company was charming.
In the court of the fountain the sun of March shone through young leaves of ash and elm, and water leapt and fell through shadow and clear light.
Lord Russano of Salamandastron put aside his quill and capped a tiny gourd of ink with a wooden stopper.
The Penderwick family was being torn apart.
I'm pretty much fucked.
During that third week of May the situation in Baskul had become much worse and, on the 20th, Air Force machines arrived by arrangement from Peshawar to evacuate the white residents.
Their mother had been here in the hospital with the new baby for almost a week.
The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.
For a long time after that summer, the four Penderwick sisters still talked of Arundel.
"Come home, Tenar, come home!"
The last drops of the thundershower had hardly ceased falling when the Pedestrian stuffed his map into his pocket, settled his pack more comfortably on his tired shoulders, and stepped out from the shelter of a large chestnut tree into the middle of the road.
I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of gods. 
If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.
Hi!
It was a nice day.
On Career Day Lily visited her dad's work with him and discovered he worked for a mad scientist who wanted to rule the earth through destruction and desolation.
Mr Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the popholes.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
I figure that Mom and Dad were having some kind of trouble and needed to go away by themselves.
I'm pretty sure my parents really wanted a dog, but they got me instead.
First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey.
The woman was tall, blonde, green-eyed and beautiful.
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
Our Dragon doesn't eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside the valley.
I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
It was little more than three miles from the Wall into the Old Kingdom, but that was enough.
Beyond the Indian hamlet, upon a forlorn strand, I happened on a trail of recent footprints.
With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea.
It was well said of a certain German book that "er lasst sich nicht lesen" --- it does not permit itself to be read.
It was a September morning, hazy with late summer, and now with all the years in between.
It was a chilly November afternoon.
Ill-fated and mysterious man!
On Dreamer's Plain, the gathering of delegations from the Twelve Crowns of Raine for the coronation of the Queen of Raine looked like an invading army.
In the Palace of Black Swans, Zakdin, capital of Hakdar: Blue eyes wide, Lady Sandrilene fa Toren watched her near-empty oil lamp.
Misery is manifold.
It was about a week after I'd almost saved mankind.
For the most wild, yet homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief.
"That is my decision. We need not discuss it," said the man at the desk.
It was just another fucked-up night in the Cauldron.
I am a business man.
Each year, at the end of March, a great fair was held in Cria, the capital of Galla.
Anna Stangeland woke up abruptly, clutching the pendant so hard that the worn edges nearly cut into her fingers.
The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.
We had now reached the summit of the loftiest crag.
Everybody knows, in a general way, that the finest place in the world is -- or, alas, was -- the Dutch borough of Vondervotteimittiss.
Since the world began there have been two Jeremys. 
From his cradle to his grave a gale of prosperity bore my friend Ellison along.
In this village, when the ripened ears of wheat sway in the breeze, it is said that a wolf runs through them.
Of course I shall not pretend to consider it any matter for wonder, that the extraordinary case of M. Valdemar has excited discussion.
During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.
It was close on midnight when a man crossed the Place de la Concorde.
 The thing was big and white and Harry, and it was eating all the ice cream in the walk-in freezer. 
It was five o'clock on a winter's morning in Syria.
Lady Rowena gasped in horror at the sight of Lord Raoul's majestic purple-helmeted warrior of love.
So, what do you think?
Anyone might accidentally dig up the wrong grave.
Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months. 
 Fox is a television character, and she isn't dead yet. 
"Excuse me, another round of Bloodys, please?"
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.
Many years ago, I contracted an intimacy with a Mr. William Legrand.
I never knew anyone so keenly alive to a joke as the king was. 
I presume everybody has heard of me.
"Nancy," said the voice on the telephone, "you are wanted in New York City!"
In the consideration of the faculties and impulses -- of the prima mobilia of the human soul, the phrenologists have failed to make room for a propensity which, although obviously existing as a radical, primitive, irreducible sentiment, has been equally overlooked by all the moralists who have preceded them.
"A penny for your thoughts, Nancy Drew," said George Fayne.
This is written from memory, unfortunately.
It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.
The king stood in a pool of blue light, unmoored.
Many religions think of the afterlife as somewhere gilded. 
It’s hard, coming back from the dead to realize that all the world you know is long-gone, drowned beneath the sea, and the person you loved most is the one you’ve hurt the deepest.
The girls were never present for the entrance interviews.
All the best things in my life have started with a Dolly Parton song.
The temperature hit ninety degrees the day she arrived.
The sun is always just about to rise.
Down in the town by the butcher's shop door, sat Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy.
Hairy Maclary felt bumptious and bustly, bossy and bouncy and frisky and hustly.
With a twitch of his tail and a purposeful paw, down by the river crept Scarface Claw.
Down at the Vet's there were all kinds of pets, with troubles and woes from their ears to their toes.
In Riverside Hall on Cabbage Tree Row, the Cat Club were having their Annual Show.
On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me a partridge in a pear tree.
Jeremy Thatcher crumpled his paper in disgust.
A light breeze causes the naked branches overhead to rattle like wooden windchimes.
"Blood is life!"
Two tired men looked at Antonia Gallo with resentment and hostility in their eyes.
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
 Fox is a television character, and she isn't dead yet. 
Your brain is a soft thing, mushy like toothpaste but less spreadable.
My brain is a mess of florid activity at the most quiet of times
The episode of the Black Cloud has always had a great fascination for me.
TO-NIGHT again Paul was preparing to go out, it seemed.
Of late years an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the north of England: they lie very thick on the hills; every parish has one or more of them; they are young enough to be very active, and ought to be doing a great deal of good.
My godmother lived in a handsome house in the clean and ancient town of Bretton. 
THE other day, in looking over my papers, I found in my desk the following copy of a letter, sent by me a year since to an old school acquaintance:— “DEAR CHARLES, “I think when you and I were at Eton together, we were neither of us what could be called popular characters: you were a sarcastic, observant, shrewd, cold-blooded creature; my own portrait I will not attempt to draw, but I cannot recollect that it was a strikingly attractive one—can you?
ALL TRUE histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut.
Ciao
It's a weirdly subtle conversation.
At the time I first realized I might be fictional, my weekdays were spent at a publicly funded institution on the north side of Indianapolis called White River High School, where I was required to eat lunch at a particular time - between 12:37 P.M. and 1:14 P.M. - by forces so much larger than myself that I couldn't even begin to identify them.
I walk to the bus station by myself.
From a distance, the man struggling up the white face of the glacier might have looked like an ant crawling slowly up the side of a dinner plate.
Call removed a small circle of oily pepperoni from his slice of pizza and slid his hand under the table.
Call made a few final tweaks to his robot right before sending him into the "ring" - a section of garage floor outlined in blue chalk.
Prison was not like Call expected it to be.
"You've got to be kidding me," the bouncer said, folding his arms across his massive chest.
The formidable glass-and-steel structure rose from its position on Front Street like a glittering needle threading the sky.
The cold snap of the previous week was over; the sun was shining brightly as Clary hurried across Luke's dusty front yard, the hood of her jacket up to keep her hair from blowing across her face.
"Just coffee, please."
Simon stood and stared numbly at the front door of his house.
On the day Emma Carstairs's parents were killed, the weather was perfect.
Shadow Market nights were Kit's favorite.
Kit had only recently found out what a flail was, and now there was a rack of them hanging over his head, shiny and sharp and deadly.
Alek raised his sword.
"Siberia," Alek said.
The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit.
Getting dressed was always the hardest part of the afternoon.
The six hoverboards slipped among the trees with the lightning grace of playing cards thrown flat and spinning.
"Moggle," Aya whispered.
Albert Gates came down from Oxford feeling that his life was behind him.
Four o' clock on the first of November, a dark and foggy day.
"No, I'm sorry," said Noel Foster, "not sufficiently attractive.
Fire roared through the bifurcated city of Ankh-Morpork.
The sun rose slowly, ass if it wasn't sure it was worth all the effort.
Sophia Garfield had a clear mental picture of what the outbreak of war was going to be like.
There is a photograph in existence of Aunt Sadie and her six children sitting round the tea-table at Alconleigh.
I am obliged to begin this story with a brief account of the Hampton family, because it is necessary to emphasize the fact once and for all that the Hamptons were very grand as well as very rich.
"The foreign gentleman seems to be in a terrible hurry, dear."
On the day which was to be such a turning-point in my life, I went to London by the 9.07.
Shadow had done three years in prison.
At the height of the long wet summer of the Seventy-Seventh Year of Sendovani, the Thiefmaker of Camorr paid a sudden and unannounced visit to the Eyeless Priest at the temple of Perelandro, desperately trying to sell him the Lamora boy. 
Lightning has struck me all my life.
On the second day of January, windswept and bright, a half-blood Seminole named Sammy Tigertail dumped a dead body in the Lostmans River.
No seaside town is, I think, as attractive as St. Loo. 
It's always darkest before the dawn.
It was five o'clock on a winter's morning in Syria.
Hercule Poirot frowned. 
When at last I was taken out of the plaster, and the doctors had pulled me about to their hearts' content, and nurses had wheedled me into cautiously using my limbs, and I had been nauseated by their practically using baby talk to me, Marcus Kent told me I was to go live in the country. 
It was the last day of the festival of Atra. 
"I am not sure if you are aware of this," said Amy with a smile, "but I am not actually human." 
He kept saying that he was going to kill me.
Cleopatra lived closer in time to the moon landing than she did to the building of the pyramids of Giza.
The light was flashing again.
With the upraised, flailing arms and the dim blue spotlights sweeping across it, the dance floor in the Cut looked as if several dozen people were drowning in it. 
The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.
Claire Lacombe was fifteen when she determined she must find a way out.
Outside my window an old woman is selling flowers.
The village of Alloway straggled back from the banks of the river Doon to where the ground was firmer and drier; and here William Burns decided to make his home.
One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.
When a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean’s Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country.
I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why.
May the merciful gods, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when no power of the will, or drug that the cunning of man devises, can keep me from the chasm of sleep.
Cautious investigators will hesitate to challenge the common belief that Robert Blake was killed by lightning, or by some profound nervous shock derived from an electrical discharge.
In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring.
Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at the end.
I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more.
It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to shew by this statement that I am not his murderer.
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had 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 that were then uppermost;—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded that I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me.
This is the bright candlelit room where the lifetimers are stored - shelf upon shelf of them, squat hourglasses, one for every living person, pouring their fine sand from the future into the past.
Vili glanced up, turned his head back toward the interior, and said, with no particular inflection, “Klava with honey for Lord Taltos.”
There is a similarity, if I may be permitted an excursion into tenuous metaphor, between the feel of a chilly breeze and the feel of a knife's blade, as either is laid across the back of the neck.
Every morning, before the sun rose to gild the white marble columns of the monastery with flecks of gold, the High Priestess went to the Chamber of the Watchful Eye to perform the Rite of Seeing. 
Some things just aren’t meant to go together. 
There is a place in the mountain called Saestara where, according to the locals, you can look east and see the past, and look west and see the future.
I awoke instantly from a sound sleep to active stillness, and before reaching for a weapon, or dodging from a possible attack, or even opening my eyes, I reached out, mentally, psychically, for contact with my familiar.
I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751, when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father’s house. 
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. 
Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen
From ten kilometers out, the Sky Survey Observatory looked like an over-sized beer can.
It was a nice day.
Tomato Tomato Tomato Tomato
Shadow had done three years in prison.
Shadow had done three years in prison.
Schools used to be known as centers of freedom. 
Near sunset of my full second day as a guest in Roseland, crossing the immense lawn between the main house and the eucalyptus grove, I halted and pivoted, warned by instinct. 
It was only a duckpond, out at the back of the farm.
There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.
Coraline discovered the door a little after they moved into the house.
It was, of course, a beautiful day - a Company brochure day.
Against the stars a turtle passes, carrying four elephants on its shell.
It was a warm spring night when a fist knocked at the door so hard that the hinges bent.
"It's about time to get this party started, Mr. Ace of Hearts."
The Orchestrion swooped low, singing its steam and metal tune over the precariously stacked roofs and chimneys and balconies of Argent Town.
"Tell us what the problems are, Esther. Talk to us."
Nothing but stars, scattered across the blackness as though the Creator had smashed the windscreen of his car and hadn't bothered to stop to sweep the pieces.
In one way, at least, our lives are really like movies.
There is a pile of clothing on the side of the train tracks.
I'm pretty much fucked.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
He was laughing, chin up, and shaking his head.
It was freezing in the churchyard, even before the dead arrived.
The sun rose slowly, and if it wasn't sure it was worth all the effort.
After Farmer Flint of the Middle Valley died, his widow stayed on at the farmhouse.
In five years, the penis will be obsolete.
There were many theories about the strange illness of the second Ruler of the Free Republic of Aburiria, but the most frequent on people's lips were five.
My brother calls and says to get to the bar as fast as I can--he thinks he just died.
The boy's sister is missing or has not yet come home.
Haiden's morning sickness was bad, and she told me to get the boy out of the house, take him anywhere.
When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special significance, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton. 
Aragorn sped on up the hill. 
Pippin looked out from the shelter of Gandalf’s cloak. 
“Ship duty!” chortled the ensign four ahead of Miles in line. 
Not long before I embarked on my journey to Eriga, I girded my loins and set out for a destination I considered much more dangerous: Falchester. 
Thick cloud had pressed down on Berlin all night, and now it was lingering into what passed for the morning.
The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home.
The first time Alya Hadwin ran away from home, she was nine years old and bleeding from the cheek.
257 days
The last memory I have of my parents is blood mingling with rain on the pavement.
Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she had been told that she would kill her true love.
It is the first of November, and so today someone will die.
Matthias cut a comical little figure as he wobbled his way along the cloisters, with his large sandals flip-flopping and his tail peeping from beneath the baggy folds of an oversized novice’s habit.  
Shallan pinched the thin charcoal pencil and drew a series of straight lines radiating from a sphere on the horizon. 
It has been said by the wise that in the heart of every man there lies a noble beast who seeks to do what is right. 
Someone was standing by his bed, a person completely unlike anyone Tendai had ever met.
Glastonbury Abbey was a cesspit of human filth and debauchery. 
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
The road the Romans made traversed North Wales a little way inland, between the weather off the Irish Sea and the mountains of Gwynedd and Powys; past the copper and the lead that the travel-hungry Empire craved.
The night before he went to London, Richard Mayhew was not enjoying himself.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
They set a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the colour of his hair.
The ghost was her father's parting gift, presented by a black-clad secretary in a departure lounge at Narita.
They didn't think that Flynne's brother had PTSD, but that sometimes the haptics glitched him.
The courier presses his forehead against layers of glass, argon, high-impact plastic.
After Slitscan, Laney heard about another job from Rydell, the night security man at the Chateau.
Through this evening's tide of faces unregistered, unrecognized, amid hurrying black shoes, furled umbrellas, the crowd descending like a single organism into the station's airless heart, comes Shinya Yamazaki, his notebook clasped beneath his arm like the egg case of some modest but moderately successful marine species.
The rules of the New Haven Youth League required that each kid played at least ten minutes in each game.
Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.
‘Rausch,’ said the voice in Hollis Henry's cell.
Inchmale hailed a cab for her, the kind that had always been black, when she'd first known this city.
‘Nabe?’ said the port inspector.
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
When the guards on Asteroid 000013 started whimpering and licking each other, Dog Schwartz, to do him justice, was the first person to notice.
I was driving east on the Eisenhower Expressway when the Teatime Anarchist dropped the Ashland Avenue overpass on top of me, using enough C4 to bring the whole southbound span down at once.
She was the kind of girl who slept with books on her bed.
"It's perfectly safe," Tony said with his most engaging would-I-lie? grin.
The first thought Anderton had when he saw the young man was: I'm getting bald. Bald and fat and old.
"One of these days I'm going to take time off," Spence Olham said at first meal. 
He awoke--and wanted Mars. 
I always get the shakes before a drop.
In his office at the Terran Import Bureau of Standards, the tall man gathered up the morning's memos from their wire basket, and, seating himself at his desk, arranged them for reading.
Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith.
Winter glided through the hospital nursery, spreading spells without a thought.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
The body of Louis Sarapis, in a transparent plastic shatterproof case, had lain on display for one week, exciting a continual response from the public.
The accused man, Kabuo Miyamoto, sat proudly upright with a rigid grace, his palms placed softly on the defendant's table - the posture of a man who has detached himself insofar as this is possible at his own trial.
At four-fifteen in the afternoon, TST, Garson Poole woke up in his hospital bed, knew that he lay in a hospital bed in a three-bed ward and realized in addition two things: that he no longer had a right hand and that he felt no pain.
My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie.
The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years -- if it ever did end -- began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.
"Your grandfather," said Vanyel's brawny, fifteen-year-old cousin Radevel, "was crazy."
Long ago, in the days of the first King, for whom the Kingdom of Valdemar is named, it came to the King that he was growing old.
It was a nice day.
Tika Waylan straightened her back with a sigh, flexing her shoulders to ease her cramped muscles.
Fifty years before the war to end all wars, a boy played hide-and-seek with his friends in a pear orchard bordered by a dark forest
A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.
The history of the town of Night Vale is long and complicated.
In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.
When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself transormed right there in his bed into some sort of monstrous insect.
The little cottage at the edge of the swamp wherein old Roggit had lived out his life was not, strictly speaking, a part of the village of Telven.
The marsh stank, with a sharp, briny stench that seemed to fill Valder's head.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
My brother had just been appointed Secretary of Nevada Territory - an office of such majesty that it concentrated in itself the duties and dignities of treasurer, comptroller, secretary of state, and acting governor in the governor’s absence. 
One of the few redeeming facets of instructors, I thought, is that occasionally they can be fooled.
Not for the first time, an argument had broken out over breakfast at number four, Privet Drive. 
Matthew Mantrell leaned forward across the little table in the campus coffee shop and tapped the sheet of rune-covered parchment before him.
Polly cut off her hair in front of the mirror, feeling slightly guilty about not feeling very guilty about doing so.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
They were together in Brother Cadfael’s hut in the herbarium, in the afternoon of the twenty-fifth day of May, and the talk was of high matters of state, of kings and empresses, and the unbalanced forces that plagued the irreconcilable contenders for thrones. 
Of all the rash and midnight promises made in the name of love, none, Boone now knew, was more certain to be broken than "I'll never leave you."
Once again Armpit was holding a shovel, only now he was getting paid for it, seven dollars and sixty-five cents an hour. 
"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.
It was Kate who, long after she had grown up, completed the story of the borrowers. 
The morning fog had lifted, giving way to a clear day. 
This journey took place in a part of Canada which lies in the northwestern part of the great sprawling province of Ontario. 
They were all sitting around the dining room table - Dr. and Mrs. Topman and David, and David’s friend Chuck - talking about that extraordinary person whose name was Prewytt Brumblydge. 
Once on a dark winter’s day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares. 
Snow had come in during the night, a fine dusting of it, thin as mist, traveling on the western wind.
Andrew Harlan stepped into the kettle.
"No good!" said Lamont, sharply.
It was a dazzling four-sun afternoon.
The bedroom murmured to itself gently.
Lije Baley had just reached his desk when he became aware of R. Sammy watching him expectantly.
Stubbornly Elijah Baley fought panic.
Elijah Baley found himself in the shade of the tree and muttered to himself, "I knew it. I'm sweating."
A nurse held the door open for them.
Gladia felt the lawn lounge to make sure it wasn't too damp and then sat down.
They say Los Angeles is like The Wizard of Oz.
The man from Earth came to a decision.
Two minutes before he disappeared forever from the face of the Earth he knew, Joseph Schwartz strolled along the pleasant streets of suburban Chicago quoting Browning to himself.
Once upon a time there was an old pig called Aunt Pettitoes.
There is too much stress everywhere on the art of winning and not nearly enough anywhere on the art of losing.
Circumstances and friendship for Alan Kain and Theodore Dolliver have made me the chronicler of their strange adventures
Let’s see if you can get us down in one piece Frank!
 All right, you blasted earthworms!
Bloat, Mississippi lies thirty-one miles south of Memphis, Tennessee on State Improved Road Number 147 and is the second largest city in Titus County.
There wasn't nothing in this part of Spokane, other than houses and more houses.
It's finally happened, babies.
The amethyst dagger called to me from inside the drowned man's chest.
I don't remember
A banging above her head woke Wren from her fitful sleep.
In the Mirza household, board games were a favorite pastime.
"Well, boy," the ringmaster said. "What can you do?"
The sky looked red.
My first real memory was hearing my grandma scream bloody murder while being attacked by zombie hamsters.
This is taking too long.
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
"What's it going to be then, eh?"
He'd stopped trying to bring her back.
Anakin Skywalker stood in a long, single-file line in an abandoned maintenance tunnel leading to the Wicko district garbage pit.
"It seems to me that mine is becoming a very important planet, Honorable Shu Mai."
Blood geysered, looking almost black in the antisepsis field's glow.
In the moment, there was little time for thought.
The sun was setting on Coruscant.
"Obi-Wan!" Anakin Skywalker exclaimed when the hologrammic image of Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi appeared before him.
Linderwall was a large kingdom, just east of the Mountains of Morning, where philosophers were highly respected and the number five was fashionable.
The King of the Enchanted Forest was twenty years old and lived in a rambling, scrambling, mixed-up castle somewhere near the center of his domain.
Deep in the Enchanted Forest, in a neat gray house with a wide porch and a red roof, lived the witch Morwen and her nine cats.
Mother taught me to be polite to dragons.
The circus arrives without warning.
The optimization of law enfrocement agencies activities is the most important direction of the development of modern Russian government.
"Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs Ramsay.
The knife. She'd lost the knife.
I still dream of the island.
There was a time, and it was many years ago now, when I had to stay in a hospital for almost nine weeks.
It was a nice day.
She rode the air currents easily, her legs sleeked tight against her body, her wings spread wide.
Anyway. I normally try to wake up before dusk.
The clock struck half past two.
It was apparent to Miss Fawcett within one minute of her arrival at the Grange that her host was not in the best of tempers
"I was going to say something," he said.
Hmm. No. I'm telling this wrong.
Lovelace had been in a body for twenty-eight minutes, and it still felt every bit as wrong as it had the second she woke up inside it.
Time grows short, my love.
I'm pretty much fucked.
He came one late, wet spring, and brought the wide world back to my doorstep.
I awake every morning with ink on my hands.
Why is it forbidden to write down specific knowledge of the magics?
The humans were agitated.
She wondered what it would have been like to be perfect.
Till she came it was all cold.
He had many names.
It began at the normal daily chapter in the Benedictine monastery of Saint Peter and Saint Pail, of Shrewsbury, on that thirtieth day of July, in the year of Our Lord 1139.
Some things start before other things.
As she woke up in the pod, she remembered three things.
Your noise reveals you, Todd Hewitt.
"War," says Mayor Prentiss, his eyes glinting.
I am lying in bed, next to my brother, Lupin.
I woke to the sound of a mosquito whining in my left ear and my mother screeching in the right.
I woke to the sound of a mosquito whining in my left ear and my mother screeching in the right.
It came crackling over the hills, like an invisible fog.
"I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one."
I'd known for ages how a baby was made.
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
Call me Jonah.
It was my birthday and a six-foot long table stretched across the grass.
It was felling night, and the usual crowd had gathered at the Waystone Inn.
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
Some years ago there was in the city of New York a society of magicians.
To begin at the beginning.
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man's mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that it is in a body that, in the morning, is going to be hanged.
The house stood in a slight rise just on the edge of the village.
The story so far: In the beginning the universe was created.
The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
We were at prep, when the Head came in, followed by a new boy not in uniform and a school-servant carrying a big desk.
Sing to me, Muse, of that endlessly cunning man who was blown off course to the ends of the earth, in the years after he plundered Troy.
‘The foreign gentleman seems to be in a terrible hurry, dear.’
An oblong puddle inset in the coarse asphalt; like a fancy footprint filled to the brim with quicksilver; like a spatulate hole through which you can see the nether sky.
The history of the Galaxy has got a little muddled, for a number of reasons: partly because those who are trying to keep track of it have got a little muddled, but also because some very muddling things have been happening anyway.
If one lives in Galloway, one either fishes or paints.
‘Well, prince, Genoa and Lucca are now nothing more than estates of the Bonaparte family.’
We hear that your Prince,' said Lady Jokaste, 'keeps his own harem. 
Captain Andurs alerted Killashandra when the ship had emerged from hyper-space and Ballybran was fully visible.
I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
Oh God, I can't stop looking at it.
I can't go out.
It's such a pretty filing cabinet I don't want to use it.
Kelly found it easier to simply fictionalise her life.
"I can't believe they're still touring," Lee said to his brother as they tested their pints on the table and sat down.
I found the box when I removed the rose bushes and the decking and started to dig.
Screams and shouts and banging on the walls.
"Pretty, aren't they?" asked the woman in the craft shop.
"Are we there yet, Dad?"
The letter had only given her an address - 42 Chandos Crescent - but no town or postcode, a date - 14th May 2011 - and a time, 11:30am.
The cancer was in remission, but I could still feel it.
May - Pick yourself up and start again.
People started asking him where she's gone to, but the look on his face stopped them.
"Ow!"
I dress normally.
The third pint was the tipping point, and I made my usual excuse to the guys - "Python time, fellas," - and pushed my way through the crowds to the toilets.
George stood at the podium and looked out over the seminar room at the faces turned up towards him: some familiar, some new.
He stepped from the cool of the car into the heat, his boots crunching onto the flat white ground.
Look, I can explain.
I sat in the car with the file on my lap and lit another cigarette.
Graham was confused.
I remember Eric putting these tiles up.
His first word was "dod".
When I was younger I would ask why we lived in Upper Edmonton.
The wine glasses were half empty but already abandoned on the coffee table.
Mark sat and stared at the wall.
A guy’s life can basically be summed up by two things: how much Silly Putty he’s eaten and who made him eat it.
Obadiah swayed in the saddle, the rocking made unnoticeable by familiarity.
Another rainy Sunday and Irene was staring out of the window.
He works in an office.
"You're out of work."
The music in the shop was too loud, but he ignored it as he ventured into the harshly-lit depths, his head turning, bird-like, as he sought what he needed.
It wasn't there when I went to sleep, but it was the first thing I saw when I woke up.
He stood in the doorway and watched her sweating face sheer backwards her eyes squeezed closed in ecstasy as her fingers clawed his brother's back.
We spent the morning on the beach.
He had been their leader, but now there was no-one to lead.
Eric had admired her for her stand.
"Forty six point four millilitres."
They returned his coat to her intact, though bleached by the sun, marked with gunpowder and mud, and homes by sword and musket-ball.
Ted couldn't find them anywhere.
It was a fight to get through arrivals because security was so heavy.
"What? What is it?" Jean asked as Des pressed the button to end the call and put the phone back in its cradle.
Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived in a small cottage on the edge of the woods with her mother.
It was her, I was sure it was.
Martha was up at 5am.
Karen watched her feet as she walked, guiding them over the tussocks of grass and testing her weight on rocks to avoid slipping.
Nineteen seventeen, it was.
The ship was quiet as she walked its cobwebbing corridors.
Ted was slowly aware of the Oxford Mail Stand falling quiet.
The prophet and the murderess stood on the battlements of the dead citadel, weapons in their hands.
The rain overnight has cleansed the city.
The barber put down the scissors and held the hand-mirror up.
Gareth rounded the corner and looked both ways for signs of life.
Alamo means cottonwood, is the thought which goes through Pedro's head when he walks past the slightly slumped former-mission.
I shouldn't have twisted when I sat down, my shoulder's aching now.
I remember the screaming.
"Right, well, be good and I'll see you tomorrow."
It was finally built.
It wasn't the best day for sending a letter, but some places don't like you to email job applications.
It starts as a glow on the horizon.
Jacques was no longer aware of the pains in his feet, or the wounds on his back and shoulders.
They built their barricade from three desks and a broken photocopier.
Andrea's alarm woke me.
The safe plummeted from out of the clear sky and straight towards his head.
Her bag was packed when I arrived home.
She poured a small amount of the hot water into the pot and replaced the lid.
I sat down and, with a loud 'spang!' my bottom hit the floor.
John was walking away from Notre Dame.
The flat felt empty without the cat, but Harry was pleased.
A hail of glass scattered over his lap and into the footwell.
He said it with flowers: one dozen red roses to another love and patch a broken heart.
When the announcement comes, and the lights flash in the distance, I step over the yellow line and steady my feet.
Lucas walked around the empty apartment.
It fell from the sky in silver sheets, glistening on the roads and flowing in the gutters, thick globules running down into drains, taking the temperature of the town.
The door had not even finished wheezing shut, but I was already on the balcony.
G snapped the shades down over his eyes and strolled the street.
It was raining, end of the world raining, battering down on heads and streets, cascading through gutters.
"Ninety-eight - ninety-nine - one hundred."
It was a fine summer morning, the kind to make a man happy to be alive.
Despite the advertisements of rival firms, it is probable that every tradesman knows that nobody in business at the present time has a position equal to that of Mr Nuth.
As soon as Einstein declared that space was finite, the price of building sites, both in Heaven and Hell, soared outrageously.
The turnover at Mideastern Radio was so great that Mickey Lloyd couldn't keep track of his men.
He came to the city at the end of summer, over the sea; leaning out over the boat's plain prow, scanning the horizon, nervously telling beads of scale and bone through his thin fingers.
Ilya Ilyich Oblomov was lying in bed one morning in his flat in Gorokhovaya Street in one of those large houses which have as many inhabitants as a country town.
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.
The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home.
‘That looks heavy.’
A sharp clip-clop of iron-shod hooves deadened and died away, and clouds of yellow dust drifted from under the cottonwoods out over the sage.
“Tonight we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.”
When the office door opened suddenly I knew the game was up.
Bill never realized that sex was the cause of it all.
Amahast was already awake when the first light of approaching dawn began to spread across the ocean.
‘And so they've killed our Ferdinand,’ said the charwoman to Mr Švejk, who had left military service years before, after having been finally certified by an army medical board as an imbecile, and now lived by selling dogs – ugly, mongrel monstrosities whose pedigrees he forged.
If a man walks in dressed like a hick and acting as if he owned the place, he’s a spaceman.
Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith.
The Great Diaspora of the Human Race which started more than two millennia ago when the Libby-Sheffield Drive was disclosed, and which continues to this day and shows no sign of slowing, made the writing of history as a single narrative – or even many compatible narratives – impossible.
“Easy, boy, easy.”
The thin air of Mars was chill but not really cold.
I always get the shakes before a drop.
I see in Lunaya Pravda that Luna City Council has passed on first reading a bill to examine, license, inspect—and tax—public food vendors operating inside municipal pressure.
You see, I had this space suit.
"Well, there's the letter."
It is our intention to preserve in these pages what scant biographical material we have been able to collect concerning Joseph Knecht, or Ludi Magister Josephus III, as he is called in the Archives of the Glass Bead Game.
It was love at first sight.
Your chamagoso drug is working, at last, too soon.
You better not never tell nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy.
We wept in what had once been the gymnasium.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
If at any point in my life I had been able to find out what the future held, I would always have wanted to know whether or not I would have children.
This is written from memory, unfortunately.
There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.
Kirian stepped down the dusty wooden steps of the caravan and looked around.
I learned many years ago that sometimes it takes just a few words to blur the line between right and wrong.
At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin.
We threw a party.
On one otherwise normal Tuesday evening I had the chance to live the American dream.
The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw.
When I think of my wife, I always think of her head.
The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.
Mariella peered down from the stern at the dark forms below and knew her fish was there if she had the strength to take it.
The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.
Only three people were left under the red and white awning of the grease joint: Grady, me, and the fry cook.
A man with binoculars.
Anyone who watches even the slightest amount of TV is familiar with the scene: An agent knocks on the door of some seemingly ordinary home or office.
Through the small tall bathroom window the December yard is gray and scratchy, the trees calligraphic.
The blue Mercedes turned into the big circular drive of the Beverly Hills mansion at precisely five after six.
No one - least of all Dr. Litchfield - came right out and told Ralph Roberts that his wife was going to die, but there came a time when Ralph understood without needing to be told.
On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide -- it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese -- the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.
The body lay naked and facedown, a deathly gray, spatters of blood staining the snow around it.
I bet you're worried.
When I was ten years old, I wrote a letter to my future self and buried it in my backyard.
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. 
It's still my favorite book in all the world.
Lest anyone should suppose that I am a cuckoo's child, got on the wrong side of the blanket by lusty peasant stock and sold into indenture in a shortfallen season, I may say that I am House-born and reared in the Night Court proper, for all the good it did me.
rologue (1) 1 WHEN Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home, and went into the mountains
No one would deny that I have known hardship in my time, brief though it has been for all that I have done with it.
Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes. 
I'm thinking of asking the servants to wax my change before placing it in the Chinese tank I keep on my dresser.
The first civilization produced the first medicine.
When my family first moved to North Carolina, we lived in a rented house three blocks from the school where I would begin the third grade.
My friend Patsy was telling me a story.
No woman will ever satisfy me.
"Can I tell you something weird?" he asked.
To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.
The Salinas Valley is in Northern California.
My first garden was a place no grown-up ever knew about, even though it was in the backyard of a quarter-acre suburban plot.
The first time I met Commissario Giorgio Valle, it took five minutes before he looked up from his book and noticed me. 
Turning, I mentally digested all of what you, the reader, are about to find out heartbreakingly.
The cosmonauts were transfixed with wonderment as the sun set — over the Earth — there lucklessly, untethered Comrade Todd on fire.
Mary (who dies at the end, so don't get all surprised like the stupid person who wrote me on my other book) loved Joe, a lot.
If you're going to start reading my novel, please stop touching yourself like that.
Monica had exploded, and I had a mystery, and pieces of her pancreas, on my hands.
The moon was full, the hot-dog-eating contest was over, and I had a lot of throwing up to do.
A lone testicle lay in a barren field.
"Handful of Meat" was, unfortunately, more than just the name of Carl's band.
Jeremy didn't remember eating corn or, for that matter, wearing his good loafers.
Leon fell out of the goat.
First, let me give you some background on the whole monkey thing.
"Man, you won't believe what happened to me tonight," Dave declared, bursting into our dorm room, "but first I gotta go beat off!"
The night passed like a kidney stone: painfully and with the help of major sedatives.
Before I got hit by that ole bus, I never used to think much, but now I think PLENTY.
Done with slaughtering nuns and the infirmed out of cyber-lust, Mandroid turned his optical probes towards a more pastoral (and spiritually recondite) existence.
In anticipation, John licked his own lips.
Hank, Herculean therapist, cleansed the Augean stables of my soul.
To stand tall, to humbly crawl; to laugh, to cry; to puke bitterly, to suck on come what may — here follows my turbulent infancy.
Six o'clock comes early, and so does death.
In 3010, the potatoes triumphed.
The pain wouldn't stop, and Vern still had three cats left.
"I raped your sister," cruelly he sneered, "and now she is no problem," and my friends that is the day my heart tore a sunder. 
His dark heart pulsated with raw evil, as he pumped it, furiously. 
Listen: once upon a time (well, actually twice but I think the first one doesn't really count...or is that "didn't") there was some guy! 
Gordon strove to be a nice pimp. 
Herein lurk delegitimized power structures and epistemological straitjackets and stuff. 
For centuries, man had watched the clouds; now, they were watching him.  
It was just like Jack The Ripper, only, this time, Jack was a she, and possibly some form of time-traveller.  
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; I know that's a contradiction but bear with me.  
Sing, O Muse, of Tiffany's wrath on Triple Coupon Day.  
It happened exactly like this... well, maybe not exactly, but I'm fairly confident about the major points—not that I was there, though.  
Michael had always wanted to lactate.  
I really hope you like this book, because I wrote the whole thing totally naked!  
Indubitably, this was not the sort of soup that engendered wholesome thoughts of energetic eating.  
The inner workings of the kidney, which you will no doubt find quite interesting, can, albeit shocking to some, be downright astonishing to others.  
In retrospect, Grace realized she probably shouldn't have fucked a Republican.  
"Son, defenestration is your only option."  
Thirty days left, forty nine thousand nine hundred eighty seven words to go.  
This is the story of your mom's life.  
"Tasty waffle?" Jim suggested alluringly, prodding me with the afore-mentioned breakfast food.  
The dame had balls, you had to give her that, and a Jetta.  
I wanted to name the heroine Siobhan but didn't know how to pronounce it — screwy Celtic pronunciation — and now I do but it's too late.  
Juicy, their love was like forbidden fruit: tasty.  
We write the year 2347, a world abound with nuclear alacrity, when suddenly Frank enters with a smile.  
I know who the murderer is, Kevin blogged.  
My English teacher, Mrs. Robinson, always said to start in the middle of something interesting, so here's Peter encased in 50 cubic feet of Jell-O.  
While a hellish yowl tore my throat, the panicked kitten — in fact me — leapt crying for the throat of Julia, there seeking comfort — and revenge.  
While my opponents fellate the Satan of special interests, I go down on Reform's compassionate angel.
My fellow Americans, as you know, my foreign policy can be summed up in five words: "Iludium-236 Explosive Space Modulator."  
Critics are calling me a fat cat, viciously ignoring the fact that I've been working out.  
Now, you're all aware of my vocal campaign against the global slave trade, so what I am about to confess may raise a few eyebrows.  
I am pleased to announce that, although attitudes have improved immensely, the beatings will continue.  
John, surfing, said to his mother, surfing beside him, "How do you like surfing?"  
Man oh man, you're gonna like this book; boy howdy.  
Before I drop this narrative shit, here's a quick shout-out to that old Classics professor who said I couldn't write for jack: yo, suck me!  
Get ready to take a virtual tour of sydney australia through the backyards of a kangaroo who will punch you in the head fifty times!  
Braille haiku on the gravestone served to excite some while sighted visitors needed only touch the smoothly polished shapes.  
Dr. Metzger turned to greet his new patient, blithely unaware he would soon become a member of a secret brotherhood as old as urology itself.  
"Joy is contagious," he said, peering into the microscope.  
Her ovine familiar baaahed angrily.  
The spaceship was crashing, but, more importantly, John and Greta were having sex in it.  
The mega beasts were united by only one thing: their size.
His eyes were brown, although you wouldn't know it just by looking.  
I just recently came off a trip to the Far East, and it struck me that I was in a region of the world where wars had started.  
 This is the cipher key for all that follows: |||||| || |! 
Dora liked to explore.  
Does the dance of love have to be a dairy of romantic sonnets; can it not be a Haiku and still be sensually poetic?  
"The hero has cancer," thought the doctor grimly.  
Bill's goiter had burst and it was on my head, Mary thought quietly.  
"I can't!" screamed Jake to whomever was outside the airplane's single lavatory.  
Cries of "Ahoy!" broke the turgid silence of the golf course; the Cap'n approached.
James took Mary's hand — not in matrimony just yet, but plain physically — and led her to the altar.  
I woke up shuddering; my soul was now dead inside.  
Everyone in the year 2020 knows about nanobots!  
The evil Intergalactic Emperor surveyed the destruction he wrought. "Booyah!" he cried with glee. "I'm in ur base! I'm killing all ur mans!"  
"And that's when I stabbed her in the face," Jake finished.
It clawed its way out of Katie, bit through the cord and started clearing.  
“Crime,” declared the police captain, “is everywhere, crime, crime!”  
The foot delivered an unending holocaust of pain as it rocketed into Zamboni’s crotch.  
Ah, poetic Paris: with its pâtés and beaujolais, tiramisu and au jus.  
Emperor Wu liked cake, but not exploding cake!  
The ship sliced through the ocean like wood through water.  
I knew it was called salsa dancing, but phew!  
Beatrice was aware that many had stood before her at this sacred place, with their own reasons, but with surprisingly few footprints.  
Either the skeleton was a sheila, or some bloke had been sleeping with two silicone balloons on his chest.  
Anthony’s eyes bulged as we all watched, with languid, infinite slowness, his skull float across the cockpit.  
MacGyver had grown old.  
Mesa Jar Jar Binks, and thisa mesa story!  
Shylockina, Queen of the Jews, surveyed her realm.  
“What a horrible future we live in!” said FutureMax!  
The dawn blushed; not because it was embarrassed (that doesn’t even make sense), but because light bends funny.  
The air hung heavy with the perfume of the circus — elephants, greasepaint and hot buttered chimps.  
The flowers in the meadow grew slowly, as did my erection.  
Tingling with joy and anticipation, Paul’s gonads are just exactly that way.
It was more than a flirtation — he parted her labia like Moses did the Red Sea.  
For hobos, spring was the season of love.  
“BRRRRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” rang the alarm clock, awakening me from my Gamma Hydroxy Butyrate-induced slumber.  
BUDDABUDABDABUDDA, went the bullets.  
Fukutsuru died in 2005 but his frozen sperm lived on for people’s benefit.  
The king of ketchups was being dethroned, and I wanted an explanation.  
Clarissa plunges — a verb of great adventurous spirit — into her day.  
He was marooned in the jaws of a human minefield, and with every step the noose grew tighter.  
Feel your tensions melt away as you drive down Wildflower Lane; the natural beauty of the trees, the wildflowers and deer are all there to welcome you as you enter Domaine Madeleine.  
I’ll never forget that first morning I saw Francois Lake from outside of the front door of a small red log cabin as a small boy in late winter.  
Anamaria had already gotten up obviously because there was no Anamaria in Anamaria’s bed.
Because they had not repented, the angel stabbed the unrepentant couple thirteen times, with its sword.  
Sophi broke down in tears, like a diesel car that had run out of petrol.  
Her face, though scalded, was as lily-white as I could ever want as we jovially kissed.  
Portia, distracted, brushed the fetlocks of her steed, murmuring softly.  
The Ramadan tree was lit, and Aladdin joyfully sat around it.  
Queen Elizabeth sat alone, wondering when Napoleon was gonna get there.  
This story is a murder mystery — the mystery of a murder.  
John Gantry surveyed the grim aftermath of battle through the aft porthole.  
Hussein read the agent’s TSA badge, gently grazed his strong hand with hers, and whispered two words that would change her love life forever.  
Liz Trundy burst onto the stage to the wild applause of her fellow Mary Kay comrades, unaware that the wildest applause came from Digby Jones, NFL punt receiver, who had never let himself forget her.  
Bob is sad. :(  
Under Bob’s fez was another.  
As Lucas hunkered in the shadows waiting for his name to be called he fiddled with his cuff links, praying that this time his knife thrusts would be sufficient.  
FUCK. I scream and pound my monitor so hard it stops functioning for four minutes, but I’m not using it anyway. I’m crying.  
PEWPEW — Lasers! — PEWPEWPEW!  
The thing is, you can never really tell if a person is looking out from behind their own eyes, or if the eyes are being piloted by tiny mice in swivel-chairs.  
Sadly, Jim retracted his penis; it obviously wasn't welcome here.  
Sleep was about to clutch my eyes, when suddenly the text rang through my head. Peering at my phone I saw, “WTF? LMAO!” and I could not help but smile.  
Tears are permanent when you tattoo them to your face.
Tune your ear to the frequency of despair, and cross-reference by the longitude and latitude of a heart in agony.
At the risk of exposing myself to that dreadful epithet, unorthodox, I am jumping feet-first with you into the past tense.  
I observed this wheelchair dude in the vestibule. He was waiting for me.  
With the backbreaking work of the Gold Rush came massage techniques from across the globe.
There is simply no scientific or mathematical formula that defines conservatism.
The mighty frigate Indestructible rounded the Horn of Africa and lurched east’ard.  
Pika ... chu, thought Pikachu.
Alex turned to Gertrude, in much the same way Martin Landau turned to Barbara Bain in the opening of Space: 1999.  
For many, surfing can be a pleasant and enjoyable pastime, if you like surfing, but not Peter.  
Zamboni doubled — nay, TRIPLED over in happiness-demolishing agonies.  
I have the ability to go through time, he suddenly remembered while at a bus stop near a tree.  
Deep space. The silence of the void. Shh.  
Deborah walked briskly down the street with pants on her legs.  
Jerry’s wife looked forward to a romantic time with him, Jerry.  
“Ooh la la!” whispered Larry in French.  
Farmer John admired the golden corn, sprouting from the ground like buried treasure.  
“Tectonic plates fascinate me,” she says, her eyes swiftly darting from my eyes to the ground, and back again.  
“I hope I win,” thought Ernest, blinking laboriously; he was proud to represent his country in the Olympics, but “What did it all mean?”  
Despite having ascended to the most powerful political office in the world, President Zachary Herney was average in height, with a slender build and narrow shoulders.  
A leg and part of a torso lay on the sidewalk — the remains of Alan Tompkins.  
Huang Lee has a simple mission: deliver an ancient sword to his Uncle Kenny.
Org of Otterland was not Duke Og and Duchess Dina's first child, for that honor belonged to Natalya, brown-haired, eyed, and furred.
No matter what you believe, whether you’re Christian, Muslim, or Jew, this is where it probably happened.  
The door, which had been left open a few inches, was ajar.  
“I shouldn’t be saying this, but I think I’ll love you always, baby, always,” Adam cried into the email.  
Splashy the whale smiled secretively, flapping his flappers and swimming.  
The meteor formed a crater, vampires crawling out of the crater.  
This is a story about a racist hero who dies at the end, probably painfully since he’ll get shot in the face.  
“You are the greatest human in the world,” the dragon told the boy who desperately wanted to be a dragon, too.  
This is a mystery about a murder I committed.  
“Murder is the most terrible crime of them all,” the police commissioner thought to himself as he loitered purposefully near the deli counter.  
Once upon a time, there was a talking lamp whose lightbulb fell out and hit a person and the person got shocked and destroyed everything.  
Zandor stood in the doorway, raking the onlooking crowd with the hot coals of his eyes.  
The general, one might have said, had a sly, sneering-smile expression upon his face.  
There was only one man salubrious enough to assuage my hunger for love — senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA).  
“You are in pain; both physical and emotional,” my heart informed me.  
When John left me he took with him my heart, my soul, my everything — which included my happiness, my appetite, my energy, and even my tears!!  
“Great Caesar’s Ghost!” Amy sputtered. “What glorious lovemaking!”  
“OMG” texted Sue-Anne to her compatriot Ellen, “MY OWN PARENTS R DED!” It looked like the Mystery Girls had a new mystery!  
“Approach ramming speed!” commanded Commander Klamsky, as her frigate plowed through the celestial ocean at erupting speeds.  
Bookended with firecrackers, her birth was an auspicious occasion, festooned with all the ornaments of her birth, and solemn.  
As someone who has menstruated, I thought, I could tell you it’s no picnic.  
“Hearken,” he spake, drawing thither, “and alight thine eyes on yon comely maiden betwixt such knaves as they.”  
The battlefield stank thick with writhing “progressives.”  
Tuesday. Africa. Lion o’clock.  
Some things are so small, so miniscule, so atomically insignificant, they can be seen only from three feet away using the Hubble telescope.
Nine-year-old Kyle Graddy looked out across a minor league baseball diamond for the first time in his life and pondered the possibility of his own death.  
Street punks live in a fantasy world of invincibility, and our fear turns their dreams into reality.  
 Andy Hallett was an only child who grew to stand 6’2”.  
The saying “I have got your back” almost never has the literal meaning of receipt or possession of another’s spine.  
At the peak of a golden career Liu Yan lost control of the very limbs that experts say made her dances so magical.  
David Becker had never held a gun, but he was holding one now.  
THIS STORY BEGINS on a Beautiful sunny day in Daytona Beach Florida With a man by the name of David Braymer. A 45-year-old Single man that works at the local High school as a science teacher and astrology in the 12-grade level.
Knuckles resembles a human, but with differences. Knuckles is neither male nor female, though referred to as a "he." Three-quarter-inch-thick dark-violet-colored (FFA000E0) fur covers his entire body. He is only 25 1/3 inches tall, 4 inches wide, and 2.5 inches deep. 
"By the whirling rings of Saturn," he growled as he gazed disconsolately at his paper-strewn desk. "I'd like to have those directors of ITA here on Mercury for just one Earth-month." 
Jennifer stood there imagining how good that pear would be.
The red hot sun rose in the cold blue sky.  
‘Pfft’ — he knew the silent but deadly whisper of a silenced SIG SG 550 rifle with a 650mm barrel and a 254mm rifling twisting rate.  
This is the story of how one woman overcame breast cancer by never ever losing faith in herself.  
"When my homie pulled out his gat, the first thing I said was, “That is	very tight!”  "
Cowboy Bret said to Dave (another cowboy), “Now let’s rustle up these cattles.”  
A wind was blowing from east to west, as if it were the sun, blowing instead of shining.  
I passed the fledgling plastic to the checkout chick. “Cred?” she said.  
The blood that was dripping onto the parched floor resembled a Rorschach ink-blot test, invented in 1921 by Hermann Rorschach.  
He, from a physical stature, was short.  
“Caw! Caw!” went the birds as the massacres happened (the birds represent sadness).  
He kissed Abigail sensually, as if to say “I still need you” with his lips.  
“Bring me the light of your love,” Steve purred into my ears.
“My heart medication!” slowly remembered Dwayne, but his lateness was a stark reality.  
 This was the story of a brave man, a freeman, who can’t stop touching society.  
“AAHHH” she screamed in horror as her infant rocketed from inside her towards the free world.  
“Me, I like a girl with a couple extra pounds on her,” said Tom, subtly negging his target.  
The spice filled up my taste buds, and was quite lovely.  
Mongoose-to-cobra, two serpentine forms, he was my rival; are we fighting in these holes, or are we really making love?  
Princess Amabel brushed her silky golden hair and tried not to think about my breasts.  
The detective could smell the murder on the knife.  
“NOOOOOOOOOON!” cried Poirot Jr., falling to his knees and rending his fledgling moustaches, “But when will ze killings end?!”  
“You just may be the most beautiful perp I’ve ever laid sensors on,” thought the robot lieutenant as his humanoid partner ate donuts unaware.  
This story is about a man and a woman, with lots of things sticking into things.  
He lived in a time of stories told by many.  
Her “parents,” her “boyfriends” — Angel knew she’d never be truly understood by anyone.  
Let’s rap about the issues of today.  
No matter how hard life got, Zade thought, ska would always be there.  
Slowly, carefully, and with a lot of understanding, he put his mouth onto her mouth.
While they had been together after being married, exalting in their love, something had been outside the door, exalting in death.  
The intruder attempted to break down the reinforced door with his axe, shouting phrases like “We will get our revenge!”, “Revenge!” and “Blood!”  
After the firestorm, Sally Quinn entered the concrete meditation labyrinth her husband had built for her on their country estate in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, to think.
The heating was down, all the toilets closed and there was no way to get something hot to drink.  
Like a present that suddenly arrived, we come into this world. We come into this world in miniature.
Several billion years ago, that whirling speck of dust known as the Earth, fifth in size among the planets, came into being.  
Her cheeks were rosy and so was my love — bursting with fragrance and softness.  
 “Shame on you,” he scorns at you in anger, “Shame!”
“Wow,” said David Spergel, an astrophysicist at Princeton who was not involved in the work.
 Agent Jeffrey’s trained eyes rolled carefully around the room, taking in the sights and sounds.  
Bang! As the bullet hit her ear, she felt an excruciating pain, as if her ear were screaming into itself.  
She had the kind of face that made you want to say hey, look at your face.  
“I’m a winner,” thought Seabiscuit, galloping across the finish line.  
“There was to be boxing,” Steve muttered. “Punch, punch, punch.”  
I parted her legs with great solemnity. “Hello old friend,” I whispered.  
As I approached the dairy aisle, wondering what milk to buy, I remembered my doctor suggested a low fat milk, so I purchased skim milk.  
Dolly looked upon her paper expeditiously then elevated up her pencil. She had now commenced not only a race against the clock, but a race to get the best mark ever in the class.  
Wow. He was firmly mesmerized by her bright blue eyes that complemented her blue floral dress.
Her golden hair bounced in the breeze like farm-fresh honey flowing from a jar.  
The moon shone like a star, while tears of heaven rained the sky.  
A lone plastic grocery bag fluttered in the breeze, like a sail without a boat.  
She was really really hot, her breast like flames to my heart and mind.  
Today was the night where our love was to be consummated, by making love.  
Albert Einstein claimed that the only universal constant is light. However, Einstein never witnessed the power of Vittoria Lionheart’s love.  
“Do you still love me, John?” I asked. “I don’t love you, Marie,” came the reply from the letter I held in my shaking hands.  
Even as I leaned on the lamppost, the sadness of my heart could not be brightened.  
It was the worst possible news he could have received. He howled an inarticulate howl of rage, and threw the various decorations on his mahogany desk all across the small room.  
Gramlax the Mighty raised his broadsword overhead and swung it mightily, roaring, “You fellows will certainly pay!”  
Kaldor fondled the hilt of his sword with his lanky fingers and inhaled the sunrise. “I taste the future blood of my enemies,” he relished.  
Melissae’s ears, which ears were long and pointed on account of her proud elfin heritage, were perked up.  
Robert woke up in a hospital bed and he couldn’t remember the criminal man he had just killed moments before.  
My pen allowed me to write this tale, your eyes to read it, your mind to “get it.”  
Just as we were moving from the wedding to the reception, Mother demanded, “Show me by the way that you dance that you are.”  
Stephen knew today felt wrong, as he listened to “Heart Cooks Brain,” by the band “Modest Mouse,” from the album “Lonesome Crowded West.”  
The cat sat in silence on the window sill, doing catlike things while watching his owner tend to the makings of supper.  
Sheila woke up instantly; it was that dream again — the one with the face, and the man, with the face.  
It was August 2009. On this sunny morning, Lake Como was a picture of tranquility, a striking contrast to the turbulence of the global apparel industry.
I have been married to my wife Janice for 38 years. We have four daughters and have been blessed with twelve grandchildren. I can relate to individual and family issues.
I awakened with renewed hope that I grimly tried to suppress.
In interacting with Japanese women, I noticed something.
In the Land of Wasteland, there lived a city called Sand City.
I draw a hot sorrow bath in my despair room.
The men greeted each other, wearing various smiles on their faces.
The stranger rode into town with eyes that said his sixgun would have stories to tell, if it spoke any language other than the guttural tongue of violence.
The town was built in the lowlands, risking flood, as if the founders dared the mighty mountains surrounding the town by asking for giant rivulets of detritus, saying “Give me them” to the mountains.
My dear wife jolted awake, rolled over, and looked at me. “I just lucid dreamed that I killed you,” she said sadly.
We had succeeded in evaluating the strengths and needs of the enemy battlestation. “Eureka,” I exclaimed. Prepare to utilize Attack Plan Theta on the rear defensive shield!
Madison was a shy, awkward, inwardly beautiful teenaged girl just like you.
 Pius XIII stood on the balcony, triumphant. Earlier, when the white smoke had vacated the chimney, not one citizen of FurRome would have bet on a Shibu-Ina to emerge.
Charging, sprinting, loping with great speed, the cheetah lunged at Theodore Roosevelt, but he already had that cheetah dead to rights.
“This isn’t fair!”, wept Case, who had previously been the team captain but due to events yet to be described was not now.
“Please, just give me the answers to the test!” said Ron. Jacob pulled his mouth over his teeth as if to say “I am not going to give you the answers.”
Jacques entered out of the rain, drenched from that selfsame precipitate.
Carrie sat alone, at the most expensive restaurant in town, for the third time that month. Maybe if she turned her violet-eyed head the right way, she would get swept off her feet by a gorgeous man.
The fast man raced quickly after the other man, while a third man tried to keep pace with the first man.
The sex I had with a girl last night filled me with a feeling of 100% Grade A joy.
John ejaculated with such strength as if to say “I love you Mary.”
Amy gasped for her last breath, as she entered the intoxicating room of her brother.
“BOOM!” said the bomb very loudly.
It was a beautiful night, and the full moon glew like it had never glown before.
The fireman squad extinguished the house, as it was aflame.
Sirens had always made Simon feel safe, like being inside a strong man’s muscles.
As all true prophets know, the lips of fate are tightly sealed, and only the crowbar that is the passing of time can manage to pry them open.
Taft slid slowly, carefully into the bathtub. He knew that it would be the best bath that he and the bathtub had ever had.
Like Venice in Italy, Thailand’s magical Bangkok is built on a wide network of canals. So it should be no surprise that the art of the noodle is equally prized in each.
As Joseph Leahy, whose research focused on the biodegradation of hydrocarbons, ducked for cover, a bullet tore through the top of his head, severing his right optic nerve.
For years, scientists have been trying to harness the raw power of an eclipse.
Her spirit was as strong as the titanium sheathing her graphene-coral bones.
Drug lord Pablo Escobar’s hippo died the same way he did, hunted down and shot by the authorities for posing a danger to the public.
Birth defects affect us all, but particularly families with children who have birth defects.
I’ve fallen prey to the vicissitudes of limerence periodically since I felt the first pangs of adolescence.
Suddenly Alex had had enough. “Then why don’t you go and ---- yourself.” He spat out the swear word.
It was that time again. The time where all the horses used to show off to their gods.
Obama chuckled. “You mean the Chaos Emeralds?”
“Together, we will beat them all,” she whispered, caressing the circlet-girt fontanelles of her #royalbaby.
As we gazed into each other’s eyes, Colin moved the front bits of my hair off my face and put them with my other hair.
As the abandoned temple crumbled, Professor Winston cried, “Utilize your rope!”
All humans work at The Factory, which is run by robots and it makes more robots.
It was 1995 the year the soccer teams came, kicking their balls, to town.
“Well, this is passing strange,” thought Shakespeare as he saw the dead body of the lady in Stratford-upon-Avon, “and methinks it dost bear investigating.”
“This sure is a bad murder,” quietly thought Detective Gaius Hanssen as he was investigating a hell of a crime at the Colosseum in Ancient Rome.
“The Crime Lads have done it again,” I realized grimly, surveying my dead wife.
As he stared into her fiery alabaster eyes, the wealthy Earl Roderick realized that Lady Serena was not like the other Regency-era noblewomen he had known.
I gently began to fuck Tracey, and as the fucking continued we swept down and across the floor like midnight dancers.
Darla lay aside her man, yowling cat noises in the glow of their grownup lovedance.
Their passionate love took flight as an explosion of sprawling limbs and content genitalia.
I couldn’t believe what I heard as I read the words in her note which, like daggers, sliced up all my feels.
Phil’s tears fell softly, carried down his face by the gravity of her unfairness.
No one could love a dark-past’d vampire like me.
Nils awoke, contemplating the things of love.
Dave, sitting there, thought to himself quietly about all the different things in the world.
The man with black skin took the big rubber ball and jumped and put it into the basket with a metal rim on a board.
“No!” raged the swimmer, his opponent streaking by to touch the wall like a dolphin, “No.”
Ah, the first time I set eyes on Asia… a whole new world of rich descriptions and evocative atmospheres was unveiled before my eyes.
New York in the 80s: money was tight, but homies were tighter.
The mean loudmouths at Orangedale High just didn’t understand Timmy, who only wanted to stay quiet and read and appreciate nature.
Stepping into the trinket shop, the musty air inhaled by Glenda’s lungs went unnoticed, distracted by the air of wonder inhaled by her eyes.
Dark. Cold. Vast. Shards, falling. Shapelessness. Formlessness. A wheeling, as of stars. Yes: you are inside my cerebral cortex, suckling on my thoughts.
Welcome to WikiPlot, the free novel that anyone can edit! LOL JOHN LIKED POO
The rain loudly hits the sidewalk like bacon sizzles in a skillet, thinks Jake as he holds his coat collar closed, wishing he could trade the bitter cold for that meaty heat.
Casie did not enjoy the preference dreams, like lemon – red pepper – onion; she much preferred the simple dreams, like orange – orange.
I drew my customized Kimber 1911 .45, with the Pachmayr grips and skeletonized trigger, and leveled it coolly at the African-Americans.
“The experiment of multiculturalism has failed,” noted Captain Perry as he removed the laser-bayonet from the brown man’s chest.
The bastard mayor tossed the money to his criminals. “Heh heh heh,” everyone said.
      “Why do you love me?” asked Wildflower.       “I love you because you are brave, strong, beautiful, tough, kind, spunky, and pure,” said Damien, “and unlike all the others, you stood up to Dictator James.”
The sky was gray, fitting for this grim dystopia.
      “Mom,” I asked my mom. “What’s for breakfast?”       “You know I haven’t made breakfast since your father died in a mysterious car crash a year ago on your birthday,” she said sadly. “You have his eyes.”
Though she may have wiped away the tears, they just couldn’t stop flowing. Like a wound on a patient without enough platelets, it kept pouring out, rapidly filling in the paths she tried to remove.
The cattle-rustler’s whip sang through the air like a long thin snake.
Do you have the time / To read a little rhyme? / I can rhyme for ages, / For 400 pages!!!
With the brassy tocsin of his morning alarm clock, John Michaelson’s weary eyes exploded open.
Night falls in East L.A. with the crimson blood of men, as the day rises with women’s tears.
David fell into Greg’s manful arms and cried against his waiting muscles.
Nothing would ever stop reminding me of Lisa and her body.
So we all had dicks, all of the boys — can I go on?
The dancers undressed; Liam noted their respective vulvae.
All the girls at the school talked about makeup and boys, but Sheila wore ripped jeans and didn’t care.
I hope you discover, my dear teenagers, reading about my life as a “rebel”, that doing what your parents say isn’t always bad, cuz it can be bitchin’ sometimes.
Ten years ago in the war, the only thing in which I thought I would be was “the shit,” not this mansion where I live at now.
I knew that Billy had hiked into my life on a trail of broken hearts, but I never guessed that mine too would soon be becoming a part of that trail.
They had the mettle of men, and yet they ate the biscuits of dogs.
Jorge was helplessly gripped by the sight before him, like cojones in the hand of an expert dominatriz.
Like any Russian, Sokolov enjoyed a game of chess. At some level he was never not playing it!
Serena fished the Tic Tac out and put it on her tongue, but she was so worried about her future, she could barely taste it.
“Heaven help me!” she groaned, mentally. “Now is my hour of need!”
When Nathaniel at last ventured distantly to hint of an engagement with Olympia, her father Professor Spalanzani smiled all over his face.
For Google executive Forrest Timothy Hayes, heroin was the killer app.
The family road trip in America is as old as covered wagons headed west — older, if you consider the ocean a road.
“Bees are good,” Obama says, as children scream.
It all started when my topaz eyes looked up into his soft emerald ones.
1993, it is the future. Acid rain had destroyed civilization.
The usually handsome left side of my darling husband’s face spasmed a full 90 degrees into horror when I told him my little secret.
Some girls never get a pony, but Jane was good and her daddy loved her.
This is a story about an ENFP and an INTJ who fall in love.
“He was approximately 182.88 centimeters tall and 90.7185 kilograms,” the nice guy converted to the European police officer.
“Cucks! You’re all cucks!” I passionately exclaimed.
Torval found great pleasure in his elfin mother’s lips; edgy, huh?
8:32 P.M., April 17th, 1996. Detective Fry cuts open the plastic cover on his TV dinner, while not seven miles away, a similar knife slides over the neck of an innocent man.
The rain thundered on the roof of the casino, washing away the grime on top, but not being able to wash away the sins within.
“Good heavens,” Jonathan murmured when he looked at the sky, for the heavens he saw were not good at all.
Ebony watched over the rain-wet street, her raven hair slicked by the rain. The roof was lonely, but she preferred the honest ugliness of the gargoyles to the beautiful lies of her shallow “friends”.
It was a time of darkness in the land of Gath-ka’noug. But then, out of the darkness, there shone a brilliant light. And the name of that light was: Horick the Elf.
Call me Bastardo Medio, for my costume is black, my skin is pasty white, and I am one muy malo hombre.
Amy was not going to be the only girl in her seventh-grade class without a boyfriend, and she knew just how to get one.
The cyborg was loose in the alien ship, and it was clear from the gunshots that he was not here in the name of peace.
Picture a drop of water balancing on a leaf, or a Zen master poised on one foot — mid-air — for what seems an eternity. NFL referee and Omaha attorney Clete Blakeman maintains his own special equilibrium.
They were ensnared, their limp limbs bound together like a bunch of Twizzlers that had melted in the sun.
Blood was bursting from her arm like melted red rockets.
The blood came pouring into her mouth like a waterfall of gore and violence.
The calligraphy of combat is written with strokes of sudden blood.
My life is like a free online game, people seem to be playing with it.
Her curves were the Pavlovian meat that made a man’s loins salivate.
Her eyes were like deep, green pools of eyeball liquid.
Her eyes were terribly broken, like fractured orbs of glass being frozen.
All characters in this novel are purely fictitious, with the exception of Dr Alpha Wiseman, whose blog posts are my own.
All characters in this novel are purely fictitious, with the exception of Dr Alpha Wiseman, whose blog posts are my own.
The reason, you ask? The reason, I say, that you’re going to love this book, well, it’s simple. You’re going to love this book because I’m a fuckin’ wordsmith. You’re welcome.
Ben slams the packet down by the Officer. “These are my kids don’t you see?” His own dear flesh, his dear old blood.
Gunther sashayed across the street one day and heard the cry of a gun.
The individual stroked his mustache, following it up with a stroke to his beard.
Yeah, it kicks ass to be living in this high-rent apartment with my girlfriend who’s real hot and I fuck her.
Agent Felicia Stone was tough and she was smart, but she still had the emotions of a woman.
“How did you do that?” gasped Danielle in astonishment as Eric ran up and down the hill with astonishing speed.
The boy had a bounce in his step and a certain marsupiality of the face; we called him Kanga. But the girl, oh ho ho ho the girl, her we just called Jennifer the Bitch.
When your hand becomes steel, there is nothing you can’t punch.
Outwardly, they maintained the appearances of proper, educated Christians, but behind closed doors, they engaged in love triangles, in-fighting, drug use, and bad financial investments.
LONDON — It has seemed, almost, a land of two narratives, one in fear of jihad, the other confronting an older hazard: rain.
Natasha Romanoff hated pierogies — but more than that, she hated lies.
The safest place for the unborn child is in the firmly restrained pouch of the womb.
Reproduction is necessary for life and most of us have a preference for when and where we reproduce.
There are two kinds of men in the world, savvy and nosavvy.
The nights were getting longer and the days were getting shorter, and on the plane, there was a bomb!
Cancer is always bad, but in the 1960s it was worse than it is today.
Painted on the ceiling shines the red sun of Valmar that lights up the dark nights of vampires like you with its eight evil rays.
She was cat-derived, though human in outward shape, which explains the C in front of her name.
“Punk” is nothing but death… and crime… and the RAGE of a BEAST.
Ever since discovering that she was half human and half mermaid, Merliah Summers’ life had become an amazing adventure both above and below the waves!
“CB-99, show Lando the hologram of your file called JTHW — Jabba the Hutt’s Will!”
Our daughter is not quite 12 years old yet. That means she is 11.
I want to begin with an exercise, in which you, the reader, put yourself in an authorial-cum-narratorial position.
There’s something going on, and it’s bad.
“Climate change is real,” squawked the lady scientist to an auditorium crammed full of human sheep who didn’t question a word she said. “And I can ‘prove’ it.”
The millennial squirmed, but there was no entitling her way out of the firm grip of reason.
Tanner was triggered once again, but a microaggression wouldn’t stop him this time.
It was autumn, and the last leaf of liberty had fallen from the tree of tyranny onto the dirt of destruction.
This is the story of how I found my Father in Heaven, but it begins with my mommy, lying back as the cruel forceps tore apart my still forming yet passionately beating human heart.
Tagg could scarce believe his young eyes as they met the feast laid out richly before him: all manner of mealbreads, ripest canteloons, and—​by the Star!—​an entire bandersnort, carved and dripping.
Dudley was a magician (not a wizard like in those Harry Potter books, and also he didn’t have a wand like in them), who was poor.
Neera was a born disruptor, ready to take things and make them 2.0.
Thornmill Greyeyes was a proud elf. His ears stood proud, his cock stood proud, but most of all his heart stood proud as he watched his bride mince down the isle with her ravishingly good looks.
Once upon a time, there lived a beautiful princess named Annabelle. She had lovely golden locks and sensuous blue eyes—​a sparkling Aryan jewel, just like you! :)
The mists ran like dew over her green-eyed scarlet locks.
His tired blue-eyed gaze hit the lanky blonde and then turned to the brunette.
These liberated chestnut curls framed a handsome face made twice as radiant by the mysteries surely waiting just behind those light green eyes.
I slanted my eyes down to meet her big brown ones, which were slanted up.
The new client’s titties could make a grown man cry a river, and Detective Johnson was in his own personal Pacific Ocean of sexy.
“I’ve got a feline these cats didn’t know what they unleashed when they picked a bone with me,” snarled Rex Steele, chief dogtective of the Paws Angeles Petlice Department. “This time, it’s fursonal.”
Hashtags of the murder were all over my newsfeed.
“Yeah,” I said as he asked if my beautiful wife got murdered yesterday (she did).
Simon has been friends with Darkness for a long time, like in the song “The Sound of Silence” by the protagonist’s namesake & Garfunkel.
This is my coming-of-age story. Not literally, like the movie “Big”, starring Tom Hanks, or the movie “13 Going On 30”, starring Jennifer Garner, although those are both good movies.
1.  YOU, the Anagramancer, stare down the invading MANTICORE: Will you ROMANCE IT (turn to 123), give it CREMATION (turn to 213), or summon EROTIC MAN (turn to 312)?
His steel-corded muscles pressed into her body, so close there was scarcely room to breathe beneath the pillowy swell of her breasts.
The hot Florida sun battered my recently bruised shoulders that were a part of the activities where my virginity was lost.
“The time was now and the location was here; I’m ready,” thought nubile, 18-year-old Jenny as she lay fertilely on Johnny’s bed, blithely unready for the future.
Normally Frank was as happy as the next guy to have an erection, meaning very happy, but this was ridiculous.
I first laid eyes on her at a mutual friend’s wedding. Her body shone through her dress; it wasn’t unbecoming, but you could see enough.
She wanted to be loved like most women do, but was mostly ignored like the Alpini in the 12th Isonzo-Battle.
“I’m breaking up with you”—​her words shot into my heart, like bullets from the gun that her mouth was like.
Her wit was sharp like a lawnmower blade—​it could cut you down to size (which she could adjust, like a lawnmower).
“Oh no,” Alex gasped when realization crashed over her like the ocean wave soon to be killing her.
Like the Jews, the corals of the Great Barrier Reef observe a lunar calendar.
“Ah, little Abu,” sighed wisely the Master as his eyes roved the desert sands. “When will it be that the Muslim, the Christian, and the Jew learn to listen together to the sound of the wind?”
Just as the equine bott fly invades its host equus to inject its larvae, Ted’s glowing aura now infected Mary’s every thought.
“I only wish He would understand me like you do,” Rebecca sighed, twirling her fingers not only through her auburn hair but also the horse’s.
There she was, staring at the sunset, wondering why it was blue… then she remembered she was staring at it through the sad filter of her tears.
Almo gripped the hysteric female. “Tranquilize yourself!”
The newly single Macho Man certainly wasn’t ready for the pain caused when Miss Elizabeth hit him with an elbow from the emotional top ropes.
The rain was pouring, but I cried harder, my tears sweeping away into the gutter where I belonged.
Susan drank water, the liquid of life, unaware that soon death would be hers.
"The day began like any other. My alarm clock rang at 6:51 a.m. and James Brown told me that he felt good—​he knew that	he would. If only I myself had known that later, I would not feel good."
“So the ‘establishment’ likes opera, huh?” I thought to myself. That’s when I had the epiphany that started it all. “Well, let's see how they handle a rock opera!”
G0bl1n always told me: “You can’t speedrun life, Ph4z0r; not even tool-assisted.”
It was too peaceful out here, surrounded by the vacuum of space and with only the continual hum of the twin ion drives breaking the silence.
She turned to her side and watched the people nearest to her, starting the process of listening.
Some time before the Mega-Quake of ’26 erased Neo-Tokyo from the Matrix, the first unsuspecting CEO was sitting in his New Nippon garden enjoying his ’trodes when he was downloaded by the enemy.
When settlers first came to the shores of North America, they found several things. They found a land inhabited by an exotic people that was rich in resources and in wolves.
Empress Celene strode into the University of Orlais's great Chantry Courtyard surrounded by her entourage of servants and guards and flanked by Ser Michel, her champion.
The afternoon my parents died, I was out shoplifting with Irene Klauson.
The lunch hour in the coworkers' cafeteria at Frankenberg's had reached its peak.
Kit Rodriguez lay sprawled in the gray dirt, staring in shock at the fire-blackened book that had just landed open side down in front of him.
The afternoon air tasted of wood smoke, a sign of autumn Katya would have enjoyed if she hadn't been hunting a traitor.
Two boy-men sat on the river's eastern bank, where an open-fronted tent gave them shelter from the chilly spring wind.
Three miles up the river Thames from the center of Oxford, some distance from where the great colleges of Jordan, Gabriel, Balliol, and two dozen others contended for mastery in the boat races, out where the city was only a collection of towers and spires in the distance over the misty levels of Port Meadow, there stood the Priory of Godstow, where the gently nuns went about their holy business; and on the opposite bank from the priory there was an inn called the Trout.
As the final rays of light glance off the water of the Zwanenburgwal, Amsterdam closes down.
The taxi’s radio was tuned to a classical FM broadcast.
Infinity; the noble goal held by every creature in existence, a wish that every being in this insignificant world held; the principle of eternity, of never dying, of keeping prosperity through every winter with their cold winds and mean, bitter weather; that was the goal of a single non binary individual.
Starlight gives way to bolder neon.
It is said, in Imardin, that the wind has a soul, and that it wails through the narrow city streets because it is grieved by what it finds there.
Shadow had done three years in prison.
Even before he got electrocuted, Jason was having a rotten day.
Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest.
My name is Melisande Stokes and this is my story.
Everything starts sonewhere, although many physicists disagree.
He began his new life standing up, surrounded by cold darkness and stale, dusty air.
Some people would say it's a bad idea to bring a fire-spider into a public library.
Gordon Edgley's sudden death came as a shock to everyone - not least himself.
This is the Discworld, which travels through space on the back of four elephants which themselves stand on the shell of Great A'Tuin, the sky turtle.
A small party of elves reached the road marker at the edge of the Gilt Leaf Wood an hour after sundown.
True! - nervous - very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?
Alanna the Lioness, the King's Champion, could hardly contain her glee.
Fall that year was warm.
Despite the overflow of humanity present for the congress at the royal palace, the hall where Keladry of Mindelan walked was deserted.
Keladry of Mindelan lay with the comfortable black blanket of sleep wrapped around her.
There is just enough space inside here for one person to live indefinitely, or at least that's what the operation manual says.
Dr. Jonasson was woken by a nurse five minutes before the helicopter was expected to land.
In a starless May night the town slept and the river flowed quietly through shadow.
Ten past three already, and no sign of Colin.
Terminal F at the Philadelphia International Airport is the end of the airport, but it feels like the end of the world.
There was once an orphan who as long as he could remember, had been herding sheep for a farmer in the South of Ireland.
At the time I first realized I might be fictional, my weekdays were spent at a publicly funded institution on the north side of Indianapolis called White River High School, where I was required to eat lunch at a particular time-between 12:37 p.m. and 1:14 p.m.-by forces so much large than myself that I couldn't even begin to identify them.
Jashnah Kholin pretended to enjoy the party, giving no indication that she intended to have one of the guests killed.
The home was a small yellow cottage on an empty street.
The woods are beautiful.
I still get nightmares. M
Strange things can happen at a crossroads.
I looked up from the book I wasn’t reading and glanced around at the other passengers, all the while raising my butt cheeks as imperceptibly as possible, so as to let off an unprovenanced SBD.
"This must be so difficult for you, Meredith."
Hollywood is obsessed.
I've always believed that destiny chooses our path in life.
Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth.
I was leaning against the bar in a speakeasy on Fifty-second Street, waiting for Nora to finish her Christmas shopping, when a girl got up from the table where she had been sitting with three other people and came over to me.
I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte.
Day had broken cold and gray, exceedingly cold and gray, when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail and climbed the high earth bank.
One dollar and eighty-seven cents.
My sister decided we had to go see her estranged husband in Reno.
Time is a lot of the things people say that God is.
Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately overpriced shops, and the quiet abiding air of earned grace, it was this, the lack of a smell, that most appealed to her, perhaps because the other American cities she knew well had all smelled distinctly. 
Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion and Papa flung his heavy missal across the room and broke the figurines on the etagere.
Ma, a mouse has to do what a mouse has to do.
If your teacher has to die, August isn't a bad time of year for it.
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through.
In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.
Nobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years I was fond of them, and believed them to be trustworthy.
No man knew when the Shuttle began its slow and heavy weaving from shore to shore, that it was held and guided by the great hand of Fate. 
While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years.
She would never have fit as neatly into the trunk of his own car.
First the colors.
My father had a face that could stop a clock.
Miss Alexia Tarabotti was not enjoying her evening.
This is the worst story I know about hocuses.
If it had not rained on a certain May morning Valancy Stirling's whole life would have been entirely different.
When the young dark-haired woman stepped into his parlour, Archibald Clare was only mildly intrigued.
"Too many!" James shouted, and slammed the door behind him.
There are so many things which are impossible to explain!
Although I knew nothing of chemistry, I listened fascinated.
Three young creatures, the otter twins Bagg and Runn, accompanied by Grubb, their molefriend, hauled a small beech log between them along the path to Redwall Abbey
"I am glad you came, Clarke; very glad indeed. I was not sure you could spare the time."
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn't sure it was worth the effort.
It was a nice day.
In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.
I warn you that what you're starting to read is full of loose ends and unanswered questions.
"Little Man, would you come on? You keep it up and you're gonna make us late."
The year Janet started at Blackstock College, the Office of Residential Life had spent the summer removing from all the dormitories the old wooden bookcases that, once filled with books, fell over unless wedged.
 Serin pulled Rylek through the growing crowd of people, dodging between oblivious bystanders, moving carts, and the occasional building.
Linderwall was a large kingdom, just east of the Mountains of Morning, where philosophers were highly respected and the number five was fashionable.
I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.
Alive! Still alive. Alive... again.
He remembered much of his stay in the womb.
I slipped into my first metamorphosis so quietly that no one noticed.
Doro discovered the woman by accident when he went to see what was left of one of his seed villages.
Doro's widow in the southern California city of Forsyth had become a prostitute.
The ship had been destroyed five days before.
Rayal had his lead wife, Jansee, with him on that last night.
I had my recurring dream last night. I guess I should have expected it. It comes to me when I struggle--when I twist on my own personal hook and try to pretend that nothing unusual is happening. It comes to me when I try to be my father's daughter.
They'll make a god of her.
It was a second chance for humanity as a whole, and they’d gone and screwed it up from the start by coloring the city gold, of all colors.
My last night of childhood began with a visit home.
When I was fifteen and trying to show my independence by getting careless with my diet, my parents took me to a Duryea-Gode disease ward.
"She wanted you," my uncle said. "She didn't have to have a child, you know. Not even twenty-two years ago."
There was trouble aboard the Washington Boulevard bus.
At work that day, they put her to soldering J9 connectors into a harness, and they expected her to do twice as many as everyone else.
124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom
His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a country boy who had never seen Trantor before.
The escalator crept along slowly, straining upward.
There are dreams that are dreamed for centuries.
¿Encontraría a la Maga? Tantas veces me había bastado asomarme, viniendo por la rue de Seine, al arco que da al Quai de Conti, y apenas la luz de ceniza y olivo que flota sobre el río me dejaba distinguir las formas, ya su silueta delgada se inscribía en el Pont des Arts, a veces andando de un lado a otro, a veces detenida en el pretil de hierro, inclinada sobre el agua.
His followers called Mahasamatman and said he was a god.
I shut the door of the old Victorian behind me, and the stuffy atmosphere closed in: overheated, dry, and redolent of mothballs.
A girl murmured, in a voice that could barely be called a voice, “I’d be better off dead.”
ALTHOUGH IT WAS the weekend, Cryse University on Mars buzzed with activity.
A red van turned off the highway into a scrubby, rock-strewn field and came to a stop.
a set of all possible character strings.
THE FUNERAL BEGAN as the sun climbed above the ring’s horizon.
Lest anyone should suppose that I am a cuckoo’s child, got on the wrong side of the blanket by lusty peasant stock and sold into indenture in a short-fallen season, I may say that I am House-born and reared in the Night Court proper, for all the good it did me.
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday.
"How white the moonlight is tonight!" said Anne Blythe to herself, as she went up the walk of the Wright garden to Diana Wright's front door, where little cherry-blossom petals were coming down on the salty, breeze-stirred air.
How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.
Woodsmoke hung heavy and golden on the shorn wheat, the earth bristling like an old, bald woman.
Szeth-son-son-Vallano, Truthless of Shinovar, wore white on the day he was to kill a king.
MY MOTHER CLAIMED TO have been on the set of Darkness Visible when Axel Kern fired a revolver into the air, not to goad his actors but out of frustration with a scriptgirl who repeatedly handed him the wrong pages.
Dear Charles, Please don’t think I’m running away.
T HE RIDER LEFT THE great sprawl of tents that marked the main camp of the nomad army just as the sun set.
Her earliest memory was of wings.
DORO DISCOVERED THE WOMAN by accident when he went to see what was left of one of his seed villages.
Doro’s widow in the southern California city of Forsyth had become a prostitute.
I had expected Birana to weep.
IT WAS A dumb thing to do but it wasn’t that dumb.
Toward sundown Skeen heard the howls of a saayungka pack and knew the P’jaa were after her.
I was the youngest of three daughters.
It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future.
Seaplane days had always been special for Naluvara.
Manfred's on the road again, making strangers rich.
Absentmindedly, Maria stared the ceiling.
Ten and a half hours before a mounted knight with a machine gun tried to kill her, tech journalist Miriam Beckstein lost her job.
Ninety percent of everything was terrible.
Walking up the wall had not been easy.
On a windy summer day, the light formed everchanging patterns on the forest floor.
His return to consciousness was a slow and painful process.
It was the last day of the semester, and Bella could not have been happier.
Science delivers “Wow!” moments like nothing else on screen.
Cath was a butterfly collector.
A shrieking alarm, echoing through the hallways, awakened Jack and Vladimir from their deep sleep in the space station.
“Captain to the bridge! Captain to the bridge!”
You will criticize me, reader, for writing in a style six hundred years removed from the events I describe, but you came to me for explanation of those days of transformation which left your world the world it is, and since it was the philosophy of the Eighteenth Century, heavy with optimism and ambition, whose abrupt revival birthed the recent revolution, so it is only in the language of the Enlightenment, rich with opinion and sentiment, that those days can be described.
CAN YOU SEE how the pieces fit together? Not just the visible ones, like the towers of the sunset, but those unseen, like the heart of a man or the soul of a wizard.
Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.
Students filled every seat in the University of Oregon’s biology lecture hall.
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
wilford Igoe Jr. wrapped his fingers around the pumpkin-shaped rock, moved it a half inch to the left, then waited to die.
Aleksi could no longer look at the sky without wondering.
He woke before dawn and snuck away from the tents to watch the sun rise, both of them solitary - he and the sun.
A wobbly view of a tiled floor, splattered with vomit.
Cazaril heard the mounted horsemen on the road before he saw them.
Some say that there is nothing in dreams but lies and fables; however, one may have dreams which are not in the least deceitful, but which later bacome clear.
It is almost pleasant, at first, to be Falling.
The incident took place on April 16, 1996, a Tuesday.
Before my wife turned vegetarian, I'd always though of her as completely unremarkable in every way.
Hmm.
Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we?
You ain't gonna like what I have to tell you, but I'm gonna tell you anyway.
One night, Azhrarn Prince of Demons, one of the Lords of Darkness, took on him, for amusement, the shape of a great black eagle.
After Farmer Flint of the Middle Valley died, his widow stayed on at the farmhouse.
I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss.
He was lost when he came to us, and I fear the silver spoons he stole from us didn't save him when he ran away and went up into the high domains.
The first thing I can remember clearly is writing the way into the secret room.
"Don't talk about it," Sallo tells me. "But what if it's going to happen? Like when I saw the snow?" "That's why not to talk about it."
What the hell is up with the moon? I am riveted to the news, which is quite the productivity killer because EVERYTHING HAPPENS SO SLOWLY. I have CNN on right now because they have the best satellite footage, and I swear there was just a five-minute discussion about whether or not something is a dust cloud. Yes, it's a dust cloud! Some fucker is chopping up the moon! You're going to have a certain amount of dust in that circumstance!
The Citadel of Trozien, where the Palace stands, was built by giants before anyone remembers.
It was dolphin weather, when I sailed into Piraeus with my comrades of the Cretan bull ring.
He had been living at the men's co-op (Serpent House) six months now.
This morning on planet Earth, there are one thousand, six hundred, and eighty-six enhanced, gifted, or otherwise-superpowered persons. Of these, one hundred and twenty-six are civilians leading normal lives. Thirty-eight are kept in research facilities funded by the Department of Defense, or foreign equivalents. Two hundred and twenty-six are aquatic, confined to the oceans. Twenty-nine are strictly localized--powerful trees and genii loci, the Great Sphinx, and the Pyramid of Giza. Twenty-five are microscopic (including the Infinitesimal Seven). Three are dogs; four are cats; one is a bird. Six are made of gas. One is a mobile electrical effect, more of a weather pattern than a person. Seventy-seven are alien visitors. Thirty-eight are missing. Forty-one are off-continuity, permanent emigres to Earth's alternate realities and branching timestreams.
Hail to thee, St. Valentine, Prince of Love! Hail to thee on this, thy festive day!
"All right. He's dead. Go ahead and talk to him."
The old ram stands looking down over rockslides, stupidly triumphant.
From a little after two o'clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that - a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.
There's blood dripping down her face and it's getting hard to see.
the second cataclysm began in my eleventh life, in 1996
the circus arrives without warning
 The sunshine of a day in early spring, honey pale and honey sweet, was showering over the red brick buildings of Queenslea College and the grounds about them, throwing through the bare, budding maples and elms, delicate, evasive etchings of gold and brown on the paths, and coaxing into life the daffodils that were peering greenly and perkily up under the windows of the co-eds’ dressing-room. 
Wilford Igoe Jr. wrapped his fingers around the pumpkin-shaped rock, moved it a half inch to the left, then waited to die.
Had Morai given the job to anyone else, the ambush would have gotten me.
Wyvern sacrifices vary a great deal from temple to temple.
I wheeled my bike down Decatur Street and eased deeper into the French Quarter, the bike's engine purring.
Molly and the kids and I were eating a big lunch when the lightning hit.
I rolled over, taking most of the covers with me as I stretched.
The story that follows is one I never intended to commit to paper.
I killed a demon.
Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.
3 May. Bistritz.--Left Munich at 8:35 P.M., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late.
Mr. Hungerton, her father, really was the most tactless person upon earth----a fluffy, feathery, untidy cockatoo of a man, perfectly good-natured, but absolutely centered upon his own silly self.
Gerard woke in a dark place.
The Priestess entered her temple through the inner sanctum and paused for a moment at the edge of her sacred pool.
It was night again.
Funny as it may seem, Martin's grandfather Edelweiss was a Swiss--a robust Swiss with a fluffy mustache, who in the 1860's had been tutor to the children of a St Petersburg landowner named Indrikov, and had married his youngest daughter.
Dawn was coming.
Quentin did a magic trick.
Doctor Clara Bailey crossed her arms and refused to budge.
Not everyone believes in mountains, yet there they are, in plain sight. 
The circus arrives without warning.
A little more than one hundred days into the fortieth year of her confinement, Dajeil Gelian was visited in her lonely tower overlooking the sea by an avatar of the great ship that was her home.
I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.
to wound the autumnal city.
It has fallen upon my shoulders, or perhaps for the sake of honesty I should say that I have taken it upon my shoulders--to organise the recounting of the following tale.
The deep space probe ship Clinton was in trouble.
Isabella: When the cold comes, I think of her.
Ibrahim Hadmani yanked the loose tie and felt a wonderful sense of freedom wash over him as he undid the top two buttons on his shirt.
The pilot pushes the stick forward and the little 'Alouette' helicopter hurtles out of the dawn-lit sky towards the raging North Sea, its tiny airframe buffeted by the strengthening gale.
The galaxy known as Celestine was home to twenty million sentient species, four hundred billion suns and one million inhabitable planets.
I called my mother every Sunday from the silence of my basement apartment, reluctant to tell her how I longed to get away from this freezing cold city where even the traffic sounds were muffled by the snow.
In July my father went to take the waters and left me, with my mother and elder brother, a prey to the blinding white heat of the summer days.
Forty-seven standard years before the harrowing reign of Emperor Palpatine, Bal'demnic was nothing more than an embryonic world in the Outer Rim's Auril sector, populated by reptilian sentients who expressed as little tolerance for outsiders as they did for one another.
June 27, 1850  - six months to look back on - six long, lonely months, since Laura and I last saw each other!
.A month without uploading, he comes back with a tag that no one even tagged him in he's not a challenge to drag, so prepare for an attack and by that I mean cringe cause this motherfucker's bout to get dragged by his fringe.
The very first time I remember you, you are blonde and don’t love me back.
Weidmann appeared before you in a five o'clock edition, his head swathed in white bands, a nun and yet a wounded aviator fallen into the rye, one September day like the one when there came to be known the name of Our Lady of the Flowers.
The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.
Hello there, inhabitant of the third planet away from the Seventh Sun.
Alex Parker was not where she was supposed to be.
Does not interrupt, for what makes her to think in the fresh air, is but a notion of my own intensity, that of distance between passing makes her trotting, quite undenied.
"What in the world are you doing in there?"
Declan grit his teeth, certain he wouldn't survive.
I didn't tell Dad about Granmama's white owl.
To successfully pass through open doors, a man must respect the fact that they have solid frames.
Let the reader be introduced to Lady Carbury, upon whose character and doings much will depend of whatever interest these pages may have, as she sits at her writing-table in her own room in her own house in Welbeck Street.
I was ten years old when Rhonda, my mom, left my dad and me.
All children, except one, grow up.
In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing.
B. "Bunny" Bretterspitt, "Hare" to his friends (sometimes "O'Hare" or "Rabbit Pal") was well liked.
When Patricia was six years old, she found a wounded bird.
The school bell rings, and within moments the muted swelling of voices and chairs erupts out of the classrooms.
Ira was standing before the Banting High bulletin board.
No good phone calls come at seven o’clock in the morning.
People…they do the craziest shit.
It was early June, which in Michigan meant one could almost count on summer being here to stay.
The twin moons cast shadows like blood scores across the sand.
It was night again.
Maia woke with his cousin’s cold fingers digging into his shoulder.
One of the few redeeming facets of instructors, I thought, is that occasionally they can be fooled.
Mouldering bone crumbled beneath their boots as Lord Mardus and Vargil Ashnazai lowered themselves down into the tiny chamber beneath the earthen mound.
The second time I saw my dead aunt Rosaria, she was dancing.
The Oracle closed all four of its eyes.
He was going to die.
Had Eidolon been  anywhere but the hospital, he would have killed the guy pleading for his life before him.
The old are modest, said Phillip.
An elderly lady, wasted and stiff, sat in a garden beside a beautiful young woman whose two children, aged eight and nine, had been kidnapped  eight months earlier.
Twenty-two Americans were touring China.
Lavinia was born laughing.
"They won't be taking blood or anything, will they?" Callie Hayes looked up from the clipboard in her hands to the dimpled youth behind the receptionist's counter.
Somewhere in the world, an unbearable cry pierced the darkness.
Grant Borrows awoke on the ground.
Hand over hand, Oblivion climbed.
Right foot. Left foot. Right foot. Left foot. Stumble.
"Doesn't matter who you are or what you believe. Everybody has a ghost story."
Troy's skin tingled.
The liquid crystal display screen flickered with pale light as the skinny black-haired boy leaned over it, starting up the terminal and seating himself before it.
"The body's here."
When Lilia was four years old, her mother filled a shallow dish with Lilia's blood and fed it to the boars that patrolled the thorn fence.
Rosie glanced down at her buzzing phone.
I was late for my appointment with a dead man.
The grey awful misery tangled round his heart and throat, choking him, sickening him with the vileness of his own nature.
So I didn't come back for my brother's funeral because I had to work and I was newly pregnant and there were reporters and seeing Ricky dead and pieced together by some amateur embalmer-type person would've seriously pushed me over the edge, I know this.
The train pulled into the station; though, it really pushed into the station because the engine was at the hind end.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The boys, s they tlked to the girls from Marcia Blaine School, stood on the far side of their bicycles holding the handlebars, which established a protective fence of bicycle between the sexes, and the impression that at any moment the boys were likely to be away.
In my earliest memory, my grandfather is bald as a stone and he takes me to see the tigers.
I stared at the words on my HUD. It wasn't the point. I knew it wasn't the point. But still... I had to ask.
It was spring in the city of K'aifeng, a late spring in the northern Chinese province of Honan.
The book was thick and black and covered with dust.
The twelve men congregated in the smoking room of the Crown Hotel gave the impression of a prty accidentally met.
The Lunch hour in the coworkers' cafeteria at Frankenberg's had reached its peak.
This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.
At sixty miles per hour, you could pass our farm in a minute, on County Road 686, which ran due north into the T intersection at Cabot Street Road.
Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway.
The old woman remembered a swan she had bought many years ago in Shanghai for a foolish sum.
Meetpoint was in one sense the center of Compact space: in another sense, this place where all the Compact met for trade was the hindside of every species' separate territory, and, along with its cosmopolitan character, it had that chancy watch-your-back kind of feeling on its dockside, even in these days when weapons were discouraged and peace governed the dealings of species.
For a short while during the year I was ten, I thought only people I did not know died.
I am noting down the matters which are in this document because the next life is approaching me swiftly--far from us be the evil thing and may the bad spirit not regard me as a brother!--and also because our likes will never be there again.
I’m so freaking excited I can hardly stand it.
Nothing but stars, scattered across the blackness as though the Creator had smashed the windscreen of his car and hadn't bothered to stop to sweep up the pieces.
When the procession reached the edge of the volcano, the thief abandoned all dignity and began to scream.
Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she'd been told that she would kill her true love.
Binding circles were bad news, my uncle said.
 9 P.M on a November Saturday.
My name is Ted Burger
The night was quiet.
Makenna had to stretch onto her toes to reach the small stone lamp, for the shelf that held it was higher than a grown woman's head, and she was only eleven.
He shouldn't have taken the shortcut.
The sun beat mercilessly down on the concrete launching pads at Mildenhall.
The Flinx was an ethical thief in that he stole only from the crooked.
"Please, Tavi," wheedled the girl in the predawn darkness outside the steadholt's kitchen.
The cold night breeze shifted, blowing stinging smoke from old Teolin's campfire in Mahti's eyes.
Some people would ay it's a bad idea to bring a fire-spider into a public library.
I hope you're reading this, Mark.
Hi, guys.
That's where I am.
Acolytes.
Bobby Pendragon slipped the heavy ring on to his finger, where it belonged.
It began with a battle.
I like to play games.
The future isn't what it used to be.
Yeah.
Early-spring rain lashed against the windowpanes next to Alec's chair adn drummed on the inn's roof slates overhead.
Seregil hadn't been sure what to expect--or rather, he hadn't expected much.
Dying--even for just a little while--took a lot out of a person.
Seregil balanced precariously atop the shard-lined wall, impatiently scanning the shadowy garden below for his misplaced partner.
The sleet-laden wind buffetted Magyana, whipping wet strands free from the wizard's thick white braid as she trudged across the churned ground of the battlefield.
The lean ship smashed through foaming crests, pounding southwest out of Keston toward Skala.
Once, when I was seven, I was chased by a dog.
I'd died six months ago.
People die.
They said if you couldn't tear down Heaven, then you'd have to raise fucking Hell.
"He's gone. Let's call it."
There were three things Wraith did well: hunt, fight, and fuck.
George was impressed, though, he suspected, not as much as he was supposed to be.
The alley was slick with rain and a rainbow-hued slop I didn't want to think about.
Kim walked slowly through the crowd, slipping in and out of the traffic almost without thinking.
Codl rain drizzled in he dark London sreets--at least, it looked cold.
I, Flannery Culp, am playing solitaire even as I finish this.
The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.
I went back to Devon school not long ago, and found it looking oddly newer than when I was a student there fifteen years before.
It was my eleventh birthday.
I take it as a given that no one really likes to see me in my official capacity.
The river flowing sluggishly under Pont de la Concorde was flat and grey, like worn out linoleum.
It was the afternoon before my threading, and stomach butterflies were doing their best to unsettle me.
The worst machine in the universe was a marble-grey box no larger than a coffin or shipping trunk.
I was born in a house with a million rooms, built on a small, airless world in the edge of an empire of light and commerce that the adults called the Golden Hour, for a reason I did not yet grasp.
Mission interrupted.
Punishment saved Sora.
It is necessary to speak of beginnings.
To begin with there was one of us, and now - if the news from Crucible is to be believed - there may soon be one of us again.
Early one evening, Mposi Akinya went to visit his sister.
Her name was Chromis Pasqueflower Bowerbird and she had travelled a long way to make her case.
Thalia Ng felt her weight increasing as the elevator sped down the spoke from the habitat's docking hub.
Dear Newcomer, welcome to the Epsilon Eridany system.
I met Childe in the Monument to the Eighty
Naqi Okpik waited until her sister was safely asleep before she stepped onto the railed balcony that circled the gondola.
There was a razorstorm coming in.
The dead ship was a thing of beauty.
She stands alone at the jetty's end, watching the sky.
We had been riding for two hours when I tugged sharply on the reins to bring my pony to a halt.
My mother had a fondness for poetry.
The call came in to the Department if Hygiene and Public Works just before five in the afternoon.
By the time I reach the road to Zvezdniy Gorodok acute hypothermia is beginning to set in.
Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest.
I was starting out the classroom window and daydreaming of adventure when I spotted the flying saucer.
"I'm going to write a ghost story now," she typed.
The ghoul lady takes out her white linen handkerchief and uses one corner to dab at her watering eye.
The motel room smells like blood and shit and air freshener, the aerosol can sitting empty on top of the television set, and the air in the room still smells like blood.
Andrea lay very still, staring up at the ceiling, what she could see of it by the flickering candlelight.
There is just enough space inside here for one person to live indefinitely, it at least that's what the operation manual says. 
When Patricia was six years old, she found a wounded bird.
Nurse Thornton dropped into the long-term care ward a little before eight with a hot bag of blood for Charlie Manx.
He is fast asleep in his bed on the night that the demon and the once-men come for his family.
Logan Tom had climbed out of the lower levels of the compound and was starting up the steps to the walls when he heard the cries.
Wills walked the empty corridors of Hell, looking for the code.
Black ice coated earth frozen hard by night temperatures that had dropped below freezing, a thin skein of slickness that challenged the grip of his toughened-rawhide boot soles.
Humming tunelessly, the ragpicker walked the barren, empty wasteland in the aftermath of a rainstorm.
She sat alone in her chambers, draped in twilight's shadows and evenings solitude, her thoughts darker than the night descending and heavier than the weight of all Paranor.
Confiscated from me this day, without cause or justice, were five crates and three trunks.
In an iron cage at the crossroads, two dead men were rotting in the summer sun.
Alvin watched as Captain Howard welcomed aboard another group of passengers, a prosperous family with five children and three slaves.
Grey's spoken German was improving by leaps and bounds, but found itself barely equal to the present task.
Standing at the narrow window of his bedchamber early on the morning of the second day of his new life as a captive, looking out at the blood-red waters of the Sea of Barbirike far below, Aithin Furvain heard the bolt that sealed his apartment from the outside being thrown back.
Tharagorn the Ranger was deep in conversation with Elrond Half-elven in the quiet shadows of the Hall of Fire.
When human colonists first settled on Pern, the third planet of the sun Rukbat, in the Sagittarian Sector, they paid little attention to the eccentric orbit of the sister planet they called Red Star.
The wind whipped the trees.
Two Ages ago, the doomed island of Serendair survived one cataclysm, when the burning star that came to be known as the Sleeping Child fell from the sky into the sea, taking much of the coastline, but sparing the middle lands.
If you ask me,' said the little man to Shadow, 'you're something of a monster. Am I right?'
The past is always with us.
When we started for our drive the sun was shining brightly on Munich, and the air was full of the joyousness of early summer.
By what means the papers out of quick which I have made a connected story came into my hands is the last point which the reader will learn from these pages.
I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia.
The village of Maxley, where, last summer and Autumn, these stand strange events took place, lies on a heathery and pine-clad upland of Sussex.
I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago.
We had dined at sunset on the broad roof of the old tower, because it was cooler there during the great heat of summer.
East of Suez, some hold, the direct control of Providence ceases;
Upon a paper attached to the Narrative which follows, Doctor Hesselius has written a rather elaborate note, which he accompanies with a reference to his Essay on the strange subject which the MS. illuminates.
It happened that in the midst of the dissipations attendant upon London wings winter, there appeared at the various parties of the leaders of the ton a nobleman more remarkable for his singularities, than his rank.
The great horn sounded.
It was the night before new moon, during the darkest hours when even that bare sliver had set.
The old man just appeared seemingly out of nowhere.
Sen Dunsidan, Prime Minister of the Federation paused to look back over his shoulder as he reached his sleeping chambers.
"Pen Ohmsford!"
carcely had the Abbey Bell tolled for five minutes, and already was the Church of the Capuchins thronged with Auditors.
Many years before the first appearance of the Swarm, after the Final War, a young man lived in a secure facility in the ruins of Pittsburgh.
It was a dark, blustery afternoon on spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.
Freya woke early and lay for a while in the dark, feeling her city shiver and sway beneath her as its powerful engines sent it skimming across the ice.
They were not railway children to begin with.
On the first Monday of the month of April, 1625, the market town of Meung, in which the author of the Romance of the Rose was born, appeared to be in as perfect a state of revolution as if the Huguenots had just made a second La Rochelle of it.
Stryke couldn't see the ground for corpses.
The Captain of Albinkirk forced himself to stop staring out his narrow, glazed window and do some work.
Her Dothraki scouts had told her how it was, but Dany wanted to see for herself. Ser Jorah Mormont rode with her through a birchwood forest and up a slanting sandstone ridge.
"We should start back," Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them.
In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.
Obscene graffiti, smashed windows.
One minute Nurse Connie Temple had been updating her journal on her little laptop, and the next minute she was gone.
He stood poised on the edge of a sheet of glass.
The little girl's hair caught fire
I had been making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles the day we heard my brother had escaped.
The ship didn't even have a name.
This is the  story of a man who went far away for a long time, just to play a game.
"Tell me, what is hapiness?"
Then, it was as though everything was striped away: sensation, memory, self, even the notion of existence that underlies reality - all seemed to have vanished utterly, their passing marked only by the realisation that they had disappeared, befoe that too ceased to have any meaning, and for an indefinite, infinite instant, there was only the awareness of something; somethingthat possessed no mind, no purpose and no thought, except the knowledge that it was.
I have a story to tell you.
The grass was still wet with the dew from the night before, its thin blades reaching up towards the sky high above.
Deep into the complex city of Noverra a man sat against the wall of his apartment.
The moon was nearing its highest point in the night sky.
No-one could have predicted what happened, a disaster that saw many of the world’s greatest racers either dead or in a coma.
Don't call me a fairy.
He was tossed, fragmented, part of the outward-collapsing whirl of shattered light.
The flotillase of the Dead sailed around the world on underwater rivers.
As I left the Kenya Beanstalk capsule he was right on my heels.
The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory.
Once upon a time when the world was young there was a Martian named Smith.
I woke up in bed with a man and a cat.
The fire pit was about twenty-five feet long by ten feet wide, and perhaps two feet deep.
A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories.
"He's a Mad Scientist and I'm his Beautiful Daughter."
Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tidewater dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Pudget Sound to San Diego.
Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway.
The house stood on a slight rise just on the edge of the village.
The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created.
The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
The history of the Galaxy has got a little muddied, for a number of reasons: partly because those who are trying to keep track of it have got a little muddled, but also because some very muddling things have been happening anyway.
I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more.
I repeat to you, gentlemen, that your inquisition is fruitless.
In a dream Kuraes saw the city in the valley, and the sea-coast beyond, and the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of the harbour toward the distant regions where the sea meets the sky.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror.
Junior at fourteen had grown tall enough to reach the highest cupboard.
They found the body in a tuft of floating forest a half-day's swim from ringsol six.
Castle Kiril was built of flat gray stone, at the edge of a beech and oak forest for which legend was only a matter of time.
Paul Durham opened his eyes, blinking at the room's unexpected brightness, then lazily reached out to place one hand in a patch of sunlight at the edge of the bed.
I was born on a farm on Whileaway.
It was a day like any other day on Isis, and yet, when it was over, nothing would ever be the same again.
It had fled for a long time and was weakening.
Once in his drifting to and fro across Earth, Jesse Nicol found a quivira left over from olden times.
The voices woke her up.
A nightmare runs over again and again in a loop.
Domnall Breich knew the hills around Loch Ness well enough to know himself lost.
My mother thinks I'm dead.
William Jason Tertullius Johnson, the elder son of Philadelphia shipbuilder Silas Johnson, entered Yale College in the fall of 1875.
A light breeze produced a dry rattling sound from some nearby bushes.
This is the story of a man who went far away for a long time, just to play a game.
In his fingers, the glass lay like something trapped, sweating light.
THE GHOST CRUISER HOVERED between Earth and Moon.
SAILS LONG AND WHITE AS swan’s wings carried the ship Farflyer through summer air down the bay from the Armed Cliffs toward Gont Port.
AFTER FARMER FLINT OF THE MIDDLE Valley died, his widow stayed on at the farmhouse.
There was a wall.
A little more than one hundred days into the fortieth year of her confinement, Dajeil Gelian was visited in her lonely tower overlooking the sea by an avatar of the great ship that was her home.
The year Janet started at Blackstock College, the Office of Residential Life had spent the summer removing from all the dormitories the old wooden bookshelves that, once filled with books, fell over unless wedged.
For false gods, they cast long shadows.
The first thing Wyatt thought when he saw the apartment was that it was beautiful.
The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived there alone. She was old and did not know it. She was no longer the color of sea foam but rather the color of freshly fallen snow on a moonlit night.
My first day on the job coincided with the first day of the Haden Walkout, and I'm not going to lie, that was some awkward timing.
"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.
"What you looking at me for?"
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Early in 1880, in spite of a well-founded suspicion as to the advisability of perpetuating that race which has the sanction of the Lord and the disapproval of the people, Hedvig Volkbein--a Viennese woman of great strength and military beauty, lying upon a canopied bed of a rich spectacular crimson, the valance stamped with the bifurcated wings of the House of Hapsburg, the feather coverlet an envelope of satin on which, in massive and tarnished gold threads, stood the Volkbein arms--gave birth, at the age of forty-five, to an only child, a son, seven days after her physician predicted that she would be taken.
Like many fathers, mine could occasionally be prevailed on for a spot of "Airplane."
At the moment, all Halley Edmonds had was a scrap of paper that read “London Airport, Berth C-3” clutched in her hand and a growing desire to just turn around and head straight home, the only problem being that there wasn’t exactly a home to go back to anymore.
There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made.
Persephone stood on the bare mountaintop, her ruffled ivory dress whipping around her legs, her masses of white-blond curls streaming behind her.
Polly cut off her hair in front of the mirror, feeling slightly guilty about not feeling very guilty about doing so.
This is where the gods play games with the lives of men, on a board which is at one and the same time a simple playing area and the whole world.
A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories.
To-day I met a girl of snow.
Beyond the Indian hamlet, upon a forlorn strand, I happened upon a trail of recent footprints
Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette; unsupported-- hanging high above us in the computer chamber; and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern.
In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about has reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.
One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. 
Brrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinng!
A screaming comes across the sky
My father used to carry me down the hall to my room after I came home from the hospital. 
Three children lay on the rocks at the water's edge.
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.
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
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
My mother knew every tale that was ever told by the firesides of Erin, and more besides.
Current theories on the creation of the Universe state that, if it was created at all and didn’t just start, as it were, unofficially, it came into being between ten and twenty thousand million years ago. 
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.
Every summer they came.
SHE WAS BORN a thing and as such would be condemned if she failed to pass the encephalograph test required of all newborn babies.
The conspiracy nuts would have a field day with this one.
There was Rock...and there was >>self<<, the former parting for the latter in the flux of pwerful magnetic fields.
It was early morning and the tiny, arc-brilliant disk of Alya A was just rising above the mountains to the east, setting golden clouds aflame in a silver-and-violet glare that touched the domes and upthrust commo towers of the Imperial base with white flame.
The planet S'rrl orbited normally in its space-time wel antithetical to Earth.
It had been Afterit for all of Lank's twenty years and for uncounted years before he emerged wailing on the atom-raped surface of the earth.
The people of Earth were not expecting guests.
Yesterday, Leah Bishop didn't believe in faeries.
Not normally a sidler, Tock Von nevertheless slyly sidled across the polished cocktail party floor where prowled the wild and the would-be wild.
It was nearing midnight and a glaring summer sun circled in an otherwise empty, arid sky.
The wind blew gently through the lush, tall green grass.
Theo had been climbing since dawn; first on the steep roads and paths and shepp-tracks behind the city, then across slopes of shifting scree, and up at last on to the bare mountainside, keeping where he could to corries and crevices where the blue shadows pooled.
By the time he got there, the hair salon was a smoking hole in the ground.
The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn't sure it was worth the effort. 
Halia knew it would be simple to steal the gems.
The Ellsworths of Long Parkmead had the regard of their neighbours in every respect. 
"You will have only moments," Occultelius had insisted months ago.
The Morris dance is common to all inhabited worlds in the multiverse. 
"Now, Captain," General Bloodworthy exclaimed to his aid Captain Waters, "I think that to honor our new Division Rifle Champion we ought to arrange for a dinner party at the Marriott - in the penthouse restaurant."
Anita Palmer stepped out of the shower and reached for the bath towel.
The van's horn blared loudly in the quiet of the early morning London streets: three short bursts followed by a cheery whistle from the driver.
Elena stepped into the clearing.
The lieutenant awoke to darkness, but was too much of a newbie to know that was wrong.
It was snowing harder now than it was when I woke.
"She's an extraordinarily troublesome girl," the Reverend James Austen said.
The day broke hot for early June.
"Article 1.
In this book, I invite you to join a journey.
Joost had two problems: the moon and his mustache
Today is the first day of November, and so today someone will die.
Standing alone in the vast kitchen of Lockwood Orphanage, Daphne looked through the tall windows and watched the last light abandon the tree-scarred sky.
On a cold January night, a nine-year-old named Gene Avrett walked down the hall toward his little brother's bedroom.
Sam Vimes sighed when he heard the scream, but he finished shaving before he did anything about it. 
The Morris dance is common to all inhabited worlds in the multiverse. 
In a distant and secondhand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part...
The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn't sure it was worth all the effort. 
There was a man and he had eight sons. 
This is a story about magic and where it goes and perhaps more importantly where it comes from and why, all though it doesn't pretend to answer all or any of these questions. 
His foot came down on blood when he slid out of the car at the curb in front of The Hub. 
Nothing but stars, scattered across the blackness as if the Creator had smashed the windscreen of his car and hadn't bothered to stop to sweep up the pieces.
The bees of Death are big and black, they buzz low and somber, they keep their honey in combs of wax as white as altar candles.
It seemed that no matter where Carter tried to go, he always managed to end up at Bryant Park.
Watch...
This is a story about memory.
Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.
It was a moonless night, which was good for the purposes of Solid Jackson.
Against the stars a turtle passes, carrying four elephants on its shell. 
This is where the gods play games with the lives of men, on a board which is at one and the same time a simple playing area and the whole world. 
The rumor spread through the city like wildfire (which had quite often spread through Ankh-Morpork since its citizens had learned the words "fire insurance").
"Hello?"
Strike spotted her: baby fat, baby face, Shanelle or Shanette, fourteen years old maybe, standing there with that queasy smile, trying to work up the nerve.
My desert-island, all-time, top five most memorable split-ups, in chronological order: 1. Alison Ashworth 2. Penny Hardwick 3. Jackie Allen 4. Charlie Nicholson 5. Sarah Kendrew.
When Arno arrived at the schoolhouse with his father the lessons had already started.
Dad always said a person must have a magnificent reason for writing out his or her Life Story and expecting anyone to read it.
My grandfather, the knife fighter, killed two Gemans before he was eighteen
The flotillas of the dead sailed around the world on underwater rivers. 
They lay in the dark, guarding. 
Once upon a time a rather unremarkable composer and music publisher named Anton Diabelli composed a rather unremarkable waltz - simple to hum and easy to remember - which gave him an idea.
It was midnight in Ankh-Morpork's Royal Art Museum.
It is hard to understand nothing, but the multiverse is full of it. 
Now consider the tortoise and the eagle.
In a city called Bakshaan, which was rich enough to make all the other cities of the North East seem poor, in a tall-towered tavern one nicht, Elric, Lord of the smoking ruins of Melnibone, smiled like a shark and dryly jested with four powerful merchant princes whom, in a day or so, he intended to pauperize.
This is where the dragons went. 
Sitting in my study one autumn night, a small fire burning in the grate taking the chill off a room filled with the scents of oncoming winter, I heard a footfall in the hall below.
Corporal Carrot, Ankh-Morpork City Guard (Night Watch), sat down in his nightshirt, took up his pencil, sucked the end for a bit and then wrote: Dearest Mume and Dad.
It was a warm spring night when a fist knocked at the door so hard that the hinges bent. 
They say the world is flat and supported on the back of four elephants who themselves stand on the back of a giant turtle.
The first thing Tak did, he wrote himself.
The goblin experience of the world is the cult or perhaps religion of Unggue.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
  Breathing comes first.
The wind howled.
"Can you swim?" Brady asked.
Daphne Worth hadn't meant to be the first one at the cookout, either.
This is the Discworld, which travels through space on the back of four elephants which themselves stand on the shell of the Great A'Tuin, the sky turtle. 
Each Friday morning, Hafidha brought in two dozen doughnuts. One box contained two plain old-fashioned (Reyes); two sour cream glazed (Falkner); one chocolate dipped and one lemon-filled, no powder (Brady); one blueberry cake (Lau); one glazed and one chocolate-frosted (Worth); and two chocolate crullers (Todd).
When does it start?
The wind howled.
Todd's voice ran measured and clear in Hafidha's phone headset, like a post-grad lecturer.
The woman standing by the crosswalk shoved a flyer at Hafidha
Through the shredded black clouds, a fire moved like a dying star, falling back to earth-- 
Brady returned from his second coffee pilgrimage of the morning and saw Daphne Worth putting a framed 5x7 prominently on her desk, with the air of one who wanted it to be commented on.
Hafidha could feel Stephen Reyes too damned close behind her chair
Hell came for Dyson Cieslewicz on a sunny Tuesday morning in mid-January.
According to the first scroll of Wen the Eternally Surprised, Wen stepped out of the cave where he had received enlightenment and into the dawning light of the first day of the rest of his life. 
Reyes leaned against the doorframe, fiddling with the string of his tea bag.
On an airplane somewhere over Kansas, it occurred to Daphne that she had never seen anyone eat oranges as Esther Falkner did.
Every time he used the key, he thought it was the best kind of commitment.
That Tuesday, Brady didn't get off work until almost eight. 
The room was cold as a skating rink, and smelled faintly of alcohol and corruption.
Nikki Lau took her first dare when she was seven years old.
You aren't supposed to be in Grandma's room when she isn't there. 
It was still overcast and spitting when Brady followed the stretcher out to the lawn.
Brady had been wondering which of them would crack first, and had almost given up on Worth.
"Gah!" Daphne Worth tilted sideways, which was all she had room for, to get her knee out of the soggy spot on the dirt floor of the crawlspace.
As he walked the hall between Shadow Unit and the more public spaces of the BAU, Stephen Reyes pinched the bridge of his nose and slid his fingers hard down the ridge of each eyebrow, trying to push away his headache.
Falkner lay back in the tub, supporting her head on crossed arms.
It was too peaceful out here, surrounded by the vacuum of space and with only the continual hum of the twin ion drives breaking the silence.
It always started with the phone. 
Gliding through the blackness of deep space, the Imperial Star Destroyer Chimaera pointed its mighty arrowhead shape toward the dim star of its target system, three thousandths of a light year away.
 Home Episodes Agents Case Files Resources Message Board Wiki CafePress Store Case Files Teasers & Deleted Scenes  Silver Spring, MD, December 18, 2007  Light still showed under Rebekah's bedroom door.
Daphne Worth watched from the corner of her eye as Todd stood up from his desk behind Chaz's, lunchtime Tupperware and a pair of lacquered chopsticks balanced on his maimed left hand. 
Solomon Todd had been expecting the blank look, the disbelieving eyebrow.
Directly ahead, the star was a marble-sized yellow-orange ball, its intensity moderated by its distance and by the viewports’ automatic sunscreens.
"Yeahwhat?" Dice is still half-asleep, but he's got panic-adrenaline to make up for it.
It was obvious from the moment Brady and Daphne walked through the swinging door that they had been bickering since Baltimore.
Leia Organa had a bad feeling about this.
As they stood in the narrow living room of Todd's townhouse, motion in the fifty gallon tank against the back wall drew Brady's attention.
The house stood on a slight rise just on the edge of the village.
Daphne Worth pushed back her chair, stood up, and marched across the aisle and around Chaz Villette's desk--and Chaz Villette--until she could loom over Sol Todd, both hands on her hips, forehead furrowed with her glower.
"I'm a butterfly!" screamed the fat man as he ran, flapping his arms like two really flabby, really rubbish wings.
Solomon Todd was surveying his desk with such satisfaction that Reyes had to go over and look.
Do not, Nicolette Lau says firmly to herself, think about the smell.
Daniel Brady is lying to his mother.
Ever since that damned call to Frost, Daphne Worth has been wary of suggestions from Nikki Lau.
Chaz remembered Hafidha's comment about speed traps, but only after the lights wobbled red/blue in the rearview mirror of the rented Hyundai.
Tonight I've been thinking about the mosaic Hope gave me the night she U-hauled ass out of Pineville. 
Your name is Felix MacDonald, and you are a worthless piece of shit.
On the night it all began, a full moon hung over Brick Lane, casting everything in a pearly glow. 
The lights hurt my eyes and Mommy is crying and not looking at me. 
One afternoon, when I was eight years old, my class was told to write about what we wanted to be when we grew up. 
"Jesus, Jam, you'd better get up already," says my roommate, DJ Kawabata, an emo girl from Coral Gables, Florida, with "certain food issues," as she put it vaguely. 
I'm lying here in hospital, one arm in plaster, two legs hanging from a frame, and bruises fading in places I'd rather not think about. 
Mr Cartright swung his legs to and fro under the desk, and raised his voice over the waves of bad-tempered muttering. 
Margaret had been discovering all her life that grown-ups were disappointing conversationalists. 
It is a Wonder, really - one of the great Wonders, as William Heelis used to say - how the course of a person's life can be altered, utterly and completely, by a moment so innocent one may not even notice that it has happened. 
I squeeze Abel's hand and he looks at me. 
First the colours. 
Hmm. No, I'm telling this wrong.
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
now is the winter of our discontent made glorious by this son of york; and the clouds that lowered upon our house, in the deep bosom of the ocean buried
This is the story of a bloodstained boy.
The fetch is one of the most feared and least understood figures in Faerie
People's lives - their real lives, as opposed to their simple physical existences - begin at different times.
By the time he graduated from college, John Smith had forgotten all about the bad fall he took on the ice that January day in 1953.
No one - least of all Dr Litchfield - came right out and told Ralph Roberts that his wife was going to die, but there came a time when Ralph understood without needing to be told.
Once, in a kingdom called Delain, there was a King with two sons.
The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years - if it ever did end - began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.
She sits in the corner, trying to draw air out of a room which seemed to have plenty just a few minutes ago and now seems to have none.
Almost everyone thought the man and boy were father and son.
For want of a nail the kingdom was lost - that's how the catechism goes when you boil it down.
Everyone seems to remember with great clarity what they were doing on November 22nd, 1963, at the precise moment they heard President Kennedy was dead.
Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith.
This morning's rain still dripped from the broad leaves of a morning glory tangling through the thicket.
It was a bomber's sky: dry air, wind enough to clear the smoke, cloud broken enough to recognize a few stars.
Three buses moved with almost funereal slowness through the narrow winding country lanes.
Eventually the passenger ejected the tape and tossed it on to the back seat.
Sophie couldn't sleep.
It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills.
The house was on Dresden Avenue in the Oak Knoll section of Pasadena, a big solid cool-looking house with burgundy brick walls, a terra-cotta tile roof, and a white stone trim.
The Treloar Building was, and is, on Olive Street, near Sixth, on the west side.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.
By the time anybody noticed the carrier was overdue, no one cared.
The King's court was in no hurry to return to England, that late autumn of 1120, even though the fighting, somewhat desultory in these last stages, was long over, and the enforced peace sealed by a royal marriage.
It began at the normal daily chapter in the Benedictine monastery of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, of Shrewsbury, on the thirtieth day of July, in the year of Our Lord 1139.
Today you liquidated about fifty thousand Eaters in sector A, and now you are spending an uneasy night.
On this particular morning at the beginning of December, in the year 1138, Brother Cadfael came to chapter in tranquility of mind, prepared to be tolerant even towards the dull, pedestrian reading of Brother Francis, and the long-winded legal haverings of Brother Benedict the sacristan.
Wilfred looked at the cow in his living room.
Look there Kate, down by the promenade.
Brother Cafael was working in the small kitchen garden by the abbot's fish-ponds when the boy was first brought to him.
I was born thirty-five years ago, ina a public house called the Church house, in the town of N-, in the city of M-.
It was early in November of 1139 that the tide of civil war, lately so sluggish and inactive, rose suddenly to sweep over the city of Worcester, wash away half its livestock, property and women, and send all those of its inhabitants who could get away in time scurrying for their lives northwards away from the marauders, to burrow into hiding wherever there was a manor or priory, walled town or castle strong enough to afford them shelter.
As soon as Jomfri stepped out of the screen of the matter transmitter, he realized there had been a terrible mistake.
It began, as the greatest of storms do begin, as a mere tremor in the air, a thread of sound so distant and faint, yet so ominous, that the ear that was sharp enough to catch it instantly pricked and shut out present sounds to strain after it again, and interpret the warning.
The were together in Brother Cadfael's hut in the herbarium, in the afternoon of the twenty-fifth day of May, and the talk was of high matters of state, of kings and empresses, and the unbalanced fortunes that plagued the irreconcilable contenders for thrones.
August came in, that summer of 1141, tawny as a lion and somnolent and purring as a hearthside cat.
On Monday the thirteenth of May in the year 1876, between the hours of two and three in the afternoon, on a day which combined the freshness of spring with the warmth of summer, numerous individuals in Moscow's Alexander Gardens unexpectedly found themselves eyewitnesses to the perpetration of an outrage which flagrantly transgressed the bounds of common decency.
Abbot Radulfus came to chapter, on this first day of December, with a preoccupied and frowning face, and made short work of the various trivialities brought up by his obedientiaries.
Lady Sandrilene fa Toren opened the door to her room and stepped into the dark corridor.
It was on the eighteenth day of October of that year 1142 that Richard Ludel, hereditary tenant of the manor of Eaton, died of a debilitating weakness, left after wounds received at the battle of Lincoln, in the service of King Stephen.
The worst of the winter came early, that year of 1142.
I do not propose to add anything to what has already been written concerning the loss of the lady vain.
In the nineteenth day of June, when the eminent visitor arrived, Brother Cadfael was in the abbot's garden, trimming off dead roses.
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
Saint Peter's fair of that year, 1143, was one week past, and they were settling down again into the ordinary routine of a dry and favourable August, with the corn harvest already being carted into the barns, when Brother Matthew the cellarer first brought into chapter the matter of business he had been discussing for some days during the Fair with the prior of the Augustinian priory of Saint John the Evangelist, at Haughmond, about four miles to the north-east of Shrewsbury.
In the height of a hot summer, in late August of 1144, Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Essex, deferred to the heat of the sun, and made the final, fatal mistake of his long and opportunist career.
The day begins in the middle of the night, I am not paying attention to anything but the bass in my hand, the noise in my ears.
The extraordinary events of that summer of 1144 may properly be said to have begun the previous year, in a tangle of threads both ecclesiastical and secular, a net in which any number of diverse people became enmeshed, clerics, from the archbishop down to Bishop Roger de Clinton's lowliest deacon, and the laity from the princes of North Wales down to the humblest cottager in the trefs of Arfon.
An old blue Ford pulled into the guarded parking lot that morning, looking like a small, tired dog after a hard run.
When Purple got in one of her moods, she never spoke.
At 08:34 precisely General Conrad Pyne's black official Rover 800 stopped outside the ugly wrought iron barrier that guarded the entrance into Downing Street
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
Noon - but the depth of swirling cloud blanked out any suggestion of the sun and made the air chill.
Zakk felt his throat grow tighter, barely able to breathe. 
In order to solve a problem, we first have to identify it.
Jonathan Fier sighed with relief as the wagon rolled past the wooden sign
Let me tell you about when I was a girl, our grandfather says.
The first phrase of my research involved waking up weekday mornings in a barely furnished attic apartment, the first apartment I'd looked at after arriving in Madrid, or letting myself be woken by the noise from La Plaza Santa Ana, failing to assimilate that noise fully into my dream, then putting on the rusty stovetop espresso machine and rolling a spliff while I waited for the coffee.
Turin is where the famous shroud is from, the one showing Christ's body supine after crucifixion: hands folded over genitals, eyes closed, head crowned with thorns.
It was a dumb thing to do but it wasn't that dumb.
The primroses were over.
There was a boy called Odd, and there was nothing strange or unusual about that, not in that time or place.
The buckskin horse walked up Allen Street just before dawn.
It was a nice day.
I sing of arms and the man, he who, exiled by fate,first came from the coast of Troy to Italy, and to Lavinian shores – hurled about endlessly by land and sea, by the will of the gods, by cruel Juno’s remorseless anger, long suffering also in war, until he founded a city and brought his gods to Latium: from that the Latin people came, the lords of Alba Longa, the walls of noble Rome. Muse, tell me the cause: how was she offended in her divinity. how was she grieved, the Queen of Heaven, to drive a man, noted for virtue, to endure such dangers, to face so many trials? Can there be such anger in the minds of the gods?
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
First the colors.
It was the day my grandmother exploded.
Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.
It was a pleasure to burn.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.
It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard
The manhunt extended across more than one hundred light years and eight centuries.
This preface is a preface, which means no one will read it.
I lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of the Bitchun Society, to learn ten languages; to compose three symphonies; to realize my boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World; to see the death of the workplace and of work.
God made everything, but humans keep screwing it up; some Jews move to Egypt, which seemed like a good idea at the time.
It all simply comes down to good guys and bad guys.
They didn't say anything about this in the books, I thought, as the snow blew in through the gaping doorway and settled on my naked back.
Shadow had done three years in prison. 
The Prisoner stopped at the edge of the precipice and gazed out over the land ahead, the trailing edge of his heavy black woolen greatcoat flapping in the stiff wind that screamed out of the glacier valley in front of him. 
No one believed it at first.
Most relationships end in a breakup,
I'm pretty much fucked.
Pawnshops in Night Vale work like this.
In the early 1850s, few pedestrians strolling past the house on H Street in Washington, near the White House, realized that the ancient widow seated by the window, knitting and arranging flowers, was the last surviving link to the glory days of the early republic.
It was a nice day.
Six-twenty A.M. and the sun rises over a dark place.
Two tires fly.
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
The gunslinger came awake from a confused dream which seemed to consist of a single image: that of the Sailor in the Tarot deck from which the main in black had dealt (or purported to deal) the gunslinger's own moaning future.
Time grows short, my love.
This is not for you.
In the dark of waking, a soul has died.
Her name is Melanie. 
There were two hundred and fifty-six places where a man could hide within his own flesh.
Once there was a boy in a house.
 It started at one thirty on a cold Tuesday morning in January when Martin Turner, street performer and, in his own words, apprentice gigolo, tripped over a body in front of the West Portico of St. Paul's at Covent Garden. 
Born of filth, he stood on the river-bed, feet anchored, fully submerged. 
The room was so hot that Leila tried not to move inside her clothing. 
It was at the celebrations on the fourth night before my wedding, that my mother's brother decided he had something important to tell me.
The city is cursed.  No, strike that, the city was cursed.
Here is Santa Claws.  If you look closely, you can see the claws.  This is why he is called Santa Claws.
Uan nibbled her claws, feeling stupid.  Around her sat young Earth people with beautiful, childlike faces. From the way they stared at the ritual-speaker, they carried the cosmos on their shoulders.
I guess that hand of days I was feeling blue.
The little lemming tapped away on its keyboard, ignoring us looking at it.  It glanced up then looked back at the screen.
"I'm not coming back," Hayseed said.  "Unless you agree to stop making those sorts of jokes."
The long kiss I gave Simona was, I suppose, inexcusable.  I could try to excuse it by saying I was full of anaesthetic-induced euphoria; but it doesn't ring true.
The first sign of trouble came a couple of days later.  I had got myself started on a storyline for a new children's adventure game, called The Little Big Kitten and the Big Friendly Cat-Eating Monster, about a little human girl orphan raised by a family of talking cats, who one day meets The Big Friendly Cat-Eating Monster.  Her father.
One evening in autumn, when the deformities of London were veiled in faint blue mist, and its vistas and far-reaching streets seemed splendid, Mr. Charles Salisbury was slowly pacing down Rupert Street, drawing nearer to his favourite restaurant by slow degrees. His eyes were downcast in study of the pavement, and thus it was that as he passed in at the narrow door a man who had come up from the lower end of the street jostled against him.
He was the succ
A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment.
There things happened when I was fourteen years old.
The future is just more of the past waiting to happen.
For a few weeks each summer, the sky over Kyralia cleared ti a harsh blue and the sun beat down relentlessly.
As the ship Gwenna glided through the entrance of Rajmuat harbour, a young woman of seventeen years leaned against the bow rail, taking in her surroundings through hazel-green eyes.
When the cockies spread their wings and float from one branch to another they hang for a moment, like they're caught on an eddy of air.
We were halfway up the spur when we heard it.
Generally John knew better than to go anywhere near New Rochelle.
Once there was a dead man.
The heat of the day is somewhat less underground, but even then it is advisable to travel by night in the furthest reaches of the burnt lands.
I never wanted any of this.
I was on my tippy-toes, bouncing up and down on the first step of the bus, stuck behind my second cousin, Danisha, and her melon-sized butt.
We close at twelve on Saturday,' said the blonde in the estate office. 
He sees me.
There’s an empty parking lot near the corner of Seafarer and Rood where I used to go fight with my wife.
The children were playing while Holston climbed to his death; he could hear them squealing as only happy children do.
Today I dropped my laptop on the concrete floor of a bar built on the beach.
It was a cold clear day in April.
The Primroses were over.
The rule for wishes at the Temple of the Sun is that the petition must be made by the concerned party only.
"There were unexpected difficulties," said the dark gray blur.
The tale is told of a time when Haken Rafi the accursed, the theif, the blackhearted, when this nefarious infidel violated the Temple of the Faith in the fabled city of Ravan and stole the golden jeweled urn of Aeshma from before the Bahram fire itself.
They set a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair.
The first I knew about the civil war was when my sister Aurien poisoned me.
There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.
The tall noncom could have stepped straight out of a recruiting poster.
Prince Rupert rode his unicorn into the Tanglewood, peering balefully through the drizzling rain as he searched half-heartedly for the flea hiding somewhere under his breast plate.
Sometimes I just need to go for a walk.
Three imperial stormtroopers strode into Chilcott's bank on Park Street in Mayfair, brandishing their weapons, 'The Imperial March' playing from concealed speakers somewhere on their person.
This year the Ribeiro's daffodils seeded early and they seeded cockroaches.
How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.
Emilio Armando pushed back his hat and mopped the sweat from his brow.
"The man," said my friend Marty Gilmartin, "is an absolute... a complete... an utter and total..."
The hills rolled up to the moon on slopes of wind-bent grass, crested, swept down into tangled brier shadows.
As Kockroach, an arthropod of the genus Blatella and of the species germanica, awakens one morning from a typically dreamless sleep, he finds himself transformed into some large, vile creature.
I will make a new beginning on this fresh scroll, which the black man has found in the city.
Upon the first day of autumn, that is, the ninth day of the month of the Vallista in the five hundred and thirtysecond year of the reign of His Imperial Majesty, Tortaalik I, of the House of the Phoenix, a messenger arrived at the Imperial Wing of the Palace and begged an audience with the Emperor
It was starting to end, after what seemed most of eternity to me.
I stood there on the beach, and said, "Good-by, Butterfly," and the ship slowly turned, then headed out towards deep water.
I ignored the questions in the eyes of the groom as I lowered the grisly parcel and turned the horse in for care and maintenance.
I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems like when things are going wrong--your wife is ready to leave you, all of your notions about yourself and the world are getting turned around, everything you trusted is becoming questionable--there's nothing like having someone try to kill you to take your mind off your problems.
The Cycle: Dragon, dzur, and chreotha; athyra, hawk, and phoenix; tekla and jhereg.
This was supposed to be a writers' retreat.
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.
Not long after I moved with my family to a small town in New Hampshire I happened upon a path that vanished into a wood on the edge of town.
At first, the new owner pretends he never looked at the living room floor.
Testing, testing.
When they pulled her out, she was not crying at all. 
Nothing in this book is true.
This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old men on a planet which was dying fast.
My name is Howard W. Campbell, Jr.
Despite the murderous nature of the plot he hoped to devise, the thoughts of Scytale, the Tleilaxu Face Dancer, returned again and again to rueful compassion.
The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum!
When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton
It was midnight in Ankh-Morpork's Royal Art Museum.
While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years.
It was a short one-paragraph item in the morning edition.
Before the beginning there was nothing—no earth, no heavens, no stars, no sky: only the mist world, formless and shapeless, and the fire world, always burning.
The horrible conclusion which had been gradually obtruding itself upon my confused and reluctant mind was now an awful certainty.
High up, crowning the grassy summit of a swelling mound whose sides are wooded near the base with gnarled trees of the primeval forest, stands the old chateau of my ancestors.
"In a distant and second-hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part ... See .. Great A'Tuin the turtle comes, swimming slowly through the interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, his huge and ancient shell pocked with meteor craters.
In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative.
I am writing this under appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more.
The Privilege of Reminiscence, however rambling or tiresome, is one generally allow'd to the very aged; indeed, 'tis frequently by means of such Recollections that the obscure occurrences of History, and the lesser Anecdotes of the Great, are transmitted to Posterity.
Into the North window of my chamber glows the pole star with uncanny light.
I grew up yesterday.
Some days the sun is too bright, and some days it's actually bright enough to melt rock.
May they all die in pain, for they are no-good octopi and other cephalopods!
Dear Aissatou, I have received your letter.
I have been destroyed by science before, but never this thoroughly
Alacrity, not money, is the root of all evil.
Splendor is a many-splendored splend.
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
Ilya Ilyich Oblomov was lying in bed one morning in his flat in Gorokhovaya Street in one of those large houses which have as many inhabitants as a country town.
In the Spring of 1966, Lila, in a state of great agitation, entrusted to me a metal box that contained eight notebooks.
Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith.
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. 
The leather-bound volume was nothing remarkable.
We arrived in an undignified heap of witch and vampire.
There are the so-called inert gases in the air we breathe.
I needed a snail, badly — but not just any snail, I needed a snail with graduate degrees in both forensic musicology and theoretical linguistics.
Ghosts didn’t have much substance.
A thousand deadly trolls and a hundred howitzers stood between me and my evening antacid dose, but I was hardly going to let them stop me.
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.
It wasn’t a very likely place for disappearances, at least at first glance.
The first time Caesar approached Cora about running north, she said no.
Roger Wakefield stood in the center of the room, feeling surrounded.
Desperate stragglers arrived late for the molecular biology final examination, their feet wet from tramping through snowbanks and their faces damp from running.
Hau had always loved pokemon for as long as he could remember.
He was dead.
You open your eyes and blink, slowly. 
"You can't hold me forever, you know."
"I still don't think this is a good idea."
In retrospect, you're not sure why you didn't see it sooner.
Young Henry Maximilian Ligre was making his way toward Paris, taking the long journey in short stretches.
The noise of ringing glass cuts through the murmurs of the crowd like a knife.
Forty-five minutes north-east of Cambridge is a landscape I've come to love very much indeed.
 Dave looked away from the computer screen and glared at his kernelsprite once again.
Who is this John claiming to be your friend? And these other friends he mentions?
John looked around his room.
Rose shifted uncomfortably on the tree branch.
When I alighted on the top of a lamppost in the London dusk the rain had reached the deeply unpleasant point of sheeting.
A weak, bluish-white sun sat low in the black sky, behind tenebrous arches that resembled the bones of some ancient behemoth that loomed over a shallow sea the color of dark mercury. 
"Despite the exploration team's best efforts, however, the rare, oddly colored pokemon eluded detection. The rumored red gyarados failed to appear, even fleetingly, to the crestfallen team…" said the TV. 
He was particularly distressed by the scaly appearance of his skin, which he believed was caused by a lizard growing inside his body, the lizard’s skin being evident on his arms and legs.
Pearl settles into her place by the wall.
The sun is setting when Bonnibel first meets Kukui in the flesh, without that badly raised rockruff she'd seen during their video chat.
Someday, a very long time from now, she will reassure a small impossible creature about her life before they met.
On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.
When they'd first met, Jane had looked down on Roxy's drinking habit.
Your advance warning is when an Eridan hits on you.
The boy walked up to the counter wearing a backward hoodie with a bulbasaur glowering out from inside the hood.
Pearl is the first pearl of the Crystal Gems, and she is the last, but at the midpoint there are three.
The baby breathes out.
You aren't sure what you were expecting when you reached the end of your journey.
Sometimes, when Toriel smiles at Frisk, it's impossible to miss the sadness in her eyes.
They have a chance to shatter Pearl early on.
A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over:
He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
The student wouldn't stop doing her homework, and it was going to kill her.
"Does it bother you?" Rose asks.
The pearl spends most of her time thinking.
The eleventh apartment had only one closet, but it did have a sliding glass door that opened onto a small balcony, from which he could see a man sitting across the way, outdoors in only a T-shirt and shorts even though it was October, smoking.
The moment was strange.
"Would you do this please, Koi-san?"
Usually, world-changing moments squeak by with no one paying attention until the instant it's over.
As the Manager of the Performance sits before the curtain on the boards, and, looks in to the Fair, a feeling of profound melancholy comes over him in his survey of the bustling place.
"Damn vermin!"
"Machamp, look," Miki said.
Everything outside was white.
"Will you be my new Master?"
Homura survives Walpurgis Night's coming once.
The thing you have to remember is that it's legal. 
When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.
Fahey was accustomed to disappointment.
Edna and I had started down from Kalispell, heading for Tampa-St. Pete where I still had some friends from the old glory days who wouldn’t turn me in to the police.
"But it wasn't meeeeee-"
A sleek white cat picked its way delicately through the still marsh, leaping occasionally between pockets of dry land.
This is the first thing Vriska remembers:  She's watching as her lusus' mandibles dig into another troll's stomach.
The Inventive Patissiere knows that baking is the most important thing.
The forest had been left empty.
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
She came by way of Archer, Bridgeport, Nanuet, worked off 95 in jeans and a denim jacket, carrying a plastic bag and shower shoes, a phone number, waiting beneath an underpass, the potato chips long gone, lightheaded.
Beyond the outer wall of the room the minds of the birds shifted, first songs of the day approaching half over and the beginnings of fatigue mixed with accomplishment seeping through the wrinkles of their minds like a drop of water spreading through the fibers of a scrap of paper bit by bit. 
They'd finally finished preparations for the raft, and Sora wasn't thinking about his dream any longer, not with the excitement of leaving and the twisting confusion over Kairi's words - let's take the raft and go – just the two of us!
You wake up in a room.
There are 2,556,596 faggots in the New York City area.
The annual meeting of ponyta proceeded in its usual fashion, which is to say it rapidly degenerated to a confused shouting match.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
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.
We begin where else but with my mother, Regina Deutsch, second to Pauline, the eldest, each of five girls domiciled, in the course of fatherless years and, as a practical matter, shortly thereafter, motherless ones too, in an orphanage operated for Hebrew youth, in Astoria, New York, and who (Mother! Mother!–that's who) was also, to my mind, morally speaking, I mean, second to the least interesting of the Deutsch girls—which luckless child would be Sylvia, and, as was also so, the youngest of these involuntarily abandoned children, all born here, in the United States, when events in Vienna had given their progenitors sufficient notice such people (Jews, the Jews) would be wise to clear out at all good speed.
In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.
The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended.
During these fleeting, drifting days of late autumn I recall with special fondness the paths on that little beach at the close of the season, suddenly strangely overwhelmed by silence.
Not very far from Upton-on-Severn-between it, in fact, and the Malvern Hills-stands the country seat of the Gordons of Bramleys; well-timbered, well-cottaged, well-fenced and well-watered, having in this latter respect, a stream that forks in exactly the right position to feed two large lakes in the grounds.
I used to work in a mirror store.
The freezing rain sifts down, handfuls of shining rice thrown by some unseen celebrant.
Reynolds bustles into the living room, carrying two pillows.
Every morning at breakfast Jorrie reads the obituaries in all three of the papers.
What could be done with me, what should be done with me?
The next thing is that his car won't start.
"I had a dream about Zenia last night," says Charis.
The Dead Hand Loves You started as a joke.
At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone.
The little people are climbing up the nightstand.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
If all the Saturdays of 1982 can be thought of as one day, I met Tracey at ten a.m. on that Saturday, walking through the sandy gravel of a churchyard, each holding our mother's hand.
The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats.
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
Dear Halford, When we were together last, you gave me a very particular and interesting account of the most remarkable occurrences of your early life, previous to our acquaintance; and then you requested a return of confidence from me.
On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology.
My godmother lived in a handsome house in the clean and ancient town of Bretton.
Tim already had his bag and overcoat on and his keys in his hand and was about to leave when Diane stopped him at the door.
"Nottingham has enough pubs and clubs", say the local police.
The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. 
There are moments of great luxury in the life of a secret agent. 
The two thirty-eights roared simultaneously.
With its two fighting claws held forward like a wrestler's arms the big pandinus scorpion emerged with a dry rustle from the finger-sized hole under the rock.
The naked man who lay splayed out on his face beside the swimming pool might have been dead.
Punctually at six o'clock the sun set with a last yellow flash behind the Blue Mountains, a wave of violet shadow poured down Richmond Road, and the crickets and tree frogs in the fine gardens began to zing and tinkle.
James Bond, with two double bourbons inside him, sat in the final departure lounge of Miami Airport and thought about life and death.
The eyes behind the wide black rubber goggles were cold as flint. 
The most beautiful bird in Jamaica, and some say the most beautiful bird in the world, is the streamer-tail or doctor humming-bird. 
James Bond said: 'I've always thought that if I ever married I would marry an air hostess.'
The sting-ray was about six feet from wing-tip to wing-tip, and perhaps ten feet long from the blunt wedge of its nose to the end of its deadly tail. 
I was running away. 
The geisha called "Trembling Leaf," on her knees beside James Bond, leant forward from the waist and kissed him chastely on the right cheek.
Most motor-cars are conglomerations (this is a long word for bundles) of steel and wire and rubber and plastic, and electricity and oil and petrol and water, and the toffee papers you pushed down the crack in the back seat last Sunday. 
Hetherwick had dined that evening with friends who lived in Cadogan Gardens, and had stayed so late in conversation with his host that midnight had come before he left and set out for his bachelor chambers in the Temple; it was, indeed, by the fraction of a second that he caught the last east-bound train at Sloane Square.
West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. 
When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean’s Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country.
It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to shew by this statement that I am not his murderer. 
In a vast room hung with strangely figured arras and carpeted with Bokhara rugs of impressive age and workmanship four men were sitting around a document-strown table. 
Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at the end. 
During the winter of 1927–28 officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth. 
I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. 
I had been pulled into the future first, ahead of my companion.
Everybody agreed that Nana Coldharp, well up in her eighties now, was at last clearly too old to manage the family Thanksgiving get-together anymore, so this year her late-in-life daughter Hibiscus, known as Biscuit, was to be in charge.
In a dry trench about twelve klicks west of Denver, Private Melissa MacKay—originally from Hotchkiss, Colorado—rummaged through her battle pack, looking for some paperwork.
The mystery would never be solved. 
They called him "the Blue Jinn."
I drove into Goldport, Colorado at sunset, with the mountains in front of me and the sky a welter of red and gold behind them.
Many years ago, I contracted an intimacy with a Mr. William Legrand.
The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.
The space hero came out of the old Soyuz docking ring in a flight suit that looked so new you could have cut titanium with the creases.
"No, no, no!" Dan Colton shouted, slamming the thruster control on his EMU backpack fully forward.
In retrospect, the most amazing thing is that Watson confided the story to me at all.
I have mentioned before the three massive manuscript volumes that contain my notes on our cases for the year 1894.
It was a nice day.
People who knew Chester and Serena Wolcot socially would have placed money on the udea that the couple would never choose to have any children
Rain fell steadily, drumming on the hard black Thunderpath that led between unending rows of stone Twoleg nests.
Watery shafts of light sliced through thd bare trees as Fireheary carried his leader to her final resting place.
"Hey, Fuan, how about some fun?"
Once upon a foggy day in a cold, cold country long, long ago, seven small Viking boats floated through the Sea-Known-as-Woden's-Bathtub.
It was one of those days so blue and sunny that you had to be flying. 
The first time Winter disapointed his family, he was two years old. 
A silvery white dragon poked her head around the door, tapping three times lightly on the ice wall.
Fathom had never thought of himself as anyone special, and he certainly wasn't expecting that to change the day of the animus test.
In the year 1815 Monseigneur Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of Digne.
The stench was unbelievable.
I hope I'm getting extra credit for this.
Yeah, I know.
I has just come to accept that my life would be ordinary wjem extraordinary things began to happen.
I spent the last afternoon of Before constructing a 1/10,000-scale replica of the Empire Stare Building from boxes of adult diapers.
A half-moon glowed on smooth granite boulders, turning them silver. 
It was very dark.
The woman bore a scorch mark from her chin to her brow.
Enna let the fire burn out.
At sixteen, Alaric and Naia were as alike as any two people of opposite sexes can be.
A dragon was trying to hide in the storm.
Clay didn't think he was the right dragon for a Big Heroic Destiny.
An agonized groan echoed across the moon-bleached floor of a forest clearing.
Warm shafts of sunlighf streamed through the canopy of leaves and flickered over Fireheart's pelt.
Lief, Barda, and Jasmine walked through the crisp, bright morning.
Brendan Walker knew the house was going to be terrible.
Inside the lennel-that-moves, everything was dark.
Fireheart's fur bristled with disbelief and fury as he gazed up at the new leader of Shadowclan standing on the Great Rock.
Sophie had waited all her life to be kidnapped.
There is one mirror in my house.
I wake with his name in my mouth.
I pace in our cell in Erudite headquarters, her words echoing in my mind: My name will be Edith Prior, and there is much I am happy to forget.
First the colors.
That last time. 
She's taking a moment to rest from the pitched battle, busily inspecting the polished maybe-metal-maybe-magic ovoid now bolted to her back, when the Incubator hops up onto the dashboard of her ship (her very own *spaceship*!) and does the telepathic equivalent of opening its mouth to speak.
Below the serpents, the beds of weeds swayed gently in the changing tide.
So that's me.
SPARTAN-104, Frederic, twirled a combat knife, his fingers nimble despite the bulky MJOLNIR combat armor that encased his body.
You have to see the funny side of things in the army.
We're fucked now.
"I was there," said Titus Cassar, his wavering voice barely reaching the back of the chamber.
Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest.
It became their motto, and Jonesy couldn't for the life of him remember which of them started saying it first.
Even before the boat came through the reef, Mirissa could tell that Brant was angry.
Inchmale hailed a cab for her, the kind that had always been black, when she'd first known this city.
My best friend is my rifle, my bosom companion is my palamino stallion, my buddy is my six-shooter — but my sweetheart is my 6.25-inch omelette pan, and death to the man who forgets that or steps between us two.
First the colors.
There is one mirror in my house.
I must depiliate, or I shall surely die!
My scansion is a matter of legend in my home land; yet my flatulence even more so.
The Western American Explorers' Club, in the city of San Francisco, was honored as it had never been honored before in the first week of October 1883 by being promised to be first to hear the details of an unexplained, extraordinary adventure; the biggest news story of the year, the story the whole world was waiting impatiently to hear- the tale of Professor William Waterman Sherman's singular voyage.
There was a harsh gale blowing on the night Yarvi learned he was a king.
He hesitated just an instant, but long enough for Thorn to club him in the balls with the rim of her shield.
Past and future. Then and now. Temporal anchors. Intellectual conceits, they allowed a farseer to cling to the present.
Barely worthy of being designated a planet, the doomed world hung in the fringes of Arcturus Ultra's rapidly diminishing Kuiper belt at the farthest extent of the star system.
How did the Lion die?
It was Felling Night, and the usual crowd had gathered at the Waystone Inn.
Ravens! Always the ravens.
Open the box, Jorg.
It’s a warship all right. Damn!
Athel the Grinner wasn't grinning.
The harbour was called the White Landing, though in the darkness it looked black.
He had been functioning in a strange, twilight world for months.
A boy ran down a hill path screaming.
The still desert air had a lenselike quality.
"Yes!" shrieked Salem Rews, quartermaster of his August Majesty's First Regiment.
When Shev arrived to open up that morning, there were a pair of big, dirty, bare feet sticking out of the doorway of her Smoke House.
Craw chewed the hard skin around his nails, just like he always did.
"Maybe we should skip town." said Javre.
Temple ran.
"This is hell," muttered Shev, peering over the brink of the canyon.
Canto Silvine finished his morning slice of bread and honey, licked his finger, used it to sweep up the crumbs from the plate, and smiled as he sucked it clean.
Shy gave the horse her heels, its forelegs buckled and, before she had a notion what was happening, she and her saddle had bid each other a sad farewell.
Tinder stood in his doorway, and watched the Union ruin his crop.
Shev propped her elbows on the parapet, shoulders hunched around her ears and her fingers dangling, and gave a soft whistle.
What can my unworthy pen set down upon the subject of that great heart, that good friend, that magnificent presence, that dauntless explorer, proud statesman, peerless swordsman, accomplished lover, occasional sea captain, amateur sculptor of renown, noted connoisseur, champion short-distance swimmer and warrior poet, the famous soldier of fortune, Nicomo Cosca?
"What's peace, Father?"
Damn, but she hated Sipani.
My name is Thrall.
Khadgar clutched the crimson-sealed letter of introduction and desperately tried to remember his own name.
He woke up scarec.
Dawn, and fog still shrouded the world.
"Throw down!"
One minute before the explosion, the square at Sainte-Cecile was at peace.
Veradis fell through the night air, weightless.
He waited.
Hwa wondered if today was the day she would finally get to finish that sorry son of a bitch once and for all.
The realm of Scarlet was full of beautiful green pastures and lush forests.
Parsifal is dead.
A sharp wind slapped the sodden hem against my ankles
Sleeping in a car is cramped.
As the story begins, Snowman is living in a tree by the seashore.
One evening in Toronto, the gods Apollo and Herme were at the Wheat Sheaf Tavern.
Right before my fifteenth birthday, my dad, Jules, and I moved into a two-room apartment in a building that we called the Ostrich Hotel.
The plane had yet to take off, but Osgood, the photographer, was already snoring softly.
Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree
Before the beginning there was nothing—no earth, no heavens, no stars, no sky: only the mist world, formless and shapeless, and the fire world, always burning.
Shadow had done three years in prison.
Sam Vimes sighed when he heard the scream, but he finished shaving before he did anything about it'
Nothing but stars, scattered across the blackness as though the Creator had smashed the windscreen of his car and hadn't bothered to stop to sweep up the pieces
It was the day my grandmother exploded
I came to Comala because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Páramo, lived there. 
So here's the file that almost killed me, Director.
Is it that difficult to believe?
Marghe's suit was still open at the neck and wrist, and the helmet rested on the crook of her left arm.
The night before he went to London, Richard Mayhew was not enjoying himself.
 After Slitscan, Laney Heard about another job from Rydell, the night security man at the Chateau.
My nightmare started like this.
Schwartz didn't notice the kid during the game.
They came down to the emergency ward at noon and sat on the bench just behind the swinging doors that led in from the ambulance parking slot.
It was the evening of what would later be called the Great Storm of '93, and Arthur Archibald Shaw sat at his usual desk in the Reading Room of the British Museum, yawning and toying with his pen.
The sun sizzled red in the sky as the front gate to the compound hissed open. 
I call our world Flatland, not because we cal it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.
I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.
At 19.00 hours, ship's time, I made my way to the launching bay.
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.
That was when I saw the Pendulum.
One day Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could create anything starting with n.
Aeneas Tell of House of Tell, youngest of the Lords of Creation, was twenty-one when he was assassinated for the first time.
He shouldn't have taken the shortcut.
Five hundred years before the first colony ship landed on Venus, an asteroid which had been expanded into a fat nickel-iron balloon impacted with the upper Venerian atmosphere.
In the forest, a sparrow died.
What I saw that night defied belief, but believe it I had to because I trusted my eyes. 
Kefiristan is about as close as you can come to hell on Earth. 
Ian Kelliher walked up to what looked to be an enormous portal, the steel plates sealed tight. 
When he heard the sirens and understood their meaning, Jarl knew he was going to die.
“Colonel, riders coming.”
The chatter and gaiety of the feast had been stilled, and although the candles still burned brightly, fear and apprehension darkened the Great Hall of Castle Glaun.
The hotel had been evacuated since the government had collapsed and revolution had spilled over the countryside, but the lobby still stank of stale cigarette smoke and sweat.
Mendez, the newest guy in the squad, had been jumpy ever since the worsening solar weather updates started coming in.
Of course I shall not pretend to consider it any matter for wonder, that the extraordinary case of M. Valdemar has excited discussion.
During the autumn of 18--, while on a tour through the extreme southern provinces of France, my route led me within a few miles of a certain Maison de Sante or private mad-house, about which I had heard much in Paris from my medical friends.
"Dear God, I'm going to die," muttered Joe Buckley, as the SUV bounced from one rutted pothole to another.
I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia.
The music all that morning had been of the militant type that had dominated the airwaves for the past few weeks; but to the discerning ear there was a grim undertone to it that hadn't been there since the very start of the alien invasion.
The July night sprawled, warm and deep blue over Goldport, Colorado.
The fifteen-thousand-ton asteroid had been named, in the deepness of time when men still did such things, AE-513-49.
The Taiwanese captain bowed quickly when his temporary commander—USSF Admiral Nolan Corcoran—rounded the corner.
"Why do I have to go with her?" Theo demanded, and winced at the quaver in her voice.
Once upon a time, in the state of Mississippi, there dwelt an elf princess.
Sergeant Second Class Kendra Pacelli, UNPF, was looking forward to finally finishing the admin from her deployment to Mtali.
The Moon in Splendor was full that night.
“Wait! I have cookies!" Dugan yelped in fear.
One didn't have to be involved in a war to suffer, nor even in line of fire.
Sue Fisher tried to force herself to stay awake. 
Early September; the air crisping up, and the sea getting feisty.
I knew the boy was going to be trouble the moment he walked into the tavern.
"How many worlds does this make?"
The assassin came in and ordered waffles.
The 4.15 from Victoria to Lewes had been held up at Three Bridges in consequence of a derailment and, though John Lexman was fortunate enough to catch a belated connection to Beston Tracey, the wagonette which was the sole communication between the village and the outside world had gone.
The man who was not Terrence O'Grady had come quietly.
Horror and fatality have been stalking abroad in all ages. 
I never knew anyone so keenly alive to a joke as the king was.
The "Red Death" had long devastated the country.
The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis.
The year 1647 was that wonderful year in which manifold signs in the heavens and on the earth announced misfortunes of some kind and unusual events.
No one expected significant consequences from the Battle of Arsia Mons on Mars.
Bishop Thomas Cranberry was having what was easily the most spiritually challenging week of his life. 
Ronald Standish lay back in his chair with a worried look on his usually cheerful face.
Mr. Blingham, and may he fry in his own cooking-oil, was assistant treasurer of the Flaver-Saver Company.
Dominating twice a hundred square miles of campus, parade-ground, airport, and space-port, a ninety-story edifice of chromium and glass sparkled dazzlingly in the bright sunlight of a June morning.
The solemn tones of an old cathedral clock have announced midnight—the air is thick and heavy—a strange, death like stillness pervades all nature.
So much happened in the two years that I spent at the Admiralty, I had a finger in so many pies, that I have found it difficult to say exactly when it was that this thing began.
"I am inclined to think—" said I.
It was near the close of a hot, sultry day in midsummer, which I had spent in exploring a part of the shore line of the lake where I was camping, and the tortuous inlet which led into the same; and wearied with the trip I had made I was returning toward the camp.
My dad had problems, and that's the only reason my sister and I are still alive. 
It is a warm evening in early Summer; the sun is setting behind a long range of fir and yew-clad hills, at the feet of which twists in and out, as it follows their curves, a placid, peaceful river. 
Blood and scales hit the floor, torn from Ray's ragged cheeks. 
Herbert Zulerich was a big, heavy-framed man with a tangled mop of shaggy hair which lay back from his sloping forehead and clustered about the collar of his dark coat.
Of my country and of my family I have little to say.
Sunset Boulevard was a blur of lights and noise, too many radios and car stereos, too many people talking and shouting and laughing.
Harry Hockenheimer was depressed. 
When I was some fifteen years old, I once made the remark, "Why, that's impossible."
The aristocracy of Zenith were dancing at the Kennepoose Canoe Club.
"Good morning," the small, quavering voice comes from the medical bed.
Captain Gursh of the fifth division patrol slowed his fighter down as the prison station came into view. 
In retrospect, I set the stage for the disaster because I couldn't stop mouthing off to my big brother. 
Gilberec Parzival Moth woke up, startled, when a large black raven landed on his chest at midnight. 
I woke up when my gun jumped into my hand. 
I, Adolf Hitler, am in Hell, the place to which the victors assign their dead opponents. 
The freakish little leader of the orchestra, newly imported from Sicily to New York, tossed his conductor's wand excitedly through the air, drowning with musical thunders the hum of conversation and the clatter of plates.
Trevorrick River was but a little stream to have fretted so deep a cleft between the hills as that which sloped from the main road of Tregols parish to the sea. 
There must have been a dozen guests applying for rooms at the Hôtel de France et Chine.
Kleon stood on the edge of the jungle, stared out at the bright-blue bay.
The Piper Aztec flew out of the clouds, and the jagged green mass of Elephant Island appeared beneath the nose, dead ahead. 
I was sick -- sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me.
It was well said of a certain German book that "er lasst sich nicht lesen" --it does not permit itself to be read.
Hidden in the grass, the hare froze as the shadow passed over it.
At Paris, just after dark one gusty evening in the autumn of 18--, I was enjoying the twofold luxury of meditation and a meerschaum, in company with my friend C. Auguste Dupin, in his little back library, or book-closet, au troisieme, No. 33, Rue Dunot, Faubourg St. Germain.
Two thousand million or so years ago, at the time of the Coalescence, when the First and Second Galaxies were passing through each other and when myriads of planets were coming into existence where only a handful had existed before, two races of beings were already old; so old that each had behind it many millions of years of recorded history.
"Off there to the right—somewhere—is a large island," said Whitney.
"Applied science," said the Professor, "is always incredible to the vulgar mind."
Toward the end of the year 1920 the Government of the United States had practically completed the programme, adopted during the last months of President Winthrop's administration.
Slow yellow river flowing, willows that gesture in tepid August airs, and four children playing at greatness, as, doubtless, great men themselves must play.
The rocketship of Harg zoomed swiftly along.
Moon Station 2X hummed with activity.
"Do you know, Nell," said Stas Tarkowski to his friend, a little English girl, "that yesterday the police came and arrested the wife of Smain, the overseer, and her three children, — that Fatma who several times called at the office to see your father and mine." 
In Tynets, at the Savage Bull, an inn which belonged to the monastery, were sitting a number of persons, listening to the tales of a veteran warrior, who had come from distant parts, and was relating adventures through which he had passed in war and on the road.
Behold, how vain are human hopes before the order of the world; behold, how vain they are before the decrees that have been written in fiery signs upon the heavens by the Eternal!...
In Tynets, at the Savage Bull, an inn which belonged to the monastery, were sitting a number of persons, listening to the tales of a veteran warrior, who had come from distant parts, and was relating adventures through which he had passed in war and on the road.
The rustic portion of the congregation shouted the familiar hymn with laborious goodwill, overpowering the more cultivated voices that rose from the chancel and the front pews—almost defeating the harsh notes wrung from the harmonium by the village schoolmistress, who also led the singing in a piercing key, supported raucously by her pupils gathered about the unmusical instrument.
Commander James Driscoll, attached to the Intelligence branch of the United States Navy, has asked me to write this, in order that my version may be placed in the files with his own account of certain peculiar transactions which took place in Japan and China some months ago.
I often like to think that the entire sequence of events of the afternoon and evening, which I am now trying to set down, tend to prove a theory to which I used to be partial.
It was early autumn, and the woods were just beginning to take to themselves the variegated colors which make our northern forests a wonder to foreigners and an annual delight to those who live within sight of their glorious changes, when two men might have been seen forcing their way through the underbrush of a tamarack swamp, which divided two small lakes near the centre of the wilderness.
The man in the corner pushed aside his glass, and leant across the table.
In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army. 
Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case.
The sharp snip of the golden scissors preluded the roar of the applause.
When the glass shattered, many things happened.
The birds sat chirping, their squeaks and squawks lifting on the still air of the cool afternoon.
"Four-hundred and thirty five errors."
He awoke, as he always had, before the alarm even began to go off.
Falling dreams are supposed to be nightmares.
Dry, ancient grave-soil fell from the bucket of the Kubota Mini-Excavator.
The long steel finger of the subway stabbed into the station. 
Out of the gravel there are peonies growing. 
I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopaedia
To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.
The Salinas Valley is in Northern California.
There are still the flowers to buy.
On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor.
In my grandmother's dining room there was a glass-fronted cabinet and in the cabinet a piece of skin.
We are the rubbish, outmoded and unrequired.
At the sunset hour of one warm spring day two men were to be sseen at Patriarch's Ponds.
If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
What made me take this trip to Africa?
The neighbours - there were in all six white people who lived at Sego Desert Lake - told one another that old Hattie could no longer make it alone.
It was a thoughtful day for Dr Braun.
My name is George Smith.
My Dear Wormwood, I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend.
We had succeeded, my friend B. and I, in dispensing with almost three of our six months' engagement as Contucteurs Volontares, Section Sanitaire Vingt-et-Unm Ambulance Norton Harjes, Crouix Rouge Americaine, and at the Moment which subsequent experience served to capitalize had just finished the unlovely job of cleansing and greasing (nettoyer is the proper word) the own private flivver of the chef de section, a gentleman by the convenient name of Mr. A.
Granted: I am the 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.
"Nunc et in hora, mortis nostrae. Amen"
A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over: "Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi!"
When it rains the women stay in the summer-house.
As usual, at five-o'clock theat morning reveille was sounded by the blows of a hammer on a length of rail hanging up near the staff quarters.
If there was a bishop, my mother would have him to tea.
She was sleeping with the enemy. 
We have been lost to each other for so long. 
I could not see the street or much of the estate.
Maia woke with his cousin's cold fingers digging into his shoulder.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
"My God!," said the Duchess, "I'm pregnant again! I wonder who did it *this* time!"
Brilars’ Vanja Essre Two, information assistant with the Essre Hygiene Specialists, was the only passenger on the auto train bound for Amatka. 
J. Malachi MacCool was born in Berkeley, California, in the last decade of the Cold War, to parents who deserved better.  
New York always brings out the serial killer in me.  
If you’re reading this on a screen, fuck off. 
Ballard and Jenkins rolled up on the house on El Centro shortly before midnight. 
the night was clere though i slept i seen it. 
After Five Dynasties’ turmoil and strife, The clouds dispersed and revealed the sky, Refreshing rain brought old trees new life, Culture and learning once again were high.  
She has often suspected that her last words to herself and in this world will prove to be ‘You bloody old fool’ or, perhaps, depending on the mood of the day or the time of the night, ‘you fucking idiot’.  
The quiet was painful.
Once upon a time, a girl named September grew very tired indeed of her parents' house, where she washed the same pink-and-yellow teacups and matching gravy boats every day, slept on the same embroidered pillow, and played with the same small and amiable dog.
Weaving her way slowly through the stacks of the Merlin Library with an armload of histories and grimoires, her chin resting on the dull-green leather of the topmost, Sophie Marshall smiled to herself.
Bill Dillon turned up the collar of his tweed overcoat and thrust his hands deeper into his pockets. 
Bramble woke with Merit's hand on her forehead. 
Sunlight picked out motes of dust, and burnished mellow wood to match Arianne Seaforth's hair as she strolled through the Southern Nomarch's library.
"I'm here for my room assignment, please," Jahir said. 
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression "as pretty as an airport".
South of base camp, a daisy-clipper skimmed through the flash wood, buffeting the undergrowth into a brilliant display of light. 
Sir Adam Braid rose stiffly from his comfortable seat by the fire and hobbled across the room to the massive bureau which stood across the opposite wall, well outside the radius of the heat from the glowing, heaped-up coals.
According to all known laws of aviation, a bee should not be able to fly.
"Death," the proprietor said clearly, showing the stone.
The marsh stank, with a sharp, briny stench that seemed to fill Valder's head.
"How utterly delightful!" exclaimed Richelieu.
The course of history is determined not by battles, by sieges, or usurpations, but by the actions of the individual.
Lost in the shadows of the shelves, I almost fall off the ladder.
Quentin did a magic trick. Nobody noticed.
The world begins anew, starting now.
Shadow had done three years in prison.
Camille had either been the world's most powerful hurricane or the largest tornado in history.
Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.
They were not railway children to begin with.
It's a funny thing about mothers and fathers.
It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened.
Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away.
Phoebe Gray sang along lustily with the rest of the retuning campers, but her face was pressed against the window.
Up until October of last year my mother had two hobbies: major league baseball and my brother, Spencer.
In the Year of the Dog, 4645, there lived halfway across the world from New York a girl called Sixth Cousin.
The Fossil sisters lived in the Cromwell Road.
On one otherwise normal Tuesday evening I had the chance to live the American dream.
Martha Abbogt woke up on the seventh day of April and sat straight up in bed with her eyes wide open.
Lexie Nielsen flopped backward onto her pillow and used both hands to hoist her right foot up in front of her face.
I remember the day the Aleut ship came to our island.
On the night that Ronia was born a thunderstorm was raging over the mountains, such a storm that all the goblinfolk in Matt's Forest crept back in terror to their holes and hiding places.
Not long ago in a large university town in California, on a street called Orchard Avenue, a strange old man ran a dusty, shabby store.
A little boy was sitting in the corner of a railway carriage looking out at the rain, which was splashing against the windows and blotching downward in an ugly, dirty way.
I saw him for the first time at the funeral.
In Mr. Kaplan's studio is a needlepoint pillow, on a chair.
The only difference between the school Mama picked out for me and The Girls' Reformatory was tuition.
It's raining, Annie.
It's been a long time since I've played with dolls.
I've done the thing where I'm awake but haven't yet opened my eyes.
The Ellsworths of Long Parkmead had the regard of their neighbors in every respect.
There are few things in this world that can simultaneously delight and dismay in the same manner as a formal dinner party.
Women on their own run in Alice's family.
A distant bell tolled.
I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign.
Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.
They say the ruins of Sedraxis were once a shining capital in Vithia. Now it is a blight, a place to be avoided by the living.
Clare: It's hard being left behind.
Pat stood before the door at the bottom of the stair, reading the names underneath the buttons.
To take an interest in the affairs of others is entirely natural; so natural, in fact, that even a cat, lying cat-napping on top of a wall, will watch with half an eye the people walking by below.
My mother did not tell me they were coming.
In 1902 Father built a house at the crest of the Broadview Avenue hill in New Rochelle, New York.
Susan Scott is a wonder.
It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed.
Enoch rounds the corner just as the executioner raises the noose above the woman's head.
He was not merely awakened, but detonated out of an uncommonly long and repetitive dream.
"Men half your age and double your weight have been slain on these wastes by Extremity of Cold," said the Earl of Lostwithiel, Lord Warden of the Stannaries, and Rider of the Forest and Chase of Dartmoor, to one of this two fellow-travelers.
The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory.
The bells of St. Mark's were ringing changes up on the mountain when Bud skated over to the mod parlor to upgrade his skull gun.
"Do your neighbors burn one another alive?" was how Fraa Orolo began his conversation with Artisan Flec.
Ukatonen looked out the window at his home world of Tiangi.
Ani was gathering tender bibbi shoots when a patch of white on the distant forest floor caught her eye.
Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.
"You think you've found somebody, so suddenly my program gets the ax?"
Ash fell from the sky.
The ruby light on the com unit was blinking when Hypatia Cade emerged from beneath the tutor's hood, with quadratic equations dancing before her seven-year-old eyes.
Some people called it "the time of undoing", some, wishing to be more positive, spoke of it as "the replanting" or "the restoring" or even "the resurrection" of the Earth.
I remember hearing somewhere that freezing to death is an easy way to go; but the guy that said that never tried it. 
Using sheets of corrugated iron to construct a barrier, Zinina was able to contain the expanse of poison-specked foliage as it tumbled down the stairs of the house.
I'm Taako, from TV, and this is my autobiography, ghost-written by Angus.
I'm sure we all know that animations are just ink on paper, paint on cells. They have only the illusion of living. But, what if I told you there was a way to give them real life?
Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand Sand sand 
Lyra and her dæmon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen. 
Will tugged at his mother’s hand and said, “Come on, come on …”  
In a valley shaded with rhododendrons, close to the snow line, where a stream milky with meltwater splashed and where doves and linnets flew among the immense pines, lay a cave, half-hidden by the crag above and the stiff heavy leaves that clustered below.
Shadow had done three years in prison.
Ian Murray knew from the moment he saw his best friend’s face that something terrible had happened.  Gabaldon, Diana. 
The court date fell on the Friday of what had been a very bad week for me as an account executive at Hastings Channel 8.
Somewhere in the mortal realms, the smith raised his hammer.
The sorcerer's face curled back in a leering rictus, exposing blackened stumps of bone hidden behind his lips.
The divine consciousness of Sigmar Heldenhammer, the God-King, raced down from the celestrial peaks of Azyr and into the tangled canopies of Ghyran, the Realm of Life.
Never trust a god.
A figure sits atop a weather-beaten rock, clad in white, his legs crossed beneath him.
The screaming marked an end to the say's toil.
May the Omnissiah watch over this instrument of holy war.'
I have considered it.
Within the roiling, too-bright tides of the hell-sea known as the Eye of Terror, a shoal of great beasts scattered in sudden alarm.
I stare down at my shoes, watching as a fine layer of ash settles on the worn leather. This is where the bed I shared with my sister, Prim, stood.
I’ve been locked up for 264 days.
First the colors.
A thief is a lot like a wizard. 
Prague, early May. 
The screw through Cinder’s ankle had rusted, the engraved cross marks worn to a mangled circle.
Congratulations. 
Ironically, since the attacks, the sunsets have been glorious.
The assassins dropped into the palace grounds at midnight, four fleet shadows dark against the wall. 
I stood in front of today’s schedule still holding my skateboard, still drenched from the ride over, and still desperately wishing I hadn’t dropped out of college.
Turner Buckminster had lived in Phippsburg, Maine, for fifteen minutes shy of six hours.
Once, in a house on Egypt street, there lived a rabbit who was made almost entirely of china.
The night breathed through the apartment like a dark animal.
Prayer candles flicker in my bedroom.
I’ve always been competitive.
Jacob Fielding stood in a small room and stared at a body.
Joost had two problems: the moon and his mustache.
It was as black in the closet as old blood.
I’ve confessed to everything and I’d like to be hanged. 
The man sitting across from me at the café was thinking about murdering his wife.
There’s a hint of wind coming over the top of the stone walls and through the barbed-wire sky on the day Alexander Stowe was to be Purged.
The Austrian horses glinted in the moonlight, their riders standing tall in the saddle, swords raised.
There’s a right way to do things and a wrong way, if you’re going to run a hotel in a smuggler’s town. 
When my brother Fish turned thirteen, we moved to the deepest part of inland because of the hurricane and, of course, that fact that he’d caused it.
Of the first few hauntings I investigated with Lockwood and Co. I intend to say little, in part to protect the identity of the victims, in part because of the gruesome nature of the incidents, but mainly because, in a variety of ingenious ways, we succeeded in messing them all up.
The freedom dave had, at last, waa in no way a good thing.
The soft sunlight fluttered through the drapes with the wind. A gentle day Meryl could hardly be angry with.
The day that Adrian’s world got unhinged had started like any other Monday. 
He hadn’t eaten any strawberries since he’d been nine years old.
Standing in front of the main building of Inverness Airport, David was trying to find the shuttle bus that would bring him to the city center.  
It was a hot summer’s day, the wheat stood ripening in the fields and the larks were singing their songs, and the boy without a name made his way across the small footpath past the duck pond towards the main Mansion. 
The year I began saying vahz instead of vase, a man i barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.
My sister Greta and I were having our portrait painted by our uncle Finn that afternoon because he knew he was dying.
This morning Rino telephoned.
Three miles up the river Thames from the centre of Oxford, some distance from where the great colleges of Jordan, Gabriel, Balliol, and two dozen others contended for mastery in the boat races, out where the city was only a collection of towers and spires in the distance over the misty levels of Port Meadow, there stood the priory of Godstow, where the gentle nuns went about their holy business; and on the opposite bank from the priory there was an inn called the Trout.
The room where Nakvin lay confronted her with a paradox. 
Silent as specters, the tall and the fat thief edged past the dead, noose-strangled watch-leopard, out the thick, lock-picked door of Jengao the Gem Merchant, and strolled east on Cash Street through the thin black night-smog of Lankhmar, City of Sevenscore Thousand Smokes.
Prince Rupert rode his unicorn into the Tanglewood, peering balefully through the drizzling rain as he searched half-heartedly for the flea hiding somewhere under his breastplate.
I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess; and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing. 
Even among the Wise, animals did not talk. 
I bounded over the gray, dusty terrain toward the huge dome of Conrad Bubble. 
I'm pretty much fucked. 
Finding people who don't want to be found has always been one of my specialties. 
New Year's Eve, 1999, a quarter to midnight and where else to be but Century Park! 
Another day wasted as guest of the Empress, a wretchedly long tour of the breath-taking Boreal Falls, conducted as ever by the Lady Amilia. 
It's become a matter of pride now not to give up. 
You take a deep breath of salty air as the first raindrops begin to spatter the pavement, and the swollen, slate-colored clouds that blanket the sky mutter ominous portents amongst themselves over the little coastal town of Anchorhead.
The young lieutenant-colonel was drunk, apparently, and determined to rush upon disaster.
Because of a miscalculation, the craft dipped too low and hit the atmosphere with an earsplitting scream. 
In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market town or rural port, which by some is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly known by the name of Tarry Town. 
It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer. 
When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home, and went into the mountains. 
On Zothique, the last continent on Earth, the sun no longer shone with the whiteness of its prime, but was dim and tarnished as if with a vapor of blood. 
I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. 
In the night-time heart of Beirut, in one of a row of general-address transfer booths, Louis Wu flicked into reality.
The sandstorm had scoured the narrow rock ledge clean. 
The boy frowned, pressed a folded handkerchief to his nose, and scanned the crowd for the third time. 
Almeth Elocine staggers across the narrow span. 
The woods were wrong.
He reached the humble mountain village an hour before nightfall. 
Bosch was in cell 3 of the old San Fernando jail, looking through files from one of the Esme Tavares boxes, when a heads-up text came in from Bella Lourdes over in the detective bureau. 
Simon Diggery and Ethel, his pet boa constrictor, were about fifty feet from Simon's rust bucket double-wide. 
Ned Willard came home to Kingsbridge in a snowstorm. 
The library in the East End was quiet. 
October 12 was a good day for a killing. 
The end of the year brought the usual holiday festivities, though around the Frazier house there was little to cheer. 
As Will Robie stared out the plane window, he knew the next twenty-four hours could possibly be his last ones on earth. 
I have often reflected upon the strange series of circumstances that led me to my long association with one of the most singular and remarkable figures of my age. 
Cteira would have kept her composure under threat of death. 
The Theophilus touched down on Crote just in time to prevent Teg from painting the cramped tub's walls with his brains. 
Jem hefted the crate, ignoring the vehement hissing the Altarian lizard inside was emitting, and waited for the door to Peter's warehouse to slide open. 
Jack Torrance thought: Officious little prick. 
Almost everyone thought the man and the boy were father and son. 
Augie Odenkirk had a 1997 Datsun that still ran well in spite of high mileage, but gas was expensive, especially for a man with no job, and City Center was on the far side of town, so he decided to take the last bus of the night. 
This happened in 1932, when the state penitentiary was still at Cold Mountain. 
Herbert Terrell went to spend his annual summer leave climbing on the Continent, and fell off a mountain in Slovakia.
Yap wriggled, yawning, and gave a small excited whimper.
In a small town called Whistle Root, rats play music in the moonlight.
Once there was a forest of hickory and beech, sprucy- pine, birch and oak.
It started at one thirty on a cold Tuesday morning in January when Martin Turner, street performer and, in his own words, apprentice gigolo, tripped over a body in front of the East Portico of St Paul's at Covent Garden.
Time, time, where does it go when you lose it? A flow, a river; it moved over and through her. Time, for a while, did not exist. But someone kept it for her, in marching figures on the wall in front of her. 
Lancelot, you faggotron!
A thong strung over my blowhole shifted slightly to the side, baring the gaping maw of a void through which I spurted out water, air, and my wish to find a companion in this great big oceanic landscape.
It was the beginning of a new dawn, a new age that will redefine how people perceive us - hopefully for the better.
Dear Cousin Tassue, thank you for the lovely postcards.
"Thirty minutes and counting," the loudspeaker blared.
I met Daniel the day I was fired from my third job in two years.
If you stand on the stage in the Moonlight Cafe - barefoot, of course, so you can feel the cheap painted plywood - you will be in the right place.
A flash of emerald lightning tore across the sky.
"We hear that your Prince," said Lady Jokaste, "keeps his own harem."
The shadows were long with sunset when they rode up, and the horizon was red.
Damen stood at the base of the dais steps as his name spread in tones of shock and disbelief over the courtyard.
It had begun to rain an hour ago, a fine driving mist with the sky grey above.
June 18 — Squire Hawkins sat upon the pyramid of large blocks, called the "stile," in front of his house, contemplating the morning.
The first thing I knew was bumping along, the sound of my mother’s feet going lap lap, and breath coming and going fast in and out her nose.
Dear Rimini and Benedict, You didn’t deserve ill-humour and rebuff, and I had no right to send you off with empty hearts when all you were asking was to get to know your ‘father’.
Bastard, she’d think, looking out her back kitchen window.
Jamison Stevens fumbled in his backpack, searching for the key.
Pausing to collect himself, Constantine XI pushed away the pile of city-defense maps in front of him, pulled his purple robe tighter, and waited.
The brown ant had already forgotten its home.
It is a little remarkable, that—though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends—an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public.
When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold.
I clasp the flask between my hands even though the warmth from the tea has long since leached into the frozen air.
I stare down at my shoes, watching as a fine layer of ash settles on the worn leather.
When the first bullet hit my chest, I thought of my daughter.
I have survived Day Three Post-Christian, and my first day at work.
Mommy! Mommy! Mommy is asleep on the floor.
The heat in the lifeboat had become completely unbearable.
In the old days, in the years that have gone before us, the land and sea felt a great emptiness, a yearning.
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.
Once upon a time, there was a large city named Flower-Valley.
One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it:— it was the black kitten's fault entirely.
Arthur, the good King of Britain, whose prowess teaches us that we, too, should be brave and courteous, held a rich and royal court upon that precious feast-day which is always known by the name of Pentecost.
I never knew what to do with my hands.
It all started fine.
I left.
The child is trying to stifle his sobs, his face pressed hard against his knees, the sounds of distress almost buried.
After those first two strokes, the beating became rhythmic.
David kissed Olivia, and Lena's heart crumbled into pieces.
Predators eat meat.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel
Two boys stood in the Prince Consort Gallery, and looked down on a third. 
It appears from tradition, as well as some parish registers still extant, thst the lands of Dalcastle (or Dalchastel, as it is often spelled) were possessed by a family of the name of Colwan, about one hundred and fifty years ago, and for at least a century previous to at period. 
There were two of them.
The floor and walls of the medicae bunker were painted dark green, so the blood just looked like dark water pooling under the beds.
Marduk, First Acolyte of the Worf Bearers Legion, looked up.
All around was deathly still.
During the darkest years of Ulthuan, the two greatest elves to have lived were at the forefront of the war against the daemons of Chaos.
I don't know.'
The emptiness of space buckled and bulged just for an instant as though it were being sucked into a vacuum.
The pungent smell of smouldering warpstone wafted through the blackened chamber, the corrupt fume slithering into every nook and cranny, oozing between the crumbling bricks, burning into beams of oak and ash, discolouring glass and tarnishing bronze.
The two Faustus-class Inteeceptors swept in low over a thousand, slowly spinning tonnes of jade asteroid and decelerated to coasting velocity.
Andreas Grunwald scrambled backwards up the ridge.
Running didn't help.
Arian saw the three black, wedge-shaped sails on the eastern horizon and his heart went cold.
The flesh of mercy.
The flesh of mercy.
The screaming marked an end to the day's toil.
Thud... ...that was the sound the heavy club made as it connected with the head.
Nathan had never had to sleep in a hospital before; well, not that he could remember.
Marley was dead, to begin with
The first Callanish knew of the Circus Excalibur was the striped silk of their sails against the grey sky.
When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him
Gordon Edgley's sudden death came as a shock to everyone - not least himself. 
That's good thinking there, Cool Breeze.
The wind howled.
Aramar Thorne turned away from the Light.
Khadgar clutched the crimson-sealed letter of introduction and desperately tried to remember his own name.
The sky was a chaotic flurry of purple and dark blue streaks.
It's a beatiful sunny day.
On the first day of February, sunny but cold as a frog's balls, a man named Lane Coolman stepped of a flight at Miami International, rented a mainstream Buick, and headed south to meet a man in Key West.
Lesson learned: If you take a Valkyrie out for coffee, you'll get stuck with the check and a dead body.
There seemed to be no reason to go on.
The dead were warm beneath Ruth's feet, but she tried not to read into that.
The child looked up at the adult eagerly, wondering in that way that children had.
It was Sunday after church and all my chores were done. 
I'm the only healer in two hundred miles that would let a vampire dump a half-dead snack off on my doorstep.
The gnarled oak desk quivered as a subsonic blast shook the entire room/
There was no room for emotion in a hate crime.
I staked the vamp with all my might, pinning it to a live oak tree, and ducked just before my partner's blade sliced the thing's head clean off.
Ho Chi Minh City in the summer.
The drought had lasted now for ten million years, ad the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended.
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.
In the nighttime heart of Beirut, in one of a row of general-address transfer booths, Louis Wu flicked into reality.
I am on my mountain in a tree home that people have passed without ever knowing that I am here.
The year 1866 was signalised by a remarkable incident, a mysterious and puzzling phenomenon, which doubtless no one has yet forgotten.
Until I began to build and launch rockets, I didn't know my hometown was at war with itself over its children and that my parents were locked in a kind of bloodless combat over how my brother and I would live our lives.
Sometimes wierd shit happens, like me.
"Reuse! Reduce! Recycle!"
"They won't be taking blood or anything, will they?"
It is known where we come from, but no one much cares about things like that anymore.
I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well.
Kate had finally agreed to pose under the willow tree.
Kendra stared out the side window of the SUV, watching foliage blur past.
Thunder boomed loudly within the manor of Sonic’s dad, Hareton.
There were only two kinds of people in our town.
I believe in ghosts.
I saw my first duel when I was eleven years old.
Five texts are waiting for me when I get out of my English final.
I was sent here because of a boy.
The chastities keep asking me why I can’t sleep.
The Mitchells’ backyard was packed, full of recent and not-so-recent grads in various stages of party decay.
It was late January, and New England wore a fresh coat of snow as I stepped along the gangplank to the shore.
About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the country of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet's lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income.
My big brother reaches home in the dark hours before dawn, when even ghosts take their rest.
Jason was going to Brain Camp.
After a year of slavery in the Salt Mines of Endovier, Celaena Sardothien was accustomed to being escorted everywhere in shackles and at sword-point.
In a distant and second-hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part
All the best things in my life have started with a Dolly Parton song.
They said the only folks who belonged in Deadshot after dark were the ones who were up to no good.
The screw through Cinder's ankle had rusted, the engraved cross marks worn to a mangled circle.
The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn't sure it was worth all the effort
"It's amazing you're still alive."
Everything about Councillor Rand is moisturized to the point of buttery softness. 
This is a story about magic and where it goes and perhaps more importantly where it comes from and why, although it doesn't pretend to answer all or any of these questions.
Amir Tarabi is scrubbing himself down in the misting rooms the first time he meets Mani Rizk.
All children, except one, grow up.
I should have known when I didn’t hear whooping and hollering and congratulations from Chornohora Station when I crossed the finish plane.
This is the bright candlelit room where the life-timers are stored
“Ladies and gentlemen, everyone you know—the entire world you know—is now dead.”
There was a man and he had eight sons
The priest slept in the saddle, passing in and out of half-remembered dreams.
I don’t remember the first time I saw BETsi.
The wind howled.
“Which way did my mother go?” Rhy-lee asked her father one day.
In most respects, the universe (which some call the Library) is everywhere the same, and we at the summit are like the rest of you below.
Shelly’s grandma teaches her about ghosts, how to carry them in her hair.
After she was taken, Sarai lived two years with a cloth bound over her eyes, learning scent and touch and taste, never once seeing the island that was her prison.
Nothing but stars, scattered across the blackness as though the Creator had smashed the windscreen of his car and hadn't bothered to stop and sweep up the pieces
You maintain a menu of a half dozen Experiences on your digital blackboard, but Vision Quest is the one the Tourists choose the most.
Dear Sir,  I hope you will forgive the impropriety of this personal letter sent without the benefit of previous acquaintance, but I feel compelled to write you in order that I might, indeed, introduce myself, and also so I might render to you my personal wishes for your hale and happy birthday.
As the commuter jet descended toward the ruins of Las Vegas, Roland Zhang craned his neck at the window, watching the skeleton towers grow nearer.
“Are you all right?”
we/i unfurl.
So you’re looking at me, Mr. Important Journalist, as if you’re surprised to see a little, gray-haired, gray-bearded man.
Then the Bird of A Hundred and Eight Names gathered together her three new children, and she said, “You have passed our people’s tests and joined our ranks, and may leave if you wish.
Ann Crothers looked at the clock and frowned and turned the fire lower under the bacon.
Elspeth keeps her shop in the outer rim—in the circle most distant from the center-city—in a neighborhood no one knows.
He's shivering as he emerges from the pod.
When Sere Gulliarme is dragged into the city, the canal-mud still clinging to her standard-issue boots, the police do not bother to support her legs.
On the first day of Sara's appointment as Magistra Descendant to the Assembly of Terravine, Public Works decided they needed grassroots support for the plant.
From our house on stilts, I could see rice fields, swampland, and the spires of a power plant rising high into the clouds.
I knelt with my bucket and set about the task of watering each wilted seedling by hand.
Good morning, Idonea. How would you like to spend the nineteen thousand and fifth day before you die?
Tabitha walks, and thinks of shoes. 
When Sylvie was eight years old, she became very sick.
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.
As usual, Win was late to work.
The man who’d set himself up out on the point by Gray Lagoon had conjured up a house out of rocks and sea-wrack, but he didn’t wear the badge of any guild or house.
It had been the most desperate moment of Angelo Neumann’s life so far, and you were certain to live through many such moments if you lived for the opera.
I considered declining the invitation.
Allpa received the magic sword from his grandmother, as she lay dying.
You’re just stepping into the crosswalk when the SUV screeches to a stop with its bumper six inches from your hip.
Penny woke on Tuesday morning and cautiously assessed the level of pain. 
I’ve sought a world with a higher-than-average ratio of sunny days and a pharmaceutical industry that developed a decade before my own.
It was a story passed from mother to daughter.
The river surrounding me is teeming with life.
Come-from-aways think it’s the tides that brings the wreckage in, but any local child will tell you the truth of the matter.
I can hear them whispering.
Vault 12.
Every day NuTay watched the starship from their shack, selling satshine and sweet chai to wayfarers on their way to the stars.
When Shuos Jedao walked into his temporary quarters on Station Muru 5 and spotted the box, he assumed someone was attempting to assassinate him.
The legendary Gecko incident occurred on the president of Bankim’s seventieth birthday.
“You must wait here,” the Highest of the High Priests told her.
They hate me.
Brit lowered her wooden sword and sighed. 
Are you coming to get me?
Mr. Important 1 gestures at her, clears his throat.
The goddesses are so suicidal anymore.
My mother had daughters year after year, and one by one, my father devoured us.
When I was a child, my mother would tell me stories of the sea.
You know that abandoned house round the corner?
I was born in 1892 on the banks of the Mississippi, in that muddied, mongrel part of the world where the East and West are separated only by the coalsmoke-scummed river.
Suradanna’s parents had spent a year’s savings to buy their only daughter her place as an apprentice navigator, and they waved her goodbye from Salamadan Port with a certain air of complacency.
Sana sat on the edge of the boat waiting for the sun to rise from behind the mountains.
I'm back in 2020.
The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamp below.
The water here is never going to make good bread.
It began to rain flowers before she was even halfway down the path, heavy, wet petals that splatted rather than landed and left sticky red smears down her neck. 
Sonata James was twenty-three years old when she decided what she wanted to do with her life and her iterations to come.
My parents knew I was a witch before I was born.
Silvano da Montacuto was not just young, handsome and rich.
Huan Ho sealed the last window, leaving only a crack in the shutter.
I sing the city.
Prison 17 had been built long enough ago that it got next to no natural light—before all the studies that said that light was good for prison behavior and morale.
It's the first Thanksgiving since Grandpa died.
The mule nipped at Marjan’s hand as she burdened it with her packs.
I knelt on a woven mat.
The Fleet of the Godless came to the waters around Au by chance.
Voud had escaped the house before dawn, climbing up the ladder and onto the roof, across the neighbors' roofs and down to the edge of the water, where she had caught three decent-sized frogs.
It would take Dorothy Gale and her relatives three days to reach the mountains by train from Kansas, the conductor told them.
Down at the riverfront at Kalub, the little gods congregated in clouds, flies and dragonflies and even small birds approaching would–be travelers. 
“I need you to do this,” said Queen Sveta.
I was out in the woods when the king of Therete and his son came to ask for my sister.
It was on the third day of August that Joe come off the assembly line, and on the fifth Laurine come into town, an' that afternoon I saved civilization.
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. 
Everything we crocodiles taste in the water has meaning.
At first, the murder is universally mistaken for a run-of-the-mill political assassination. 
The taxikite banked as it approached Constitution, wheeling in an arc that encompassed it and two other great ships of the Fleet of Nations.
I never felt like a real college girl until I met John my senior year.
Humble ice crystals high in the atmosphere often enrich sunsets on this cold world to glory.
Freddie’s head rested on the music rack as he murmured into the piano’s keys possible and probable rhymes, slant or assonant, for moon.
"Don't leave."
“You remember your grandmother,” they’d said to Sofia when she was seven, and she’d looked up and said, “Not this one.”
Residents of Noage Itray could look up and see the ballcourt hanging ten miles overhead, four meters wide and fifty long from goal line to goal line. 
I was serving in Baxon just north of Hescher, guard-dogging a queue of first responders heading into the riot zones, and John caught my eye.
The Penareh docks had been my favorite place as a child.
Grandmother kept her cloth of winds in the orange room, a storage chamber painted in fire and lit to a translucent glow by dozens of floating candlebulbs created by the older women’s magic.
We stood together, looking up at the house—Father, Mama, Nanny Jane, Piglet, and me.
I guess I always knew, in some subterranean way, Diane and I would end up back together.
I am an orphan.
The witch had a favorite saying: where there’s life, there’s magic.
I hadn’t had a minute, since getting off the airship, to put down my carpet bag and close my eyes.
Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvellous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it.
At night she pores over the corpus catalogues online: Incorporated Incorporated, Modern Anatomy, and Shoulders, Knees, & Toes.
When he arrived, the dunes were singing.
Long before my mother destroyed the world, her experiments were quieter, more contained.
Here’s how I remember it:  A touch shocked me.
Vellitt Boe was dreaming of a highway and ten million birds in an empty sky of featureless blue.
Once, I dreamed that I had a son named Sheldon, and my grief tore a hole in the fabric of the world.
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
Everybody knows about Thrull.
The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way towards the lagoon.
There was nothing phoenix-like in my sister’s immolation.
When I was ten, I saw a man named Menley brought out to the Ocean of Starve.
This is a food blog, not a disease blog, but of course the rumors all over about bird flu are making me nervous.
Wind howled through the night, carrying a scent that would change the world.
Madeleine remembers being a different person.
we have a page of the codex lucis & need it translated asap.
“Admit it, the only option left for that body is getting rid of it.”
Mei’s contract specified she would only get paid if both the bride and groom, along with at least fifty percent of the guests, survived the wedding.
I had been living with my aunts and my cousin Oswald for three months when Terra Nowak died.
I shot the sparrow because I was starving.
WELCOME TO MY NIGHTMARE
It was a nice day.
There was a witch who lived up in the mountains, and I never heard but that she was a good one.
Grandma Harken lived on the edge of town, in a house with its back to the desert.
There was a girl who died every morning, and it would not have been a problem except that she kept bees. 
For twenty-seven thousand years—through kingdoms and republics, through prophets and messiahs, through decay and collapse and rebirth—the city and the medical school had grown around each other.
Most people who have reached their eighties without raising children have every right to believe that they will go on not raising them, and Judith and I were no different until the day they turned up with the social worker, neatly scrubbed and pressed inside their vac-suits and carrying cases with all their remaining worldly possessions.
Look, I didn’t want to be a half-blood.
The carving was going badly.
Once there was a little girl who tried very hard not to be born.
When the Taylore case pops up through the Triage computer, it takes me five field-swipes before I steady my hand enough to cross-check the date.
In the mornings, Adele girds herself for the trip to work as a warrior for battle.
When the doorbell rings at three in the morning, it’s never good news.”
The Library of Babel is one of those extrusions of pure logic into our universe that you get sometimes, a library of infinite size containing all possible books.
The first strange thing Nadia pulled from her pocket was a piece of fudge.
My mother taught me to shoot, but it was Auntie Rosa who bought me my first rifle.
Here's the scene: It's Thursday evening and the Signalman sits smoking and nursing a flat Diet Dr Pepper, allowing himself to breathe a stingy sigh of relief as twilight finally, mercifully comes crashing down on the desert.
And if you’re a boy with a wide imagination who hikes the beach at Capitola for miles on winter days, hikes until the promontory marking home is a speck you can hide behind your outstretched hand, then you’ll continue hearing a voice in the green and white surf and in the hectoring cries of the gulls.
The girl is gone from the castle and her stepmother wanders the corridors.
Long ago, our ancestors looked at the sky and saw gods.
My mother's wedding dress was the skin of a swan, still blindingly white after more than a decade nestled in tissue paper.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife
He stood a moment on the steps of the bank, watching the human river that swirled down Broadway.
"There were unexpected difficulties," said the dark gray blur.
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.
"You do that better than your sisters, Gabe," Mom says to me as I spread the corn masa on the soaked husk and spoon the right amount of shredded spiced beef onto it.
Night.
At the counter of a marriage agency at the end of the town, I felt my lip twitch in spite of myself.
The animatronic was gone.
Naveen's boyfriend is now certainly a god.
Two hours into Annalee's first convention, she started to notice things Mommy did not.
The switch was flipped, and she dropped into the darkness.
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
Carmencita sways into Ana Teresa as they stagger down the sidewalk, shooting pain up and down Ana Teresa's bad leg and nearly knocking her over.
Shhh, shhh, concentrate on my voice, not the comb in your hair, okay? 
That day, my mother picked me up from school, wearing the yellow sundress and shawl I remembered from our trip with Father the year before.
For fifteen years my grandfather lived next door to the Mughal princess Zeenat Begum.
Now to be fair, Sun Wukong was already in a bad mood when he arrived at the Faerie Court.
I am Robot!Ophelia. 
In the middle of town there is a house, and in the courtyard behind the house, there is an apple tree.
It began, as these things often do, at a bar—a long dark piece of mahogany along one wall of Seattle’s Queen City Grill polished by age and more than a few chins.
This is the place of the carnivores, the pool ringed with sundews and the fat funnels of the pitcher plants.
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
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.
Kidnapping children is not a good idea.
I’m not exactly sure when I realised that the life I was living was not my own.
Heroes of legend are virtuous.
It was not, of course, exactly what Jane had written to her sister that long-ago Christmas Eve, but the sentiment was the same. 
I shut the door of the old Victorian behind me, and the stuffy atmosphere closed in: overheated, dry, and redolent of mothballs. 
The child's world changed late one afternoon, though she didn't know it. 
Long, long ago, before mortals began to inscribe mortal religions onto stone tablets and parchment, there were three realms: the Realm of Flesh, the Realm of Spirit, and Half-World.
She needed him.
According to popular imagination, squirrels are supposed to be adorable. 
This is the story of a bloodstained boy.
Waking up dead is the worst. 
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
I love this part. 
Turns out that when you kill a god, people want to talk to you. 
Snow, tenderly caught by eddying breezes, swirled and spun into and out of bright, lustrous shapes that gleamed against the emerald-blazened black drape of sky and sparkled there for a moment, hanging, before settling gently to the soft, green-tufted plain with all the sickly sweetness of an over-written sentence.
Jack had always craved danger's adrenaline rush. 
At dusk, they pour from the sky.
The World isn't what you think it is. 
Doom tekka tekka tekka doom tekka tek.
When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
It started out as just another everyday mission. 
There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made.
A gentle breeze from the northeast after a night of rain, and the washed sky over Malta had a particular quality in its light that sharpened the lines of the noble buildings, bringing out all the virtue of the stone; the air too, was a delight to breathe, and the city of Valletta was as cheerful as though it were fortunate in love or as though it had suddenly heard good news.
The magenta glow of the Arkansas Cave bathed the rail-thin figure in a light so pure it seemed to drip from his dirty, blond dreadlocks. 
"Sooo... apparently the road is going to stay closed for a while."
Moldering bone crumbled beneath their boots as Lord Mardus and Vargûl Ashnazai lowered themselves down into the tiny chamber beneath the earthen mound.
Jamal Glover removed his gaze from the displays that formed a sixty-degree arc around his zero-gravity chair, stepped out of the full-immersion workstation, and placed his white-striped black fedora atop his head, applying a jaunty tilt. 
Quin Lie walked the galliot down the sky, using the shaped force fields of the sails as legs, balancing their draw against the depth of gravity here in the planet's shadow.
There are many perks to loving for twenty-one centuries, and foremost among them is bearing witness to the rare birth of genius. 
The lunch hour in the co-workers’ cafeteria at Frankenberg’s had reached its peak.
A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories.
The flood of memories that streamed over me when this draft of an old letter emerged from the depths of one of my drawers was so powerful that for a few moments i stopped cleaning and just sat still.
It was one of the mixed blocks over on Central Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all negro.
A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green.
The Cave will always have a slightly damp smell, of limestone and tepid water, despite Alfred’s best attempts at airing it out.
"Will you all be quiet!" snapped High Chancellor Querida.
Jason doesn’t peel himself from the roof of his favorite safe house until the sun begins to set, the dying light turning the smog ruddy like his skin.
It figures that the one thing Tim didn’t factor into this whole disaster was the amount of sleep he’d be expected to get post-op.
He holds onto his anger because he understands it. 
THE KING STOOD in a pool of blue light, unmoored.
The first thing Dick learns how to do is hide.
I first realized that I was changing from a sedentary, word-mad bibliophile into a genuine biblio-adventurer on the Sunday evening a dark and dangerous man showed me that priceless piece of treasure.
Tim shouldn’t have gone out alone.
My name, in those days, was Susan Trinder.
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
Corporal Carrot, Ankh-Morpork City Guard (Night Watch), sat down in his nightshirt, took up his pencil, sucked the end for a moment, and then wrote: "Dearest Mume and Dad, Well here is another fine Turnup for the Books, for I have been made Corporal!!"
It was the day my grandmother exploded.
Princess Sidion ran because to stop was to die and to die was to fail.
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
Nothing was going right with the Wizards' University.
Marghe's suit was still open at neck and wrist, and the helmet rested in the crook of her left arm.
First the colors.
Have you heard of the Flying Dutchman?
I still get nightmares.
The letter was an Earth script, unhandily scrawled in blobby blue ballpoint.
The world is so far below, down there.
Spells are the hardest thing in the world to get right.
Are you still there?
The note said: SOMEONE IN THIS CLASS IS A WITCH.
September is a month of mixed emotions - anticipation, hope, and a pang of sorrow for the summer that is suddenly, irrevocably lost.
Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York.
"Matrimony was ordained, thirdly," said Jane Studdock to herself, "for the mutual society, help, and comfort that the one ought to have of the other."
The young girl sat alone in the dark room, gnawing a bone.
The last drops of the thundershower had hardly ceased falling when the Pedestrian stuffed his map into his pocket, settled his pack more comfortably on his tired shoulders, and stepped out from the shelter of a large chestnut-tree into the middle of the road.
Marcellene woke up, clothes stiff from last night, and stretched
When Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus were kids, their fathers worked together at the Coleman Candy plant and carried the stench of warm chocolate back with them.
As I left the railway station at Worchester and set out on the three mile walk to Ransom's cottage, I reflected the no one on that platform could possibly guess the truth about that man I was going to visit.
The building groaned and the trade winds of death recalled the lord of the ocean after he was able to bear our souls to the next stage.
The Grandy's had ensnared its first victim in thousands of years.
Aragon sped on up the hill.
Were the tower to be laid down across the plain of Shinar, it would be two days' journey to walk from one end to the other.
A layer of ice; it feels rough against my face, but not cold.
Standing up, The Tiger hissed at the sudden sharp points being driven into soft flesh.
Hador Goldenhead was a lord of the Edain and well-beloved by the Eldar.
Dividing a number by zero doesn't produce an infinitely large number as an answer.
Your father is about to ask me the question.
This book is largely concerned with hobbits, and from its pages a reader may discover much of their character and a little fo their history.
When he was a child, Robert's favorite toy was a simple one, a clay doll that could do nothing but walk forward.
There was once a little and called Niggle, who had a long journey to make.
As she woke up in the pod, she remembered three things.
There was a village once, not very long ago for those with long memories, nor very far away for those with long legs.
In a vast and sparkling city, a city at the center of the universe, one little man remembered something big.
In August of the year 991, in the reign of Æthelred II, a battle was fought near Maldon in Essex.
I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
There was no doubt about it: there was a fox behind the climbing frame.
At first dawn, the swathes of rain drifting eastwards across the Channel parted long enough to show that the chase had altered course.
Maulkin abruptly heaved himself out of his wallow with a wild thrast that left the atmosphere hanging thick with particles.
It was a dark and stormy night.
There was no scatheless rapture.
Eva drummed her fingers on the metal table. 
"Fire lives the death of air, and air lives the death of fire; water lives the death of earth, earth that of water"...so says Heraclitus, the ancient philosopher of flux and flame, so beloved of the alchemists.
Sara Falk had passed through the mirror in one decisive step.
Issachar Templebane examined his own dead face with more disappointment than sorrow.
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
It was love at first sight.
The recipe in Fidelia Quail's observation book was for chum, and at eleven years old, she could recite it by heart.
When Saffron was eight, and had at last learned to read, she hunted slowly through the color chart pinned up on the kitchen wall.
I am what they call in our village "one who has not yet died" - a widow, eighty years old.
I am not my mother's daughter.
"We should start back," Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them.
Even before the gym exploded, it had not exactly been a great day of high school for Gabby Wallace.
Monkey never dies.
Today is my sixty-seventh birthday, a hot day in the summer of 410 in the year of our lord, according to the new Christian system of dating the passage of time.
See the dog, swimming, following the current of the river.
"Merlin is dead."
Why is it forbidden to write down specific knowledge of the magics?
Gwenda was eight years old, but was not afraid of the dark.
It was Napoleon who had such a passion for chicken that he kept his chefs working around the clock.
Michelle wasn't sure when everyone started hanging out at the Albion.
The fly had been pestering the Greek all morning.
The following story, which is absolutely true, was brought to my attention when I was holidaying recently on the coast of North Norfolk.
When she wakes up, the floor isn't there.
A young man stands in his bedroom.
There was a time when Dave would have said with great certainty that you can’t actually write a patch for the universe.
In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her.
It reminds her of dust-dirt-sand-rock, familiar in a way that's been burned into her eyes over the years.
When the game ends everything goes soft like taffy.
Dave Strider fully admits (just not in public or in a court of law) that Jade Harley is something of a force to be reckoned with when she gets an idea in her head, which is exactly what he assumes has happened when she drops into the chair across from him in the cafeteria with a crap disposable camera, a newspaper, and a gleam in her eye.
You study history.
Karkat woke up angry.
I wish my Pa would come home to me today.
She was insane.
They shaved my head in March.
With the floor clear there's really nothing to do but call it in.
They all had their own ways of coping with the war, the heat, the bugs that wouldn't stop biting at night.
"I didn't think you were much for the holidays," Crowbar admitted to Scratch as he climbed out of the attic window and pulled himself up onto the roof of the mansion.
Morning rolled in, the blues, silvers and indigoes of night regally giving way before the golds and purples of a royal dawn.
Rain poured down in sheets from the sky.
The courtroom was cleared.
The chains clinked idly against the wall where I dangled.
The rain whipped into them, bit hard, and the seabirds were forced lower.
I always thought the biggest problem in my life was my name, Naomi Soledad Leon Outlaw, but little did I know that it was the least of my troubles, or that someday I would live up to it.
She steps out into the grey time before her sun rises.
I find it ironic that I should be invited to write a few introductory words to this book, as I know as little about the subject as it is possible to know.
The first few weeks were a difficult period of adjustment.
High on Mount Eohippus, deep in a craggy gorge buffeted by winds and approachable only from the air, stood the Aerie.
Amidst dim candlelight, a single unicorn sat with his head bent down, eyes shut.
The skills he had honed, the supplies he had gathered, and the time—precious time!—he had spent in preparation had all come to naught.
We arrived at our place of exile, fittingly enough, in a depression in the Mare Crisium.
Clouds of steam from the engine mingled with the fine mist of a drizzly spring morning as passengers disembarked from the express train from Canterlot.
“I should swear ‘pon my life, sir, It spoke!
When Megan wrenched open the driver’s side door of her mom’s rusty Chevy pickup, she found Danny sitting in the seat with a freshman girl in his lap.
Beneath the moonlight glints a tiny fragment of silver, a fraction of a line...
The screen is black. 
With a screechy thud, the wheels touched down on the icy asphalt.
It was one thing to consider floating down the river on a raft in search of adventure while reading a book and marveling at the wonderful time the young pony in the story was having.
People usually didn't say anything when they returned their tapes to the Video Hut: in a single and somewhat graceful movement, they'd approach the counter, slide the tapes toward whoever was stationed behind the register, and wheel back toward the door.
It was a day in the early spring of 1553; Edward the Sixth was King of England, but was slowly fading to his tomb; the spirit of adventure was abroad among all classes, and even children aspired to win their way to lands as yet unknown.
Something fell to the floor; a splintering crash followed by five thuds that rang like stone striking stone.
Ahem, awhoom, ahoum, a who?
I rubbed my shoe over the algebraic diagram I had drawn in the dirt with a stick.
The greatest show on Earth was on the road!
John’s my name, and those who know me know that it’s no brag for me to say that I’ve been in many a strange place and seen many a strange thing.
Every time I come down here I think about my mother.
The screen flickers to life as the lights go down and an expectant hush falls over the audience. 
Who knew?
. i heard her whimpers from across the stygian waters .
The morning sun greeted her like a furious torch.
Late in the afternoon of a chilly day in February, two gentlemen were sitting alone over their wine, in a well-furnished dining parlor, in the town of P----, in Kentucky.
When the morning sun rose, I heard somepony singing. 
The morning sun's rays glittered off the alabaster skyrises like gravestones. 
Eszter had always felt that stepping onto the grounds of Idlewild Estate was like stepping back in time.
The morning sun rose over purple mountains, its golden bands casting shadows between the sharp crags of rock that divided a myriad of sloping hillsides bespeckled with dewy glass and pastel wildflowers.
“Ledo’s Pride to Mountain Fall Tower!” a frazzled stallion shouted into a soundstone while the bulkheads of a zeppelin gondola rattled all around him. 
Morning sunlight swam over swaths of emerald fir trees in undulating golden bands.
Our story begins on the ocean, with wind and rain and thunder and lightning and waves.
There was nothing so terrible in this world, I think, as an interrupted game of cribbage.
"Tom!"
Helena Marcus had not given much thought to her marriage.
A screaming comes across the sky.
The sea speaks.
You have just been born!
At a young age I learned how quickly one's fortunes can change, a truth that never betrayed me.
She came to him towards morning. 
The town was in flames. 
A gust of wind whipped fallen birch leaves from the mud along the road to Lapinsalmi gate.
In another universe, Hannu is pulling a tray of buns from Mr. Kuikka's oven.
Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr'd the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware,—the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stocking'd-foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen, in a purposeful Dither since Morning, punctuated by the ringing Lids of various Boilers and Stewing-Pots, fragrant with Pie-Spices, peel'd Fruits, Suet, heated Sugar,—the Children, having all upon the Fly, among rhythmic slaps of Batter and Spoon, coax'd and stolen what they might, proceed, as upon each afternoon all this snowy Advent, to a comfortable Room at the read of the House, years since given over to their carefree Assaults.
"Now single up all lines!"
 "Best. Party. Ever," I said, wringing the blood out of my shirt. 
Later than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof.
The fox felt the car slow before the boy did, as he felt everything first.
Morgaine speaks… In my time I have been called many things: sister, lover, priestess, wise-woman, queen.
…to wound the autumnal city.
I really think that writing this down shouldn't be necessary.
A white boy rode flatfoot on a skateboard, towed along, hand to shoulder, by a black boy pedaling a brakeless fixed-gear bike.
Nine months Landsman's been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered.
The old orchard stood besieged.
[A.D. 41] I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relative 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 disentagled.
It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.
The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another his mother called him "WILD THING!" and Max said "I'LL EAT YOU UP!" so he was sent to bed without eating anything.
This is where the dragons went
This is space.
The bees of Death are big and black, they buzz low and sombre, they keep their honey in combs of wax as white as altar candles
The Morris dance is common to all inhabited worlds in the universe
This is the Discworld, which travels through space on the back of four elephants which themselves stand on the shell of Great A'Tuin, the sky turtle
They came like a caravn of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and across the hill in the morning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and the musicians on chairs in the truckbed teetering and tuning their instruments, the fat man with guitar grinning and gesturing to others in a car behind and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with a wrinkled face.
When does it start?
To dwellers in a wood, almost every psecies of tree has its voice as well as its feature.
Corporal Carrot, Ankh-Morpork City Guard (Night Watch), sat down in his nightshirt, took up his pencil, sucked the end for a moment, and then wrote
He - for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to describe it - was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.
This is where the gods play games with the lives of men, on a board which is at one and the same time a simple playing area and the whole world
Now in the early evening the sun is flashing everything in gold.
The wind howled.
It was a warm spring night when a fist knocked at the door so hard that the hinges bent
Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree
Through the shredded black clouds a fire moved like a dying star falling to earth
It was a moonless night, which was good for the purposes of Solid Jackson
Against the stars a turtle passes, carrying four elephants on its shell
They say the world is flat and carries on the back of four elephants who themselves stand on the back of a giant turtle
The rumour spread through the city like wildfire (which had often spread through Ankh-Morpork since its citizens had learned the words "fire insurance"
According to the First Scroll of Wen the Eternally Surprised, Wen stepped out of the cave where he had received enlightenment Andy into the dawning light of the first day of the rest of his life
Rats!
Sam Vimes sighed when he heard the scream, but he finished shaving before he did anything about it
It was a nice day
Some things start before other things
Polly cut her hair off in front of the mirror, feeling slightly guilty about not feeling very guilty about doing so
It was midnight in Ankh-Morpork's Royal Art Museum
Mia steadied her coffee as she approached Marcy's table.
It came crackling over the hills like an angry fog
They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man's mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what it inevitably concentrates on is that it is in a body that, in the morning, is going to be hanged.
As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small talk.
Thud...
They lay in the dark, guarding
Arthur Bryant stood there pretending not to shiver.
The sun is about to set
It was a vast, shining globe and it cast a light of lambent topaz into space -- but it was not a sun.
It's a warship alright.
From the Imperial Core to the outflung stars of the Rim, the galaxy teemed with life.
She saw him and stopped  a few feet from the stairs.
Can we go home soon, Dad?
On a February morning in the year 1609, a small, thin-faced man made his way over London Bridge
I wake with his name in my mouth
An anonymous letter!
It was in June of 1935 that I cam home from my ranch in South America for a stay of about six months.
Selvaris, faintly green against a sweep of white-hot stars, and with only a tiny moon for companionship, looked like the loneliest of planets.
Theron Shan walked quickly through the packed streets of Nar Shaddaa's Promenade.
So my mom got the postcard today.
There was fog in the channel.
As she sat in the chair that was hers by right of death, she raised her eyes to the cold faraway stars.
The first to die was a midshipman named Koth Barak.
Instead of bed, where she usually awoke from her dreams, Leia found herself slumped forward in her crash webbing, ears hissing with static and eyes aching from the glare of two G-class suns.
A tremor took hold of the planet.
Angelo!
Chewie, hey, I've got it!
Blood geysered, looking almost black in the antisepsis field's glow.
She was being followed.
The black hole cluster near Kessel reached out for the Millennium Falcon with jaws of gravity, drawing it close.
The war was lost; not finished, but lost.
The Pantoran Jedi Toro Irana was angry.
Vader completed his meditation and opened his eyes.
Mister Sharpe was in a bad mood.
Ashu-Nyamal, Firstborn of Ashu, child of the planet Mahranee, huddled with her family in the hold of a Republic Frigate.
The moss world, so said one XT-ploitation writer who had reviewed first-contact images of it, was a Victorian parlor of a planet, everywhere padded and bolstered, its cliffs hung with garlands, its crevasses softened with cushions, every cranny silk-woven, every surface napped into velvet.
From a private hospital for the insane near Providence, Rhode Island, there recently disappeared an exceedingly singular person.
Adam Stone empties the bucket of rotting vegetables into the trough and then he stands back to watch.
Katie ran across the Kilkennys' yard, scattering chickens.
Again penniless, houseless and ladyless, Capen Varra made a brave sight all the same as he wove his way amidst the bazaar throng.
The woman on the horse reigned in her weary steed.
I barely remember my father's voice.
The first time he noticed her, he only saw her eyes.
Sometimes there's no warning.
The date was August 31, 1984.
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
King Vortigern the usurper sat upon his throne in London, when, suddenly, upon a certain day, ran in a breathless messenger, and cried aloud--"Arise, Lord King, for the enemy is come; even Abrosius and Uther, upon whose throne thou sittest--and full twenty thousand with them--and they have sworn by a great oath, Lord, to slay thee, ere this year be done; and even now they march towards thee as the north wind of winter for bitterness and haste."
About thirty years ago Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the country of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet's lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income.
No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine.
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
Della Wetherby tripped up the somewhat imposing steps of her sister's Commonwealth Avenue home and pressed an energetic finger against the electric-bell button.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
It started at one thirty on a cold Tuesday morning in January, when Martin Turner, street performer and, in his own words, apprentice gigolo, tripped over a body in front of the West Portico of St. Paul's at Covent Garden.
"We should start back," Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them.
When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen.
Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians.
The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
The story so far: In the beginning, the Universe was created.
Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginnin to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.
The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.
The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Far to the south of the land of Ingary, in the Sultanates of Rashpuht, a young carpet merchant called Abdullah lived in the city of Zanzib.
"Charmain must do it," said Aunt Sempronia.
A large flying craft moved swiftly across the surface of an astoundingly beautiful sea.
In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three.
If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.
The history of the Galaxy has got a little muddled, for a number of reasons: partly because those who are trying to keep track of it have got a little muddled, but also because some very muddling things have been happening anyway.
The stretch of road that leads out of the city, past Hazy Harbor and into the town of Tedia, is perhaps the most unpleasant in the world.
If you didn't know much about the Baudelaire orphans, and you saw them sitting on their suitcases at Damocles Dock, you might think that they were bound for an exciting adventure.
Sometimes during your life--in fact, very soon--you may find yourself reading a book, and you may notice that a book's first sentence can often tell you what sort of story your book contains.
Some things start before other things.
The sky above the port was the colour of a television, tuned to a dead channel.
Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.
Kuvi, love of Chaos; Half-Note, god of whims, of uncertainty and thieves. 
Normally, bedding a well-to-do lady is not a dangerous occupation.
This is the story of a man who went far away for a long time, just to play a game.
It all started with the book of poems.
She didn't expect the package to be at her doorstep already.
The ship carrying her to her fears was painted green and gold. 
Arrow Blackwood Saewulf stood at the edge of world and wished she had the courage to go farther. 
Snow was falling on Riverside, great white puffs that veiled the cracks in the façades of its ruined houses; slowly softening the harsh contours of jagged roof and fallen beam. 
No one sends for a niece they've never met before just to annoy her family and ruin her life.
All things considered, Harold “Barry” James Hallwinter did not lead an interesting life.
Five hundred years ago and more, a king rode out of the North at the head of an army.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfasionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
 The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
With a strange groaning sound, the blue police box appeared from nowhere.
It was an honor, he supposed.
Dr. Augustus Baker was purchasing his afternoon snack, a white-iced donut and 32 ounces of his preferred soda, when he noticed the cluster of three moles at the upper limit of the convenience store employee's zygomatic bone, just below her temple, and abruptly realized that the girl behind the counter was, in truth, the same superheroine who had rescued him from death or serious injury just the week before. 
"The decision is difficult, I know," the surgeon said.
This is the story of a lover's triangle, I suppose you'd say - Arnie Cunningham, Leigh Cabot, and, of course, Christine.
It was Wang Lung's marriage day.
He believed he was safe.
You better not never tell nobody but God.
You don't have to pick and choose anymore.
Ryou Shirogane was right.
Dimly lit, dreadful fealing, eyes covered, guns clicking.
As I sit down to write here amidst the shadows of vineleaves under the blue sky of southern Italy it comes to me with a certain quality of astonishment that my participation in these amazing adventures of Mr. Cavor was, after all, the outcome of the purest accident.
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
Owen had the sneaking suspicion that he had chosen the wrong major.
He’s fighting a nightmare when they come for him. 
The assignment—although exactly what he had been secretly counting on, despite a lurking fear that his retirement might make them decide they no longer needed him—in the end came unexpectedly, one might say caught him unprepared, for at the time when in the plainest terms sparing all empty formalities he thanked the "wildlife management experts for their trust," and accepted their mandate, he had felt almost panicked, as one who reached his goal too easily, practically unhindered, without any struggle, for not only had he "privately counted" on this, but this was in fact what he had been expressly planning when years earlier he had first entertained the idea of retirement, hoping it would bring real liberation and a certain latitude "absolutely necessary for the unimpeded unfolding of his abilities, smothered as they had been by fatuous requirements, rules and regulations."
I recall only one sentence that she said.
See there!
The primroses were over.
The first letter came one miserable Saturday, what I was too tired from the week's work to do anything but brood…
A white bird hung still in the clear western sky and flapped its wings sporadically.
It is said that one evening, in the year his stomach was to fail him, the Emperor Shah Jahan asked a Sufi saint what would become of the Mughal Empire.
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.
We found a hat.
The nickname of the train was the Yellow Dog.
Ruttle, what are you up to, lad?
Gabčík—that's his name—really did exist.
Life is not a novel.
My father used to cary me down the hall to my room after I came home from the hospital.
After the woman had gone Simon began dreaming with new intensity.
The dead die hard, they are trespassers on the beyond, they must take the place as they find it, the shafts and manholes back into the muck, till such time as the lord of the manor incurs through his long acquiescence a duty of care in respect of them.
Qu'est-ce que c'est cette comédie d'un chien.
Once upon a time, the moon had a moon.
The grandmothers—dozens of them—find themselves at sea.
Like a man-made magic wish, the airplane began to rise.
Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies' eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through the woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde's Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde's door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brook and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.
Taran wanted to make a sword; but Coll, charged with the practical side of his education, decided on horseshoes.
Louis Wu was under the wire when two men came to invade his privacy.
On our third month in the Hospital, the pilgrims begin to appear.
As she woke up in the pod, she remembered three things.
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 consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concern'd in it, but that probably 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.
It's times like these, when I'm hunkered in a doorway, waiting for a food market of dubious legality to be set up, that I find myself wishing I could eat like everyone else.
Turin is where the famous shroud is from, the one showing Christ's body supine after crucifixion: hands folded over genitals, eyes closed, head crowned with thorns.
—Money…? in a voice that rustled.
Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades, of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at that critical moment it presumes itself as reality.
There was a baby born named Ida.
About the accident itself I can say very little.
Imagine a story without a plot.
The first thing he heard was the screaming; shouts of alarm that quickly turned to screams of pain, and were abruptly silenced.
The day begins wrong.
 Amber looked out across the quad and smiled.
Wind whipped through the desolate wasteland that had once been a thriving factory town.
It was bad enough, having to live in the suburbs, with stupid normies on every side, always looking strangely at the large, extended family that lived in 2784 East 16th St.
Tony had never intended to raise a child.
Adam reached down to pat his mount’s wide shoulder as a great sigh spread his legs even wider momentarily.
Pieter leaned against the edge of the curtain wall, shading his eyes with one hand while another rested on the head of the large cat sitting calmly next to him.
There is a difference, a large difference, between a speaker and a mage, but most people will not be able to tell you this.
I was not born this way; I was made
Toby looked up and up, his eyes widening with awe and no little fear.
“Help me.”
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 
Call me Jonah. 
I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. 
Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called True Stories from Nature, about the primeval forest.
It was fall when she first saw the house.
In the one hundred and eleven years since the creation of the Spokane Indian Reservation in 1881, not one person, Indian or otherwise, had ever arrived there by accident.
All children, except one, grow up.
Every night I wake from dreaming.
Once on a dark winter's day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares.
She flinched, hearing the sounds of yelling from outside the shop.
In life, Elizabeth Adora Holland was known not only for her loveliness but also for her moral character, so it was fair to assume that in the afterlife she would occupy a lofty seat with an especially good view.
Rossamund was a boy with a girl's name.
"Marx has completely changed the way I view the world," declared the Pallieres boy this morning, although ordinarily he says nary a word to me.
Mandalore burned.
It happened long ago, when I was only a child.
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, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy.
Kitty's been a little complainer all morning, and I suspect both Margot and Daddy are suffering from New Year's Eve hangovers.
There was something humiliating about waiting in a cart on a busy London street with all your possessions stacked around you, on show to the curious public.
Once upon a time in Westphalia, in the castle of Monsieur the Baron von Thunder-ten-tronckh, there lived a young boy on whom nature had bestowed the gentlest of dispositions.
"Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs. Ramsay.
It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days.
The servants called them malenchki, little ghosts, because they were the smallest and the youngest, and because they haunted the Duke's house like giggling phantoms, darting in and out of rooms, hiding in cupboards to eavesdrop, sneaking into the kitchen to steal the last of the summer peaches.
Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she'd been told that she would kill her true love.
"You're not going to steal anything."
The problem was, his life wasn't bad enough.
I lost an arm on my last trip home.
She was called Isabelle, and when she was a small girl her hair changed color in the time it takes a bird to call to its mate.
Miss Grace Spivey arrived in Threestep, Georgia, in August of 1938.
The king stood in a pool of blue light, unmoored.
The smell.
The meeting of the Royal Society of Unnatural Philosophers was well under way, and the entrance hall was almost empty
The TARDIS was crashing.
The house appeared suddenly from around the bend.
On a mountain above the clouds once lived a man who had been the gardener of the emperor of Japan.
In her last picture, the camera had lingered at the hip, the naked hip, and even though it wasn't her hip, she acquired a reputation for being willing.
"Please tell me that's not going to be part of my birthday dinner this evening."
I do not require life to be neat and orderly.
I am what they call in our village "one who has not yet died" - a widow, eighty years old.
Look: I do not know where I actually came from.
Staring at the sky in Bharata was like exchanging a secret.
The letter was in Earth script, unhandily scrawled in blobby blue ballpoint.
The council was probably furious right now.
The body lay naked and facedown in the snow, a deathly gray, spatters of blood staining the snow around it.
Aura’s thighs burned.
Why was it, Tiffany Aching wondered, that people liked noise so much?
When Rita Woke up that morning the world greeted her in shades of gray
Talin sat in thw palace garden watching the fish in the pond dance in an ever shifting moasic, the warm evening air settled comfortably around his shoulders like a well worn cloak.
You awake with the voices of the old gods drumming in your ears
The ballroom was a vision of elegance, flooded by a rippling sea of satin, lace, and silk. 
In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three.
There was a man and he had eight sons. Apart from that, he was nothing more than a comma on the page of History. It’s sad, but that’s all you can say about some people.
"I only want to go out for a little, little while," the faery child pleaded.
Kilian gazed out of the window next to him, into the blue sky.
Anything that happens, happens.
On a cool grey morning in June, Paris awoke to find itself awash in scandal.
Now that I am dead, I can finally say what I've been wanting to say for my entire life: FOOLED YOU! 
The man who was not Terrance O'Grady had come quietly.
Once upon a time there was a martian named Valentine Michael Smith.
You see, I had this spacesuit.
"Do you know the wish of your heart?"
It was a nice day.
Hide!'
David Case's baby brother had recently learned to walk but he wasn't what you'd call an expert.
It happened every year, was almost a ritual.
Shadow had done three years in prison.
Will Robie crouched shadow like at a window in a deserted building, inside a country that was currently an all of the united states
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
We were running through the woods, chased on by our pursuers' whooping cries of anticipated victory.
Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
Look, I didn't want to be a Half Blood.
Ash fell from the sky.
Harry Was a highly unusual boy in many ways.
In the cozy study of his home, Hans Christian Anderson was busy writing at his desk. 
In the corner of a first-class smoking carriage, Mr. Justice Wargrave, lately retired from the bench, puffed at a cigar and ran an interested eye through the political news in the Times.
I duck into the parking garsge, hoping to escape.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
The dead walk among us.
When I was little, my uncle Pete had a necktie with a porcupine painted on it.
Mr. and Mrs. Beresford were sitting at the breakfast table.
I walk to the bus station by myself.
You know it's a bad day when you pull into the parking garage at work and someone tries to run you over.
A man with binoculars.
He was lost. 
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. 
It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer. 
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. 
Today I saw Ikenna Okoro, a man I had long thought was dead. 
You thought everybody in America had a car and a gun; your uncles and aunts and cousins thought so, too. 
Today I’ve made a major decision: I am never going to die. 
Mrs Dalloway Said she would buy the flowers herself. 
Mr and Mrs Dursley of no. 4 privet drive were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
I was twelve the first time I walked on water.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.
Ianto headed down to the basement of the Hub, to snatch a few stolen moments with Lisa.
Lucy walked through Cardiff on her Doctor Who tour, she walked down the Plass grinning up at the water tower
"Ok Goose, spell your name for me
I remember the day the Aleut ship came to our island.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13.
The bible tells us that it lead to the fall of man. 
The twisted, baying creatures cane on in a great mass, howling and screaming at the darkening sky.
We live and die for Huron Blackheart!'
The man in Black fled across the Desert, and the Gunslinger followed.
The strike team spotted the compound from above, a pinwheel of menacing color amid the drab hills of our nation's fermented birthplace.
Anna said there was only one place to find a meaningful gift for MDash - the Antique Warehouse, not so much a place for old treasures as a permanent swap meet in what used to be the Lux Theater.
"What is it they've sent us?"
When the gate fell on top of me I knew I was really back home.
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures of conversations?'
We hanged him in front of Kingsbridge Cathedral.
There was once a little man called Niggle, who had a long journey to make.
Midway in our life's journey, I went astray  from the straight road and woke to find myself  alone in a dark wood.
He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher—the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum.
In August of the year 991, in the reign of Æthelred II, a battle was fought near Maldon in Essex. 
THE suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset.
Harold March, the rising reviewer and social critic, was walking vigorously across a great tableland of moors and commons, the horizon of which was fringed with the far-off woods of the famous estate of Torwood Park.
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
ALIENS ARE STUPID
Mr and Mrs Dursley of number four Privet Drive were proud to say they were perfectly normal, thank you very much
Just when I thought my day couldn't get any worse I saw the dead guy standing next to my locker
The heel of one of her high-button boots skidded across the stream of blood that seeped out from under the door. ”  
It was the darkest hour of the night, nearly three o’clock in the morning, and the chilling fog clung to the city like a ghost. 
Mrs. Ferrars died on the night of the 16th–17th September—a Thursday.
“THE SKELETON LAY on an elaborately carved and gilded bed in the center of the ancient laboratory that had become the alchemist’s tomb.”  
That morning, Kikko had awoken to a winter wonderland.
I love watermelon!
A happy school of little fish lived in a corner of the sea somewhere.
Squish was just a little rabbit.
Once upon a time there was a pond, and in that pond lived a lot of frogs.
By now I think you know what happened to your sandwich.
The sun is going down and everyone is sleepy.
When it was new, the house stood alone on a bare square of earth.
When I left my house there was a skunk on my doorstep.
Laurence leaned his arms upon the broad wooden hand-rail of the bulwarks.
This sea was once a lake of ice.
Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife.
I am the recording angle, doomed to watch.
One night in the middle of June, three brokenhearted people walked into Buena Vista Park at nearly the same time, just after dark.
One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupper-ware 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.
Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black Levi's, suede jacket, sneakers and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia.
It's the first day of spring 2001, and Maxine Tarnow, although some still have her in their system as Loeffler, is walking her boys to school.
She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to.
Bill is tired of Snow White now.
Edward was explaining to Carl about margins.
Miss Mandible wants to make love to me but she hesitates because I am officially a child; I am according to the records, according to the gradebook on her desk, according to the card index in the principals office, eleven years old.
On the trip back from the aerodrome Huber who was driving said: Still I don't see why we were required.
Hubert gave Charles and Irene a nice baby for Christmas.
One day there is life.
He sees me.
Pawnshops in Night Vale work like this.
The balloon, beginning at a point on Fourteenth Street, the exact location of which I cannot reveal, expanded northward all one night, while people were sleeping, until it reached the park.
The night before he went to London, Richard Mathew was not enjoying himself.
I am not altogether sympathetic to the new president.
Now, what I want is, Facts.
It happened in the middle of wartime, on a station platform as flat and dusty as the endless plain surrounding it.
Come forward.
Below her are the lights of the valley, like burning jewels on a dark tide.
There are a number of smells one expects to encounter in a dungeon.
Tika Waylan straightened her back with a sigh, flexing her shoulders to ease her cramped muscles.
My landlord didn't want to call the cops.
Far from here, there's a church.
It NOT only is my pleasure to announce to you this morning our discovery of this marvelous storehouse containing, among other things, a monumental collection of mnuscripts inscribed on ridulian crystal paper, but I also take pride in giving you our arguments for the authenticity of our discoervies, to tell you why we believe we have uncovered the original journals of Leto II, the God Emperor.
Somewhere between takeoff and landing, Shriver had lost his ability to read.
It was the fifth clone ship to go out from Moonbase on Project Consciousness and he leaned forward to watch it carefully as his duty demanded.
A spot of light appeard on the deep red rug which covered the raw rock of the cave floor.
"Good-bye school shoes," said Tuesday McGillycuddy, dropping her battered black lace-ups into a bin full of lunch wraps and orange peel.
Vivienne Small lived in a treehouse.
This is how it is when winter falls.
When the ghola-baby was delivered from the first Bene Geserit axlotl tank, Mother Superior Darwi Odrade ordered a quiet celebration in her private dining room atop Central.
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 consider'd 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.
The day my mom checked out, Razor Blade Baby moved in.
Taraza told you, did she not, that we have gone through eleven of these Duncan Idaho gholias?
What led you to take your particular approach to a history of Muad'dib?
An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money. 
Scarcely had the Abbey Bell tolled for five minutes, and already was the Church of the Capuchins thronged with Auditors.
Randall's Bar was at least a mile beneath the rocky surface of Carmella II and had all the inviting ambiance of an open sewer; the sign over the door was simple neon tubes rather than a holo-projection, the lightpool table inside was glitching, and the air had the thin, sour quality that suggested it had already passed through too many lungs.
YEAH, I KNOW.
It occurred as far back as February 15, 1850. 
That year the mayor decided to name the streets after presidents who had been assassinated.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
He always shot up by TV light.
"Hey, Mouse! Play us something," one of the mechanics called from the bar.
As they were leaving the Mumbanyo, someone threw something at them.
Mr and Mrs Dursley were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
We left on a school day, so Esther wouldn't see us.
Valera had fallen back from his squadron and was cutting the wires of another rider's lamp.
All the trouble, of course, began with Velázquez.
It's a port city.
The intense interest aroused in the public by what was known at the time as "The Styles Case" has now somewhat subsided.
The solstice is in nine days, the moon is waning, and Olivia Crane does not know when to stop.
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.
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. 
"If Freud is to be believed, the singular defining moment in any man's life is the death of his father," Brad was saying.
The basil plant had grown to take over the apartment in a dense, jungly green.
Not every thirteen-year-old girl is accused of murder, brought to trial, and found guilty.
My name is Homer P. Figg, and these are my true adventures.
Snow was falling on Riverside, great white feather-puffs that veiled the cracks in the facades of its ruined houses; slowly softening the harsh contours of jagged roof and fallen beam.
You are food. 
Hanging by his heels and twisting slowly in the draught that slipped beneath the crimson door, Detective Inspector Chen tried desperately to attract the demon's attention.
When the Stippled Silver Kennel, Inc., went into the wholesale raising of silver foxes for a world market, its two partners brought to the enterprise a comfortable working capital and an uncomfortable ignorance of the brain-reactions of a fox.
Aliens are stupid.
Each year, at the end of March, a great fair was hild in Cría, the capital of Galla.
His Royal Highness Kaddar, prince of Siraj, duke of Yamut, count of Amar, first lord of the Imperium, heir apparent to His Most Serene Majesty Emperor Ozorne of Carthak, fanned himself and wished the Tortallans would dock.
Pawnshops in Night Vale work like this.
It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days.
Kristin Bjornsen wondered if summer on the planet Barevi could possibly be the only season.
In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three. 
I have to.
The jungle was darkly verdant, secretive, menacing.
My name is Moon.
The rain started just as the train pulled out of Ayase Station.
Anna readjusted her floppy brown hat and shifted her weight in the saddle.
The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.
They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.
"Awake and about, woman! There's a hot plankton count to be done."
I am a cat.
The heavy gong sounds, and the two women in the uniform of the Council turn and open the lacquered double doors, each bearing the ancient symbol of the Council of Wei. 
I'm penciling in my eyebrows when the smog alert siren starts blaring.
This time there would be no witnesses.
Ever since I can remember, I had wanted to know about the Land of the Golden Mountain, but my mother had never wanted to talk about it.
Derian Carter awoke with his shirt front wet with blood and his head pounding.
The lecture was really boring.
Suppose that you and I were sitting in a quiet room overlooking a garden, chatting and sipping at our cups of green tea while we talked about something that had happened a long while ago, and I said to you, "That afternoon when I met so-and-so...was the very best afternoon of my life, and also the very worst afternoon."
At dusk, the third day of the third month, in the fifty-seventh year of the Empire of the Great Ming, a farmer entered a teahouse.
Lying on his back in the darkness of his bedchamber, King Allister of the Pledge listened to his wife's soft breathing.
How strange, that such an insignificant little world should come to matter so much.
If on a sunny day you climb the steep path leading up from the little wooden bridge still referred to around here as 'the Bridge of Hesitation', you will not have far to walk before the roof of my house becomes visible between the tops of two gingko trees.
From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that – a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.
Aaa-Rooo!
Two or three times a year, on important occasions, like the Austrian Embassy Ball or one of Lady Billingstone's famous soirees, the Comtesse de Dreux-Soubise wore the Queen's Necklace upon her white shoulders.
Austar IV is the fourth planet of a seven-planet rim-system in the Erato Galaxy.
Oriental or Renaissance cabinets, mingled with the hues of the pictures, the tapestry, the Persian rugs about the polished floor to fill the hall with a rich glow of colour.
Long, long ago a king arrived in the north.
Will said, turning a page, “He liked woad. He says— listen— the decoction of Woad drunken is good for bodies of a strong constitution, as of country people, and such as are accustomed to great labour and hard coarse fare.”
At 19.00 hours, ship's time, I made my way to the launching bay.
It was five o'clock on a winter's morning in Syria.
A thin crescent moon, high in the sky, shed faint white light over Dimwood Forest.
This morning, just after 11:00, Michael locked himself in his office and he won’t come out.
After the holiday mass, the parishioners drifted apart to their homes.
Nick Naylor had been called many things since becoming chief spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, but until now no one had actually compared him to Satan.
Around quarter past twelve in a science classroom when the flame just turned green, in the school neighbourhood somebody started to play a piano and that was the time when everything became a mess. (I just quick translatadet it from Hungarian since I couldn't find a good Emglish version.)
The hottest day of the summer so far was drawing to a cloes and a drowsy silence lay over the large, square houses of Privet Drive.
Like a cat that hides under the barn to have her kittens, a wyvern mother-to-be likes a nice, private spot to lay her egg.
Harriet Vane sat at her writing-table and stared out into Mecklenburg Square.
It was a nice day.
The villagers of Little Hangleton still called it 'the Riddle House', even though it had been many years sice the Riddle family had lived there.
Once upon a time--before kings and queens were replaced by an act of Congress and when kissing a frog still sometimes resulted in more than a case of warts--there lived a young princess named Jennifer.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Harry Potter was a highly unusual boy in many ways.
Not for the first time, an argument had broken out over breakfast at number four, Privet Drive.
The year that Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette.
Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. 
Nory Horace arrived at Dunwiddle Magic School with really wet feet.
I heard the mailman approach my office door, half an hour earlier than usual.
I never used to keep close track of the phases of the moon.
Skimming over the banks of the banks of the stream, Shade heard the beetle warming up its wings.
The bulletin board outside Lecture Hall 1712-A of Patrick Henry High School showed a flashing red light.
In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army.
How does one describe Artemis Fowl?
The lone wolf howls to rejoin the pack from which he is separated.
Don't get me wrong: I love the restaurant business.
The primroses were over.
The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.
"Naotsugu, look out!"
Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own.
August 25, 1991. Dear friend, I am writing to you because she said you would listen and understand and didn’t try to sleep with that person at that party even though you could have.
And it is with great regret, that the angels died of some such sickness
Matthias cut a comical little figure as he wobbled his way along the cloisters, with his large sandals flip-flopping and his tail peeping from beneath the folds of an oversized novice’s habit.
In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three.
The M.S. Orion was tied up at Savannah, Georgia.
The big kitchen of the Murrys’ house was bright and warm, curtains drawn against the dark outside, against the rain driving past the house from the northeast.
I was born singing.
“There’s no such thing as a perfect piece of writing. Just as there’s no such thing as perfect despair.”
I enjoyed listening to stories about faraway places so much that it became a kind of sickness.
The elevator continued its impossibly slow ascent.
In a distant and secondhand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part...
The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn’t sure it was worth all the effort.
This is the bright candlelit room where the life-timers are stored— shelf upon shelf of them, squat hourglasses, one for every living person, pouring their fine sand from the future into the past.
There was a man and he had eight sons.
Nothing but stars, scattered across the blackness as though the Creator has smashed the windscreen of his car and hadn’t bothered to stop to sweep up the pieces.
The bees of Death are big and black, they buzz low and somber, they keep their honey in combs of wax as white as altar candles.
The Morris dance is common to all inhabited worlds in the multiverse.
Now read on...
The rumour spread through the city like wildfire (which had quite often spread through Ankh-Morpork since its citizens had learned the words ‘fire insurance’).
They say that the prospect of being hanged concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that, in the morning, it will be in a body that is going to be hanged.
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression “As pretty as an airport.”
Pawnshops in Night Vale work like this.
It was just at the point when things were finally cracking up for me that I ran into Lauren and her father on Madison Avenue.
The Go Big Red Fan was John Wesley Fenrick’s, and when ventilating his System it throbbed and crept along the floor with a rhythmic chunka-chunka-chunk.
What compels the ant to break from the rule of its social nature, enmeshed as we are, and ingest its own mettle in idealer atmospheres.
Captain Kidd laid out the Boston Morning Journal on the lectern and began to read from the article on the Fifteenth Amendment.
Roscommon came and laid waste to the garden an hour after dawn, about the time I usually get out of bed and he usually passes out on the shoulder of some freeway.
May the bastard who invented the Portuguese pavement rot in hell.
“Do your neighbors burn one another alive?” was how Fraa Orolo began his conversation with Artisan Flec.
My English professor's ass was so beautiful.
Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.
Everything within takes place after Jack died and before my mom and I drowned in a burning ferry in the cool tannin-tinted Guaviare River, in east-central Columbia, with forty-two locals we hadn't yet met.
"Here," she says, "I'll get you a sweater."
Some people say I’m not right in the head.
When the battle becomes a farce the only position of dignity is above it,' said the ninth earl (the battle raging farcically beneath him.
I WILL WEEP NO MORE FOR THE LOST, ASLEEP IN THEIR WAter graves.
When fear fills your life, no one wants to be near you.
She was made after the time of ribs and mud.
This is how it all begins.
I hope you're reading this, Mark.
She had just turned the corner, ducking from a shadowed alleyway into the crowded main thoroughfare, when the bomb went off.
Antonia, you've told me so many stories.
Kalak rounded a rocky stone ridge and stumbled to a stop before the body of a dying thunderclast.
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice 'without pictures or conversations?'
One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.
Frog and Scorpion were neighbors, so to speak.
It is a rule worth remembering as long as one lives: reality is far more frightening than fantasy.
All beginnings are hard. 
At first, the new owner pretends he never looked at the living room floor. 
The eigenvalue continued its impossibly slow ascent. 
Fucking vultures
In the day's last light the glowing lake below the palace-city looked like a sea of molten gold. 
"When I was twelve I broke my leg jumping off the wall between Canada and Germany," I say but the woman across from me doesn't even blink. 
There was no warning the night the wall went up.
Let me say this: bein a idiot is no box of chocolates.
As Herr Boch finished the last lecture of the school year, I sketched one final caricature of him into the margins of my notebook.
It was little more than three miles from the Wall into the Old Kingdom, but that was enough.
The Healer's name was Fords Deep Waters.
In these dungeons the darkness was complete, but Katsa had a map in her mind.
"I'd like you to marry my daughter."
When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of Aylesbury Pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country.
Not everyone believes in mountains, yet there they are, in plain sight.
On the morning we are to leave for our grand tour of the Continent, I wake up in bed next to Percy.
It was years before Christopher told anyone about his dreams.
The trouble started the day Howard came home from school to find the Goon sitting in the kitchen.
In old times when wishing still helped one, there lived a king whose daughters were all beautiful, but the youngest was so beautiful that the sun itself, which has been so much, was astonished whenever it shone in her face.
Maniac Magee was not born in a dump.
So, there I was, tied to an altar made from outdated encyclopedias, about to get sacrificed to the dark powers by a cult of evil Librarians.
Looking back on it now, I doubt that there was any way I could have imagined what lay ahead.
Into the evening sky flew Elmer Elevator aboard the gentle baby dragon, leaving Wild Island behind forever.
A shaggy young burro lay asleep in the gray dust of the canyon trail
The small brown mouse named Ralph who was hiding under the grandfather clock did not have much longer to wait before he could ride his motorcycle.
With one last push from the mare, the foal slipped out of his mother's body.
A wild, ringing neigh shrilled up from the hold of the Spanish galleon.
The clock on the shelf pointed to five as young Paul Beebe, his hair tousled and his eyes still full of sleep, came into the kitchen.
The big kitchen of the Murrys' house was bright and warm, curtains drawn against the dark outside, against the rain driving past the house from the northeast.
It was a dark and stormy night.
Constitution Square. Athens. Late September.
There was another fog, far away from the smog of Corvere.
Deep within a dream, Lirael felt someone stroking her forehead.
The rabbit had been run over minutes before.
There was once a little tailor, a good and unremarkable man, who happened to be journeying through a forest, in search of work perhaps, for in those days men travelled great distances to make a meagre living, and the services of a fine craftsman, like our hero, were less in demand than cheap and cobbling hasty work that fitted ill and lasted only briefly.
There was once a young sailor who had nothing but his courage and his bright eyes - but those were *very* bright - and the strength the gods gave him, which was sufficient.
Once upon a time, in a kingdom between the sea and the mountains, between the forest and the desert, there lived a King and Queen with three daughters.
Once upon a time, in a village in a valley surrounded by high mountains, lived a family with two sons and a daughter, whose names were Harry, Jack and Eva.
Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.
At the first gesture of morning, flies began stirring.
She stands up in the garden where she has been working and looks into the distance.
As a child Trudi Montag thought everyone knew what went on inside others.
The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry.
On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore, or Blackmoor.
"There are dragons in the twins' vegetable garden."
A sudden snow shower put an end to hockey practice.
Dr Strauss says I should rite down what I think and remembir and evrey thing that happins to me from now on.
All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut.
It was a moonless night, which was *good* for the purposes of Solid Jackson.
If he is awake early enough the boy sees the men walk past the farmhouse down First Lake Road.
This is a story about magic and where it goes and perhaps more importantly where it comes from and why, although it doesn't pretend to answer all or any of these questions.
It might begin: The thrush has his anvil or altar on one fallen stone in a heap, gold and grey, roughly squared and shaped, hot in the sun and mossy in the shade.
The Consul awoke with the peculiar headache, dry throat, and sense of having forgotten a thousand dreams which only periods in cryogenic fugue could bring.
Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.
I was born in the city of Bombay...once upon a time.
Even in high summer, Tintagel was a haunted place; Igraine, Lady of Duke Gorlois, looked out over the sea from the headland.
On St. Valentine's Day, 1989, the last day of her life, the legendary popular singer Vina Apsara woke sobbing froma  dream of human sacrifice in which she had been the intended victim.
Only my father saw me to the Asheville station that Sunday morning in 1912.
Snow was falling on Riverside, great white feather-puffs that veiled the cracks in the facades of its ruined houses, slowly softening the harsh contours of jagged roof and fallen beam.
Imagine all the roads a woman and a man walk until they reach the road they'll walk together.
Will said, turning a page, "He liked woad. He says - listen - *the decoction of Woad drunken is good for wounds in bodies of a strong constitution, as of country people, and such as are accustomed to great labour and hard coarse fare."*
Kinraddie lands had been won by a Norman childe, Cospatric de Gondeshil, in the days of William the Lyon, when gryphons and such-like beasts still roamed the Scots countryside and folk would waken in their beds to hear the children screaming, with a great wolf-beast, come through the hide window, tearing at their throats.
Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians.
My own daughter was trying to kill me, for the crime of daring to have a son.
Two women knelt in silence before Prioress Eleanor, heads bowed.
Mother taught me to be polite to dragons.
The King of the Enchanted Forest was twenty years old and lived in a rambling, scrambling, mixed-up castle somewhere near the center of his domain.
Deep in the Enchanted Forest, in a neat gray house with a wide porch and a red roof, lived the witch Morwen and her nine cats.
Once there was a wizard whose luck time was three days long.
Queen Cimorene of the Enchanted Forest stepped back and cocked her head to one side, setting her black braids swinging.
The harper would have you believe that it was all for the love of sweet William that my sisters came to hate each other so, but that is not true.
The cave was dark, damp, and smelled faintly of sulfur.
Light and the raucous noise of a heavy-metal band spilled from the long, open windows onto the patio outside, overwhelming the pale reflected gleam of the full moon and drowning the hum of cicadas.
The worst thing about Caliph Arenschadd is that he's a wizard.
Linderwall was a large kingdom, just east of the Mountains of Morning, where philosophers were highly respected and the number five was fashionable.
When I think of my wife, I always think of her head.
Lest anyone suppose that I am a cuckoo's child, got on the wrong side of the blanket by a lusty peasant stock and sold into indenture in a shortfallen season, I may say that I am House-born and reared in the Night Court proper, for all the good it did me.
Pawnshops in Night Vale work like this.
"There's something about running."
The two would-be jade thieves sweated in the kitchen of the Twice Lucky restaurant.
Eilonwy of the red-gold hair, the Princess Eilonwy Daughter of Angharad Daughter of Regat of the Royal House of Llyr, was leaving Caer Dallben.
Under a chill, gray sky, two riders jogged across the turf.
Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs.
A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin.
The dim wagon track went no farther on the prairie, and Pa stopped the horses.
Laura was washing the dishes one morning when old Jack, lying in the sunshine on the doorstep, growled to tell her that someone was coming.
The mowing machine's whirring sounded cheerfully from the old buffalo wallow south of the claim shanty, where bluestem grass stood thick and tall and Pa was cutting it for hay.
One evening at supper, Pa asked, "How would you like to work in town, Laura?"
It was January in northern New York State, sixty-seven years ago.
今宵は夜市が開かれる。
私が最初にあの古道に足を踏み入れたのは七歳の春だった。
First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.
雷の音を聴くと私は薄暗い気持ちになる。
その日は朝おきた時から、なにかが起りそうな感じがしていた。
全てはこの忌々しい暑さのせいだ。
その人がやってきた日のことを、今でもよく覚えている。
これは十一月七日の水曜日の物語だ。
あ。
梅雨が明け晴れた空が広がり始めると、生徒たちはどこかそわそわしだして、それで夏が来たんだ、と知ることができる。
りょうりょうと風が吹き渡る夕暮れの野を、まるで火が走るように、赤い毛なみを光らせて、一匹の子狐が駆けていた。
バルサが鳥影橋を渡っていたとき、皇族の行列が、ちょうど一本上流の、山影橋にさしかかっていたことが、バルサの運命を変えた。
バルサは、滝の上に立っていた。
新ヨゴ皇国の西どなり、ロタ王国のある村の広場で、ひとりの年老いた歌い手が仰向けにたおれていた。
風が強い。
月が、大地に霜のような光を落としている。
夕暮れの光が、王城の裏庭を黄金色に染めている。
天が一面、薄墨を流したように暗くなった。
多分それは一種の精神病ででもあったのでしょう。
東京旧市内の、大震災の大火にあわなかった地域には、その後発展した新しい大東京の場末などよりも、遥かに淋しい場所が幾つもある。
この年はフェブダーシュ男爵領暦で一三六年にあたる。
The question of what one should do immediately post an averted apocalypse does not have an intuitive answer.
ルーヌ・ビーガ市警察犯罪捜査部警部エントリュア・レイの気分はあいかわらず最低だった。
They meet first in Egypt, 1242. It’s a Wednesday, if that matters.
It’s in the tea.
自分で望んだことではなかったが、ディアーホは生まれてこのかた、幾たびも住処を変えてきた。
“Look on the bright side,” says Michael’s boss—his former boss, he corrects himself for the thousandth time—proving that he maybe doesn’t know Michael all that well, despite how long they’ve worked together.
そして暗闇が生まれた。
The project started out simple.
雨が降っていた。
On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.
よく晴れた夜空。
Hermann’s first time meeting Newton is not Newton’s first time meeting Hermann.
She thinks, "anger is not an answer, it’s a weapon."
その夜の始まりには、地図はまだ空白で、約束された流血沙汰は、ひとつだけしかなかった。
My father was a king and the son of kings.
放課後の校舎は、静かでなにかしらさむざむしい。
The day Sacha found out he could see witches was the worst day of his life.
昌子は中学二年になって、また森本文一と同級になった。
ーああ、また、会ってしまった。
One of the current objections to Communism, and Socialism altogether, is that the idea is so old, and yet it has never been realized.
ある夕ご飯の席のことだった。
One suppertime, many years ago, my grandmother and I faced each other over the dinner table.
No one would deny that I have known hardship in my time, brief though it has been for all that I have done in it.
It was a dark and stormy night
Connie Haskell had just stepped out of the shower when she heard the phone ringing
Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four,Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
"Gwendolyn Margaret Elizabeth Lancaster," said Mother in a firm, cross voice, "you will cease this nonsense at once."
Kell wore a very peculiar coat.
All four walls of my cell are mirrors
This book begins with a plane crash.
It’s too damn cold of a night to be out on a hunt.
Even before he got electrocuted, Jason was having a rotten day.
"Whoops!" cried Barley, and fell off the cliff.
The snake-headed ladies were startng to annoy Percy.
Until she met the exploding statue, Annabeth thought she was prepared for anything.
My name is Luke.
Annabeth and I were relaxing on the Great Lawn in Central Park when she ambushed me with a question.
Leo blamed the windex.
“Normally I invite people to ask me questions when I’m finished, but this time I have one I’d like to ask you all instead.”
We only have a few hours, so listen carefully.
This is the story of the Going Home.
Carter here.
Winter,' said Masklin firmly.
Sadie Kane here.
Let the eye of your imagination be a camera...
I wanted to write a Guide, for new replayers.
Why did the chicken cross the road?
In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army.
I pace in our cell in Erudite headquarters, her words echoing in my mind: My name will be Edith Prior, and there is much I am happy to forget.
Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case.
Not for the first time, an argument had broken out over breakfast at number four, Privet Drive.
Mr Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he stayed up all night, was seated at the breakfast-table.
"I am inclined to look--" said I.
Harry Potter was a highly unusual boy in many ways.
The villagers of Little Hangleton still called it “the Riddle House,” even though it had been many years since the Riddle family had lived there.
The hottest day of the summer so far was drawing to a close and a drowsy silence lay over the large, square houses of Privet Drive.
The two men appeared out of nowhere, a few yards apart in the narrow, moonlit lane.
I clasp the flask between my hands even though the warmth from the tea has long since leached into the frozen air.
Agent Salamander opened one eye cautiously, but saw only darkness.
There is one mirror in my house.
One morning in December the steamer Tabo was laboriously ascending the tortuous course of the Pasig, carrying a large crowd of passengers toward the province of La Laguna.
The listing on the BHG’s board was ambiguous at best, and that’s how you should’ve known not to even give it a second glance.
I wake with his name in my mouth.
"Okay, that's the Grand Admiral contained-"
Ka-click.
“Dad? Daaaaad!”
Lesson Learned: If you take a Valkyrie out for coffee, you’ll get stuck with the check and a dead body.
Yeah, I know.
I stare down at my shoes, watching as a fine layer of ash settles on the worn leather.
When Z. Coulter (don't ask what the Z. stands for) got home from school, the Faerie Endless teaser had been live two hours.
From out of the Ironic Overpower were birthed the first of the Gods -- the Sunflower Official, the Mysterious Somebody, and Luxury.
In the Great Years, before the death of Bast and the onset of the Urple Tide, a man arose among the PPC named Jared, called the Slayer.
I have my regret.
On the last of October Don Santiago de los Santos, popularly known as Capitan Tiago, gave a dinner.
When speaking of first impressions, Ben certainly didn't stand out.
Even as their ships had neared the northern bank of the Anduin and the quay of Harlond, the Dûnedain had seen the smoke, the carnage, and the horror.
London is a metropolis, but if you're born and raised there, it seems a lot smaller sometimes.
This is an… unusual request.
Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood.
My nightmare started like this.
The Friday before winter break, my mom packed me an overnight bag and a few deadly weapons and took me to a new boarding school.
The last thing I wanted to do on my summer break was blow up another school.
The end of the world started when a pegasus landed on the hood of my car.
One dragon can ruin your whole day.
I was in fifth period science class when I heard these noises outside.
Extract from the writings of Raimun, recorder of Redwall Abbey: It has been a cruel winter, friends, but it is over at last.
This document is a guide for the immersive simulation game Sburb.
When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold.
When my brother Fish turned thirteen, we moved to the deepest part of inland because of the hurricane and, of course, the fact that he'd caused it.
The night before he went to London, Richard Mayhew was not enjoying himself.
I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
How five crows managed to lift a twenty-pound baby boy into the air was beyond Prue, but that was certainly the least of her worries.
When Lila was four years old, her mother filled a shallow dish with Lila's blood and fed it to the boars that patrolled the thorn fence.
The circus arrives without warning.
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
The day was like every other day in the last town on earth.
The first time I killed a man it was an accident.
Joost had two problems: the moon and his mustache.
My big brother reaches home in the dark hours before dawn, when even ghosts take their rest.
On the day Liz Emerson tries to die, they had reviewed Newton's Laws of Motion in physics class.
The problem with my life was that it was someone else's idea.
Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she'd been told that she would kill her true love.
The people of Bone Gap called Finn a lot of things, but none of them was his name.
The first thing you find you when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don’t got nothing much to say.
Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
By the shore of the sea stands a green oak tree;
Be patient, for the world is broad and wide.
It took seven years to get the letter right.
At dusk they pour from the sky.
At eight o'clock in the evening, the Baltimore airport was nearly deserted.
The Golem's life began in the hold of a steamship.
I was already unzipping my uniform, my hands twisted up my back, when Gail burst through the door.
Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Traumen erwachte, fand er sich in seimen Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt.
Johor has been chosen as suitable to represent our emissaries to Shikasta—of whom there were many, carrying out a multiplicity of functions—in this compilation of documents selected to offer a very general picture of Shikasta for the use of first-year students of Canopean Colonial Rule.
The night before he went to London, Richard Mayhew was not enjoying himself. 
They set a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheremones and the colour of his hair.
There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.
We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.
As a child when did I first hear about trout fishing in America?
It was the dog who found me.
I see...
THEY LEFT THE aqueduct two hours before dawn, climbing by moonlight into the hills overlooking the port – six men in single file, the engineer leading.
How Imo made the world, in the time when things were otherwise and the moon was different.
I dreamt that I heard Mr Punch laughing gleefully by my ear, but when I woke I realised it was my phone.
This is Paris; here the winds of change are blowing, whispering their discontent into the very hearts of her citizens.
The game was Carousel Hazard, the stakes were roughly half of all the wealth they commanded in the entire world, and the plain truth was that Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen were getting beaten like a pair of dusty carpets.
It was beautiful
There once was a young man who wished to gain his Heart's Desire.
Once upon a time, a man, a woman, and a cat were walking through a dark forest.
 Once upon a time, an angel and a devil pressed their hands to their hearts and started the apocalypse.
 In Styria, we, though by no means magnificent people, inhabit a castle, or schloss.
The Lady of the Manners has heard this complaint time and time again from her fellow Goths: “Why should I put so much effort into being polite to people who aren’t going to be considerate to me?”
There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made.
IT WAS MIDNIGHT in Ankh-Morpork’s Royal Art Museum.
In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.
There was a man, and he had eight sons.
SQUIRE Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17—and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.
On top of the cabinet in the back of my father’s workshop – which was my grandfather’s workshop and will one day be mine, if I want it – there is a puppet.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun
It was the Joy of the Sunset that brought us to speech
I met Cara three times in the year she was travelling
"If we stay here more than just this night, I'm chopping your priced meat worms so they won't ever be near any wet ground again and I'm going to feed them to any hungry monster I lay my eyes upon," the petite brunette said calmly, too sweetly for the message she was sending; her demeanor was peaceful but her eyes were murderous.
They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that, in the morning, it will be in a body that is going to be hanged.
Roger, aged seven, and no longer the youngest of the family, ran in wide zigzags, to and fro
If, standing alone on the back doorstep, Tom allowed himself to weep tears, they were tears of anger.
The way I saw it when I was in high school, even though there were still millions of different life forms left on the planet, there were basically only two kinds of girls
One afternoon, when I was right years old, my class was told to write about what we wanted to be when we grew up.
There was no possiblity of taking a walk that day.
A mile above Oz, the Witch balanced in the wind's forward edge, as if she were a green fleck of the land itself, flung up and sent wheeling away by the turbulent air.
All children, except one, grow up.
Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Auntie Em, who was the farmer's wife.
At the end of a little Swedish town lay an old, overgrown orchard.
It was dusk - winter dusk.
The Fossil sisters lived in the Cromwell Road.
It began with the day when it was almost the Fifth of November, and a doubt arose in some breast - Robert's, I fancy - as to the quality of the fireworks laid in for the Guy Fawkes celebration.
"Where's Papa going with that axe?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
First the colours.
I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.
My suffering left me sad and gloomy.
I do not like it when people shout.
A tall, slim girl, "half past sixteen" with serious grey eyes and hair which her friends called auburn, had sat down on the broad red sandstone doorstep of a Prince Edward Island farmhouse one ripe afternoon in August, firmly resolved to construe so many lines of Virgil.
It was 7 minutes after midnight.
No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be a heroine.
Once upon a time there were three children and their names were Carey, Charles and Paul.
Hercule Poirot frowned.
The pretty little Swiss town of Mayenfeld lies at the foot of a mountain range, whose grim rugged peaks tower high above the valley below.
The spaceship floated gently, anchored by a break of lavender light to the earth below.
One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it: - it was the black kitten's fault entirely.
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister by the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it has no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?"
Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin.
One day when Pooh Bear had nothing to do, he thought he would do something, so he went round to Piglet's house to see what Piglet was doing.
Sophie couldn't sleep.
Until he was for years old, James Henry Trotter had a happy life.
Down in the valley there were three farms.
These two very old people are the father and mother of Mr Bucket.
It's a funny thing about mothers and fathers.
What a lot of hairy-faced men there are around nowadays.
I disappeared on the night before my twelfth birthday.
"You keep away from the birdman, Gracie," my father had warned me often enough.
Jo should have known better.
We all come from somewhere.
"I don't think you ought to be crying at your age. People of fifty-two don't cry," said Aunt Hester sternly.
It was a good school, one of the best in London.
I was born in this mountain village longer ago than I like to remember.
My earliest memories are a confusion of hilly fields and dark, damp stables, and rats that scampered along the beams above my head.
Part of Patrick's walk to school, to St Thomas' Junior School on Porthcressa Road was along the canal, post the brown sauce factory which somehow smelled both sweet and sour at the same time.
I should begin at the beginning.
I first read Grandma's letter over ten years ago, when I was twelve.
Vienna has always been a city of myths.
There was no lovelier view in England, Harriet knew this.
In the fabled, glittering world that was St Petersburg before the First World War there lived, in an ice-blue palace overlooking the river Neva,a family on whom the gods seemed to have lavished their gifts with an almost comical abundance.
They were both born under the sign of Gemini, and for those who believe in the stars as arbiters of fate this must have seemed the link that bound them.
It was my fault
My name is Diamond.
Have you ever get wondered what you'd do if you won the lottery?
They were going to get me.
My father had a face that could stop a clock.
I didn't ask to be a celebrity.
Making one's home in an unpublished novel wasn't without its compensations.
When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold.
I clasp the flask of tea between my hands even though the warmth from the tea has long since leached into the frozen air.
I stare down at my shoes, watching as a fine layer of ash settles on the worn leather.
Lyra and her dæmon moved through the darkening Hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of site of the kitchen.
Will tugged at his mother's hand and said, "Come on, come on..."
In a valley shadowed with rhododendrons, close to the snow line, where a stream milky with melt-water splashed and where doves and linnets flew among the immense pines, lay a cave, half-hidden by the crag above and the stiff heavy leaves that clustered below.
There is one mirror in my house.
I wake with his name in my mouth.
I pace in our cell in Erudite headquarters, her words echoing in my mind: My name will be Edith Prior, and there is much I am happy to forget.
I emerge from the simulation with a yell.
At dusk, the enemy lit their campfires one by one, in greater profusion than on any night before.
The assassins dropped into the palace grounds at midnight, four fleet shadows dark against the wall.
Sunset above the olive groves.
Rain fell that night, a fine, whispering rain.
Twilight was gathering, and Orpheus still wasn't here.
Moonlight fell on Elinor's dressing gown, her nightdress, her bare feet, and the dog lying in front of them.
"Satellite City. The City of the Future," proclaimed the billboards.
My name is Moon.
Mrs. Rachel Lynda lived just where the Avonela main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies' eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde's Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde's door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.
A tall, slim girl, "half-past sixteen," with serious gray eyes and hair which her friends called auburn, had sat down on the broad red sandstone doorstep of a Prince Edward Island farmhouse one ripe afternoon in August, firmly resolved to construe so many lines of Virgil.
"Harvest is ended and summer is gone," quoted Anne Shirley, gazing across the shorn fields dreamily.
"Thanks be, I'm done with geometry, learning or teaching it," said Anne Shirley, a trifle vindictively, as she thumped a somewhat battered volume of Euclid into a big chest of books, banged the lid in triumph, and sat down upon it, looking at Diana Wright across the Green Gables Garrett, with gray eyes that were like a morning sky.
"How white the moonlight is tonight!" said Anne Blythe to herself, as she went up the walk of the Wright garden to Diana Wright's front door, where little cherry-blossom petals were coming down on the salty, breeze-stirred air.
It was a clear, apple-green evening in May, and Four Winds Harbour was mirroring back the clouds of the golden West between its softly dark shores.
It was a warm, golden-cloudy, lovable afternoon.
After Farmer Flint of the Middle Valley died, his widow stayed on at the farmhouse.
Ho Chi Minh City in the summer.
Sails long and white as a swan's wings carried the ship Farflyer through summer air down the bay from the Armed Cliffs towards Gont Port.
The two Russians huddled around a flambons barrel in a futile attempt to ward of the Arctic chill.
For the past two years my business enterprises have thrived without parental interference.
This article was posted on the fairy Internet, on the site www.horsesense.gnom.
On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology.
Happy was not a word often used to describe Artemis Fowl's bodyguard.
The second cataclysm began in my eleventh life, in 1996.
"TOM!"
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.
 Do you reckon Tom Sawyer was satisfied after all them adventures?
The Mississippi is well worth reading about.
In the ancient city of London, on a certain autumn day in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, a boy was born to a poor family of the name of Canty, who did not want him.
Well, it was the next spring after me and Tom Sawyer set our old n***** Jim free, the time he was chained up for a runaway slave down there on Tom's uncle Silas's farm in Arkansaw.
It was automn in Venice when Victor first heard of Prosper and Bo.
It was one of those bleak and chilly mornings that remind you winter is coming.
It is told among the wise that the First War began before Arda was full-shaped, and ere yet there was any thing that grew or walked upon earth; and for long Melkor had the upper hand.
Jason hated being old.
Forsooth, he was stunned as me arse
His name was donald trump; he was an idiot
But yet, the children were peculiar in a way that only other peculiars understood.
She was, without doubt, a flibertigibbet.
He owned his insanity like a woman owned a favourite pair of kitten heels.
Billy met the crocodile and left with but one leg.
And the troop marched on, keen to defeat the Great Snortlebeest as it grazed on the testicles of unwary peasants.
Stunned as me arse, was he, as he tried to code HTML using naught but a toothbrush and hair fairy.
And so, they came to a crossroads in the black hole, never realising that it had eaten them whole.
That axe, Eugene, that axe!
Just as suddenly as a fart, he tore into the Tooth Faerie's bag of mild-mannered accountants who thought they were seeing God.
He waltzed into the room , announcing that he had mistaken an axe for a jockstrap, and that nothing had gone well since.
And so, the brave crew of millipedes once again decided that selling tacos to belligerent meerkats was ill advised and that they should invest in science denialism, since it might mean the end of the meerkats.
How odd, thought she, as she divided zero by zero and a black hole suddenly appeared on the periphery of her planet; surely I should not have asked Siri that question in such an angry voice.
How odd, thought she, as she divided zero by zero and a black hole suddenly appeared on the periphery of her planet; surely I should not have asked Siri that question in such an angry voice.
Every once in awhile, in fact, once in a googolplex of eons, life offered the stranger a good day that started with relief of his athlete’s foot and a ticket to watch the Flat Earthers fail yet again to prove the flatness of their planet.
It was nearing midnight, and the Prime Minister was sitting alone in his office reading a very long memo that was slipping through his brain without leaving the slightest trace of meaning behind.
Class ended in five minutes and all I could think was, an hour is too long for lunch.
It was a second chance for humanity as a whole, and they’d gone and screwed it up from the start by coloring the city gold, of all colors.
The point is not to make another earth.
How does it go?
Damn me, damn them, damn it all.
The primroses were over.
Master was a little crazy; he had spent too many years reading books overseas, talked to himself in his office, did not always return greetings, and had too much hair.
The old ram stands looking down over rockslides, stupidly triumphant.
There was a wall.
It was John who killed them all.
"Dad, how many universes are there?"
"I should be happy," Thomas S. Robertson muttered to himself, fumbling for the latchkey to his Brighton flat.
"O Rania, I was better off dead," muttered Menelaus Montrose, in English, a language which, he reflected, was also long dead.
All he wanted to do was stay dead.
As he woke in his selective fashion, layer by layer, the central node version of Menelaus Montrose wondered if he had made a bad call.
At first, I thought he was carrying the corpse of a child.
Gil had only disconnected and dazed memories of the next events, like the scattered surviving pages from a burnt diary.
He opened the door onto a crowded boulevard of matter-shops, drama-spaces, reliquaries, shared-form communion theaters, colloquy-salons, and flower parks. 
He was dead, that was sure; but not entirely, and not permanently. 
I should mention that, as a science fiction writer, I can comment authoritatively and finally on the true meaning of life.
I was dead for about half a day.
It was a time of masquerade.
It was dusk in Manhattan, and Yumiko Ume Moth sat atop the Chrysler Building combing and braiding her shining hair of raven-black and brooding blackly on vengeance.
It was our fault.
Once there lived a shining field where amaranth and moly grew.
Pain.
Personality and memory download in progress.
She did not know her mother's name.
She found herself in a blinding light that did not blind her.
Standing and frowning in the New York snow, Hal Landfall realized he did not recall the name of the woman pushing his mother's wheelchair toward his father's grave.
The Earth was gone.
The estate grounds were, at once, our home, our academy, and our prison.
The future did not arrive.
The North Carolina police officers in Asheville took away the bright sword and silver armor, swan winged helm and knightly shield indight with his father's coat-of-arms of Gilberec Parzival Moth when they arrested him.
There was no time.
Upon a midnight in midsummer, in an unchanging ancient house upon the coast, in the year when he was a boy no more and a man not yet, Galen Waylock heard the far-off sound of the sea-bell tolling slowly in his dream.
Years ago, my friend Perithoös went into the Night Lands.
Her name was Ginny. 
The animals gathered, one by one, outside the final city of Man, furtive, curious, and afraid.
The monsters still howl for him, months after he fell. 
I was overcome with awe, and fell to my face when I saw the Chronomancer walking slowly toward me along the balcony.
We are lost in endless and titanic halls of windowless metal. 
The time was Autumn, and what few beech trees had been spared released gold leaves into the chilly air, to swirl and dance and fall. 
He sat in the shade of the trees at the edge of the cliff, watching the leaves fall slowly, whirling, blowing, dancing down through the air, eventually to fall into the sea. 
When her fiancée told her he was a Time Warden, at first, she laughed. 
The first principle of telepathic consumption is this: any two thoughts, sufficiently similar, are one. 
When the last mist passed, I finally found myself in a strange place. 
It was not the being dead that I minded, it was the hours.
I realize another century is supposed to pass before you wake from cold sleep, but, since it is my turn to be alive, I thought I should quickly summarized the events of the late Twenty Fifth Century for you, and for Rogers, Graham, Davis,  Taylor, and Arthur.
Ours is a Seyfert galaxy. 
I’m sorry that I smiled at him when he came in, all dripping from the rain.
“Mr. Went, if you could visit anyone in the world, any time, any place, who would you go see?
So I am telling you the end before you hear the beginning or the middle, right?
Naturally, I selected Halloween as the time for an experiment of such daring. 
It was not abduction.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.
‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
124 was spiteful.
Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
All this happened, more or less.
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
It was a pleasure to burn.
Her name is Melanie.
My mama always told me I had the devil's eyes.
A mile below the lowest cloud, rock breaches water and the sea begins.
Polly cut off her hair in front of the mirror, feeling slightly guilty about not feeling very guilty about doing so.
Polly cut off her hair in front of the mirror, feeling slightly guilty about not feeling very guilty about doing so.
There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.
There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.
Balmy November air thick with jet fuel and salt clung to Ben’s black tactical bodysuit as he crossed the tarmac in Ceiba, Puerto Rico.
The rule of Aare is rule one: Surrender none.
Authors who write in the first person cannot expect their readers to be seriously concerned about the survival of the main character.
The one who would soon be king ran naked through the woods.
Flames shot high, turning the night lurid with carneval light.
Fanny Weldon didn't remember much about her life before the Fire.
Meridion sat in the darkness, lost in thought
His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a country boy who had never seen Trantor before.
Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it.
Caldwell turned and as he turned his ankle received an arrow.
This morning I got a note from my aunt asking me to come for lunch.
Walking to school over the snow-muffled cobbles, Karou had no sinister premonitions about the day.
Harriet Vane sat at her writing-table and stared out into Mecklenburg Square.
There are many dreary and dingy rows of ugly houses in certain parts of London, but there certainly could not be any row more ugly or dingier than Philibert Place.
I have had the same nightmare for the past month.
THERE WERE THINGS Dillard Wayne Early Jr. dreaded more than the start of school at Forrestville High.
WELCOME TO THE beautiful Sinclair family.
If Dad had been a coal baron, like Mr. Tudor Carstairs, or a stock- watering captain of industry, like Mrs. Sanderson-Spear’s husband, or descended from a long line of whisky distillers, like Mrs. Carmichael Porter, why, then his little Elizabeth would have been allowed the to sit in seat of the scornful with the rest of the Four Hundred, and this story would never have been written.
Yan was much like other twelve-year-old boys in having a keen interest in Indians and in wild life, but he differed from most in this, that he never got over it.
“Blast it all, what behemoth tightened this thing!” Erin pulled hard, both hands on the wrench.
The stuttering rain slipped down the windshield of the Impala.
It’s twenty past ten at night and I’m being escorted through the glass-fronted atrium of a certain office building in central London.
There are a number of smells one expects to encounter in a dungeon.
Once upon a time, there was a boy born with frost in his eyes and frost in his heart.
In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three.
The mutineers would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for the collapse of the Flow.
She stood, shifted, eyed him impassively.
From the top of the large boulder he sat on, Ensign Tom Davis looked across the expanse of the cave toward Captain Lucius Abernathy, Science Officer Q’eeng and Chief Engineer Paul West perched on a second, larger boulder, and thought, Well, this sucks.
It was a good day on the military transfer station orbiting the planet Sergyar.
They want me to kill a child, Lieutenant Oscar Britton thought.
My mother is dead, I've been chained up like a frigging dog and been forced to wear a bloody Hawaiian shirt and khakis, and now we have Lucifer running around God knows where."
Even at the moment she was born she knew something was wrong.
The girl from the future told me that the sky is full of dying worlds.
I have come to stay in Amalfi.
You know me.
There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart's Desire.
Temur sat cross-legged on a warm stone.
West Ealing is a suburb to the west of London, and Keith Stewart lives there in the lower part of No. 56 Somerset Road
Grace glanced up to try to see if the boys were really watching her. 
At dusk they pour from the sky.
Georgie pulled into the driveway, swerving to miss a bike.
Lydia is dead.
She had long legs, big brown eyes, great tits and cheek-bones to cut bread on.
I was very young and lived with my grandparents in a villa with white walls in the Calle Ocharán, in Miraflores.
The night Effia Otcher was born into the musky heat of Fanteland, a fire raged through the woods just outside her father's compound.
I saw Lila for the last time five years ago, in the winter of 2005.
I am writing this at the behest of my advocate, Mr Andrew Sinclair, who since my incarceration here in Inverness has treated me with a degree of civility I in no way deserve.
There is a sort of coal hole in the heart of Soho that is open every afternoon: a dark, dank, dead-ended subterranean tunnel.
Watch your step.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The first thing Miss Judith Hearne unpacked in her new lodgings was the silver-framed photograph of her aunt.
I am an invisible man.
The New York docks were almost peaceful at night. 
he 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. 
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. 
I peel back my eyelids, and brightness floods in, forcing me to shut them again. 
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.
This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
Midway between Old Oba-Nneewi Road and New Oba-Nnewi Road, in that general area bound by the village church and the primary school, and where Mmiri John Road drops off only to begin again, stood our house in Ojoto.
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. 
Small trees had attacked my parents' house at the foundation.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. 
Ede remarks, shortly after my father dies, that suicide is a death which leaves its traces, and at the time I find the idea almost comforting.
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.
They do not know it, but the wolf is already at the gate.
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. 
From October 1976 until 1979, when I returned to Naples to live, I avoided resuming a steady relationship with Lila.
 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.
 Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting
Right before my twelfth birthday, my dad, Jules, and I moved into a two-room apartment in a building that we called the Ostrich Hotel.
124 was spiteful.
Had I not gone searching for the number of some dead roofer called Fenton and found the attic room in need of an airing, I may not have heard a thing.
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." 
The sun has barely crept over the horizon but the gracht is already awash with souls aware to wring a living - or a little more than a living - from the stream of commerce that pulsates through our great city's canals.
 In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. 
Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. 
Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.
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. 
The last day of August, and the sky is the colour of hot ash.
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.
Miss Palfrey first came to the Claremont Hotel on a Sunday afternoon in January.
On this day, which is the Ninth day of November in the year of 1683, a most singular thing has occurred.
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.
"Ah, don't begin to fuss!" wailed Kitty; "if a woman began to worry in these days because her husband hadn't written to her for a fortnight -!"
We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
Very quietly and carefully, hardly moving her thin young neck and round shoulders, Elsie looked round the room, first at the french windows into the garden, then at the door, measuring distances.
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. 
In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.
All day it has been windy - strange weather for late July - the wind swirled through the hedges like an invisble flood-tide among seaweed; tugging, compelling them in its own direction, dragging them one way until the patches of elder and privet sagged outward from the tougher stretches of blackthorn on either side.
I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.
A young man, young but not very young, sits in an anteroom somewhere, some wing or other, in the Palace of Versailles.
Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. 
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. 
On a warm night in early July of that long-evaporated year, the Interestings gathered for the very first time.
 If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. 
The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus-driver.
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.
John Sinnott cut his hand trying to raise a stuck window in the downstairs bathroom.
When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson. 
The Whistle Stop Cafe opened up last week, right next door to me at the post office, and owners Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison said business has been good ever since.
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
The dog mumbles something under her breath.
Here is an account of a few years in the life of Quoyles, born in Brooklyn and raised in a shuffle of dreary upstate towns.
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. 
Have you ever tasted a Whitstable oyster?
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. 
The sea which lies before me as I write glows rather than sparkles in the bland May sunshine.
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.
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. 
 In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. 
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. 
The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.
I was thinking about food.
They said I was a drug addict.
Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she'd been told that she would kill her true love. 
You know how sometimes when you're drifting off to sleep you feel that jolt, like you were falling  caught yourself at the last second?
You can hear a miracle a long way after dark. 
"I wonder when in the world you're going to do anything, Rudolf?" said my brother's wife.
A biker finds a motorcycle at an old mechanic shop that has a pussy in the seat so you can fuck it while riding; he has to keep it a secret because all the guys in his biker gang would want to fuck it.
Professor Branestawm, like all great men, had simple tastes.
I shall clasp my hands together and bow to the corners of the world.
Jen Wu is a day Master Li sets aside for my literary endeavors, and I was pleased that it was cold and rainy and fit for little else than splashing ink around.
I still dream of the island.
One grey morning the first snow began to fall in the Valley of the Moomins.
The Moomin family had been living for some weeks in the valley where they had found their house after the dreadful flood (which is another story).
I, Moominpappa, am sitting tonight by my window gazing into my garden, where the fireflies embroider their mysterious signs on the velvet dark.
The sky was almost black, but the snow shone a bright blue in the moonlight.
It must have been late in the afternoon one day at the end of August when Moomintroll and his mother arrived at the deepest part of the great forest.
One afternoon at the end of August, Moominpappa was walking about in his garden feeling at a loss.
Moominmamma was sitting on the front steps in the sun, rigging a model bark schooner.
One calm and cloudless evening, towards the end of April, Snufkin found himself far enough to the north to see still unmelted patches of snow on the northern slopes.
There were four of us – George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency.
There was once a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself – not just sometimes, but always.
South of base camp, a daisy-clipper skimmed through the flashwood, buffeting the undergrowth into a brilliant display of light.
Amid the ten thousand noises and the jade-and-gold and the whirling dust of Xinan, he had often stayed awake all night among friends, drinking spiced wine in the North District with the courtesans.
In the hall of light, they reminded her of her destiny.
The steerswoman centered her chart on the table and anchored the corners around.
His hand shook, and the mark he made with the bit of charcoal wavered as he drew it: a small, lopsided cross, one arm trailing off unevenly.
The paper was wrinkled and torn down one side; the ink was smudged, and the lines weren’t exactly steady.
Lest anyone should suppose that I am a cuckoo's child, got on the wrong side of the blanket by lusty peasant stock and sold into indenture in a shortfallen season, I may say that I am House-born and reared in the Night Court proper, for all the good it did me.
It was the first break in the weather.
Children were always the worst.
I went to the salt beds by the mouth of the river, in the May of my nineteenth year, to get salt for the sacred meal.
When Beyond Birthday committed his third murder, he attempted an experiment.
Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss.
I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
There was a wall.
The light freighter Bargain Hunter moved through space, silver-gray against the blackness, the light of the distant stars reflecting from its hull.
Again the deadly blue light engulfed him.
The sun blinded me briefly as it rose over an insignificant little town.
I walked into the reference section.
As I wandered down an aisle in the fiction section of the library, a yellowed paper card in my hand, a book fell onto my head.
Paul wandered across the sands of time, which, technically speaking, weren’t actually sands.
Paul strode purposefully down the street, tripped on a stray tuft of grass, and resumed striding.
Paul was a forty year old time traveler from the state of Washington, in the country called the United States of America, on the planet Earth, in the year 1986 A.D.
Once upon a time, the universe was being devoured. (It couldn’t help it, the poor thing.)
Once upon a time, in a number of lands and such and the spaces and times in between, which were staggeringly far away (and long), there was a man destined to save the universe.
Paul stopped walking and looked at the sky.
Rigel was officially born in 2046.
Traffic Coordinator Ka-Nei Rigel  surveyed the colony with satisfaction.
Rigel looked up at the ceiling of his colony, where his family hung asleep in their cocoons.
A light from outside streaked the wall.
On the 3600th day of the 49th year of the 50th Opposition, Traffic Coordinator Ka-Nei Norman Rigel 3 was directing traffic.
Rigel is listening to Keskan giving his weather report, when suddenly they are interrupted by a quiet BOOM from outside.
Rigel noticed the impending sandstorm about a mile from the nearest Refuge.
Rigel ran through the rising sandstorm, internally cursing himself.
Rigel flailed through the sandstorm, tripping over lots of stuff 'cause he couldn’t see.
Rigel pushed the heavy stone doors shut and looked up at the sky.
A blinding flash of ultraviolet light and a very loud boom.
The trouble started when I tripped over a rock. 
The first thing I did that day was stand at the base of the obelisk and wait for lightning to strike.
I stopped and looked up into the mountains, where the gray dust of the hills gave way to bare rock.
I took Tunapi with me to visit the Vadak monastery as I did every twenty cycles.
I stepped closer to the wall to get a better perception.
A healer named Rikel walked up a mountain one day and found an alien.
"This has gone on long enough!"
Rikel had been crossing the valley on his way to Nae Weather Colony when the alien popped into existence behind him and pointed a metal thing at him.
The problem, I later realized, was simply that I was an alien in a bus shelter.
Earth tried first to suffocate me.
I have been stranded on Earth for five or six days.
Rigel didn’t have a problem with planet Earth, just with being there.
Not so very long ago, I was a subnormal being living on a small planet in the Hunter’s Branch of the Galaxy.
Rigel wearily knocked on Carmela’s front door, standing in the small circle of yellow lamplight.
A chill wind sent brown, crumbling leaves skittering across the ground at Pelagian’s feet.
My foster mother opened the door and smiled broadly upon seeing my face.
Not very long ago, in this galaxy right here, I thought I was a human who had grown up in Arizona.
The burning point of white light in the deep blue sky fades to nothing.
Five million years ahead of my time, I went supernova.
Half the people in the Silver Springs UFO club didn’t believe in aliens, that is, until November 23, 2014.
The time machine had completely disintegrated, leaving me and Rigel standing in the middle of a brand-new tie-dyed crater on Mars.
Rigel entered silently, as he usually does when I am working on the more delicate mechanisms of my machine.
Clanks and clatters emanated from Felix’s garage as I picked the lock on the back door.
It was early in the afternoon on Halloween, and this white girl had come up to me and asked if I knew Jesus.
Rigel seemed puzzled by the idea that he could have ‘come from’ anywhere.
Rigel checked over everything one final time.
Rigel, a young elvish boy of around 12, walks through an enourmous spaceport, trailing behind an older man in military uniform with a bag over his shoulder.
Felix hefted his supersoaker down from its hooks over the front door, and groggily checked the water level.
The street ended at a T-junction, and Rigel stopped.
The planet reeks of darkness.
Few people were out on the water that night, and so there were only a few witnesses to the explosion when the giant, glowing mass of crystal plummeted from the sky, hit the waves with tremendous force, and shattered into shimmering dust.
"She's so ugly!" whispered Roger.
If you're reading this, it must be a thousand years from now.
The aechpriest watched from the caathedral window as his city burned below.
A screaming comes across the sky.
When I was little, my Uncle Pete had a necktie with a porcupine painted on it.
If you'd like a story about how I won my basketball letter and achieved fame, love, and fortune, don't read this.
A blue sun reflected from the still waters of the lake while its yellow companion peeked just above the red leaved trees that surrounded the edge of the water.
The twin moons cast shadows like blood scores across the sand.
My name's Dick Marston, Sydney-side native.
The body lay naked and facedown, a deathly gray, spatters of blood staining the snow around it.
One moment asleep.
"Considering the circumstances, you could use another lieutenant."
When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.
Two pieces of yesterday were in Captain Davidson's mind when he woke, and he lay looking at them in the darkness for a while.
The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.
Come home, Tenar!
In the Court of the Fountain the sun of March shone through young leaves of ash and elm, and water leapt and fell through shadow and clear light.
How can you tell the legend from the fact on these worlds that lie so many years away?—planets without names, called by their people simply The World, planets without history, where the past is a matter of myth, and a returning explorer finds his own doings of a few years back have become the gestures of a god.
In the last days of the last moonphase of Autumn a wind blew from the northern ranges through the dying forests of Askatevar, a cold wind that smelled of smoke and snow.
Imagine darkness.
How the patient scientist feels when the shapeless tussocks and vague ditches under the thistles and scrub begin to take shape and come clear: this was the outer rampart—this the gateway—that was the granary!
It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton.
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.
There it was again, like a signal across a wire.
High on the top of a majestic mountain, in a spot where every view of the valley below was more breathtaking than the next, was a small town called Remarkable.
The Angeles air was quiet, and for a while I lay still, listening to the sound of Maxon's breathing.
The clang of clashing swords rang out over the practice field, its constant rhythm in time with the pounding hearts of their wielders.
John Major III's disabled foot flopped this way and that as he got into the front seat of the Chrysler 4 WD vehicle.
“Wild Cat Island in sight!” Cried Roger, the ship’s boy, who was keeping a look-out, wedged before the mast, and finding that a year had made a lot of difference and that there was much less room for him in there with the anchor and ropes than there used to be the year before when he was only seven.
Peter Duck was sitting on a bollard on the north quay of Lowestoft Inner Harbour, smoking his pipe in the midday sunshine and looking down at a little, green, two-masted schooner that was tied up there while making ready for sea.
At dusk they pour from the sky.
On an alternate world, two million steps from Earth: The troll female was called Mary by her handlers, Monica Jansson read on the rolling caption on the video clip.
As the sun set over the southern kingdom of Pallava, a vast crowd gathered in a park in Kanchipuram, the elegant state capital.
Something was wrong.
They say the world is flat and supported on the back of four elephants who themselves stand on the back of a giant turtle.
About thirty years ago Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, or Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet's lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and a large income.
no one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed  her born to be a heroine.
Honestly, Mrs Hadley,' said Meggie McGregor, wiping her eyes.
It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened.
My name is Elizabeth but no one's ever called me that.
It was a pleasure to burn.
It was only a duckpond, out at the back of the farm.
There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart's Desire.
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
The circus arrives without warning.
Through the dark wood where the dead trees give no shelter, Nanna Birk Larsen runs.
I fling open my bedroom curtains, and there's the thirsty sky and the wide river full of ships and boats and stuff, but I'm already thinking of Vinny's chocolatey eyes, shampoo down Vinny's back, beads of sweat on Vinny's shoulders, and Vinny's sly laugh, and by now my heart's going mental and, God, I wish I was waking up at Vinny's place in Peacock Street an not in my own stupid bedroom.
Once upon a time - for that is how all stories should begin -  there was a boy who lost his mother.
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos.
The other day, in looking over my papers, I found in my desk the following copy of a letter, sent by me a year ago to an old school acquaintance:-- "Dear Charles, I think when you and I were at Eton together, we were neither of us what could be called popular characters: you were a sarcastic, observant, shrewd, cold-blooded creature; my own portrait I will not attempt to draw, but I cannot recollect that it was a strikingly attractive one-- can you?
My dear brother,-- I can no longer refuse myself the pleasure of profiting by your kind invitation when we last parted of spending  some weeks with you at Churchill, and, therefore, if quite convenient to you and Mrs Vernon to receive me at present, I shall hope within a few days to be introduced to a sister whom I have so long desired to be acquainted with.
"Are my children still alive?" 
The land of Equestria knew not war.
"Aaaaaah," sighed Rarity as she snuggled against the cushions in her booth. 
"Are you gonna eat that?"
Flywheel stifled a yawn as she stared at the myriad gauges in front of her.
The glitterings of Gold, Jewels, Tapestries, &c. belie the Corruption of he who 'til recently occupied this high Seat. 
I don't like talking. 
She knows there is something wrong with the baby.
The body you are wearing used to be mine.
Travelling alone on public transportation has got to be one of the most universal human experiences.
At dusk, when the stars rose one by one into a frozen sky, Usuguk approached the snowhouse as silently as a fox.
Pee-Wee Boxer surveyed the jobsite with disgust.
On the morning of the eclipse, Doreen McCloud hurried from Starbucks with the Chronicle tucked under her arm.
The events I am about to relate began on a December afternoon, when I had invited lady Harold Carrington and certain of her friends to tea.
I never meant to marry.
Hercule Poirot looked with interest and appreciation at the young woman who was being ushered into the room.
Between 7:30 and 8:30 every morning except Sundays, Johnnie Butt made the round of the village of Chipping Cleghorn on his bicycle, whistling vociferously through his teeth, and alighting at each house or cottage to shove through the letterbox such morning papers as had been ordered by the occupants of the house in question from Mr. Totman, stationer, of the High Street.
This inscription could be seen on the glass door of a small shop, but naturally this was only the way it looked if you were inside the dimly lit shop, looking out at the street through the plateglass door.
I hate going to work in the mornings.
One Warm Night four children stood in front of a bakery
Dawn came to the Congo rain forest
Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest.
A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.
Steve Grant rounded the corner of the parking lot behind Black Spring Market & Deli just in time to see Katherine van Wyler get run over by an antique Dutch barrel organ.
I awoke to darkness.
We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world
It was a curse, to be a god's son.
Kol Badar glared across the expanse of the cavaedium.
Richard did not become frightened until darkness began to settle over the woods.
The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory.
The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.
The stone door slammed.
Ove is fifty-nine.
Every seven-year-old deserves a superhero.
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had popped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?"
"Marx has completely changed the way I view the world," declared the Pallieres boy this morning, although ordinarily he says nary a word to me.
On our wedding day I was forty-six, she was eighteen.
The old ram stands looking down over rockslides, stupidly triumphant.
Major Pettigrew was still upset about the phone call from his brother's wife and so he answered the doorbell without thinking.
There was recently a rather serious difference of opinion between that great expert in the art of government, King henry the Eighth of England, and His Serene Highness, Prince Charles of Castile. 
I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands.
Halfway down a bystreet of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst.
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.
When Patricia was six years old, she found a wounded bird.
This is the story of a man who went far away for a long time, just to play a game.
Adrana had always hated Doctor Morcenx.
Morathi, Queen of the elves of Naggaroth, watched the tidal wave of flesh thunder towards her.
The Thunderbolt cut througj the frigid air like an ivory dagger, trailing white contrails from the leading edges of its wings.
It's coming for Him.'
She spoke the words with a knife in her hand and a lie on her lips.
She spoke the words with a knife in her hand and a lie on her lips.
"George, I wish you'd look at the nursery."
Under an iron star set in a sky the colour of raw meat, the Ghosts of Tanith made their loyal but weary advance towards...
The first concussion cut the rocket up the side with a giant can opener.
It wasn't safe to pray anywhere on Reredos.
It feels like the afterlife, and none of them are entirely convinced that it isn't.
When hey heard the news they came out of the restaurants and cafes and hotels and looked at the sky.
The cooling afternoon rain had come over the valley, touching the corn in the tilled mountain fields, tapping on the dry grass roof of the hut.
RIP was an acronym, and it happened in the Basement.
The woman put her sad moon-face in at the window of the car.
The first day of my new life began with ice and ended with flames.
I think that everything, or at least the part of everything that happened to me, started with the Roman architecture mix-up.
The thing happened with the appalling swiftness of a hawk swooping out of a quiet sky, on a day in late spring, when Frytha was not quite five.
The slave who came to fetch me on that unseasonably warm spring morning was a young man, hardly more than twenty.
Seeking a place to be alone, to think and reason and attend to the strange pounding of his heart, Raamo climbed high, until he could almost touch the fronds of the rooftrees.
Rain, rain and more rain!
The warm summer breeze drifted along the seaside piers lining the harbor of Reven's Landing.
Flickering flames cast long shadows.
Beth learned of her mother's death from a woman with a clipboard.
I was not yet one day old when Cookmother found me on the doorstep of the Tribequeen's kitchen.
Martha Abbott woke up on the seventh day of April and sat straight up in bed with her eyes wide open.
"Please, Tavi," wheedled the girl in the predawn darkness outside the steadholt's kitchen.
The small boys came early to the hanging.
In the freezing, eternal darkness, Candens set fire to his bow.
"There are dragons in the twins' vegetable garden."
The big kitchen of the Murrys' house was bright and warm, curtains drawn against the dark outside, against the rain driving past the house from the northeast.
The Red Union had been attacking the headquarters of the April Twenty-eighth Brigade for two days.
The brown ant had already forgotten its home.
He was different from his brothers and sisters.
The body turns in the stream.
The sound of rifles was like the cracking of whips.
Veldt to scrub to fields to farms to these first tumbling houses that rise from the earth.
A GREEN AND YELLOW PARROT, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over: “Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi! That’s all right!”
Colonel Preston Lost did not think of himself as reckless, because he believed in preparation, proper equipment, patience in stalking the prey.
April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.
It was quiet enough in the library that Twilight could almost literally feel the cabin fever growing behind her eyes.
The fisherponies looked up to the sky as they placed their nets into the holds of their little boats.
Twilight Sparkle suddenly realized that something was different.
“Oh, you’re here! Thanks so much for offering to watch over everything!” Twilight said.
"Tea, Highness?" said the tottery dun-colored unicorn mare, offering up one of the innumerable Royal Kettles for my approval.
"Oh come on, Applejack!
It was a beautiful day in Ponyville.
It was in Canterlot, that famous and fabled city, where Twilight Sparkle was made aware of the gate.
"Did you see how Wavebreaker burst out of the water at the end?!" Rainbow Dash exclaimed with a glinting grin.
"Uh!" Applejack grunted as she spiked the volleyball with her front hoof.
It really was a most unusual day in Ponyville.
Rarity's shriek could be heard all the way to down town Ponyville.
The battered band of ponies, plus one draconequus, ran through the dense undergrowth of the Everfree as fast as they could gallop.
In another time, another place, an alicorn Princess sent her faithful student a final test-- an unfinished spell by the greatest unicorn mage in Equestrian history. 
Twilight dashed back and forth through the library, frantically trying to organize twenty different things simultaneously, with Spike alternately dogging at her heels and running off in his own direction.
It took less than a week after Cadence and Shining Armor's wedding for Equestria to go completely to hell.
A layer of clouds stretched out below Rainbow Dash, providing a fluffy blanket over Ponyville.
Rainbow Dash dipped her wings.
“Mister Andrews,” said Bishop Van de Velde to me as he elbowed his way into his seat at the crowded breakfast table, “you are going to host a Christmas pageant for the ponies.”
The straps dug into the top of Celestia’s muzzle, little patches of discomfort where the metal fittings pressed into her flesh.
Eyes closed, Lyra sat upright on her stool and, using a combination of touch and magic to draw out a melody, stroked her hooves across the strings of her harp.
A bush at the edge of Ponyville hid a young filly, its leaves providing the barest of concealment.
Cup Cake stood there, staring at the gentle curves of the stranger’s body.
“Alright, colts, pucker up and pay up!”
Ponyville greeted me like a long-lost friend.
Fluttershy stood in the bathroom, once more running the towel up and down her forelegs.
Another day, another demonaic despot deposed.
The portal opened and Brony Steve’s body reassembled.
Ponyville looked like a tiny model underneath the clouds.
I have always thought that if there was ever a stallion and a steam engine that were made for one another, then it was old Highball and his longtime partner, #3803.
Secretly, every parent in Ponyville appreciated the location of the Everfree Forest.
With his mouth hanging open, Brad stood in the middle of Twilight Sparkle's backyard and swayed on his feet as he stared up at the glowing disc hovering in the air.
The morning sun shone gently through the thick curtains of the Canterlot castle guest bedroom as Twilight Sparkle stirred beneath the sheets.
Luna stood on the balcony of her sleeping chambers and let her gaze wander over the city of Canterlot, a thoughtful frown on her face.
Canterlot was bustling as it was every sunny day.
"Move along class, we've still got three more exhibits to see!" Cheerilee spoke in the friendly, yet authoritative voice all teachers were so fond of.
At the edge of the Everfree, under a purple and darkening sky, Zecora stood over a great iron cauldron that sat upon a flickering fire.
“Alright Scootaloo, this is it. The night you finally tell the girls the truth,” Scootaloo mumbled to herself as she paced back and forth outside the CMC clubhouse.
Time slows when he moves fast enough.
The sun was high in the sky.
The cavern was silent.
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
'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die. 
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.
Every expedition has a reckoning point, the moment when an adventurer must navigate her own inner tumult and find strength to continue.
I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning.
On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology.
Tick the box.
It is a long way in time and space from the bathroom of my Grandmother Mowat's house in Oakville, Ontario, to the bottom of a wolf den in the Barren Lands of central Keewatin, and I have no intention of retracing the entire road which lies between.
It's raining, Annie.
Si Wang-mu stepped forward.
I was born on January 31, 1979 -- a Wednesday.
This is a tale of meeting of two lonesome, kinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.
Call me Jonah.
The alphabet grid is a method of non-vocal communication.
It was 7 minutes after midnight.
Lije Baley had just reached his desk when he became aware of R. Sammy watching him expectantly.
One minute it was Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost, icicles fringing every roof, children skiing on slopes, housewives lumbering like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets.
In the mid-Depression year of 1934, Everett Ruess disappeared.
The thing was: One million years ago, back in 1986 A. D., Guayaquil was the chief seaport of the little South American democracy of Ecuador, whose capital was Quito, high in the Andes Mountains.
It was inconceivable to me that there could be more than one way to play in the dirt, but there it was.
Asperger's came into my life when I was forty years old.
It's so dark that for awhile -- just how long I don't know -- I think I'm still unconscious.
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.
Everett Ruess was born on March 28, 1914, in Oakland, California.
It's only life.
"To your left you will see the great desert of Giza, and on your right, the three most magnificent pyramids in all of Egypt."
Surging and receding...
I was 37 then, strapped in my seat as the huge 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach to Hamburg airport.
When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along to an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.
There were many theories about the strange illness of the second Ruler of the Free Republic of Aburĩria, but the most frequent on people's lips were five.
Before the sun and moon were metal, they were grain.
The old man, trilling softly, had sat by the dock since the start of the morning’s work.
No one knew what was under the carpet.
Lest anyone should suppose that I am a cuckoo's child, got on the wrong side of the blanket by lusty peasant stock and sold into indenture in a shortfallen season, I may say that I am House-born and reared in the Night Court proper, for all the good it did me.
Lasagna is a very wide, flat pasta, sometimes with wavy edges. 
There weren't supposed to be vans in Central Park, but of all the reasons to pick a fight with Kraven the Hunter, that would probably be the worst.
FOUR DIRKS stand in an ANTECHAMBER.
FOUR DIRKS stand in an ANTECHAMBER.  There are as many CHAIRS as there are STAIRS, which is to say, a lot.
Nine? Can you hear me? If you can, please be patient. I promise that I will answer you. I understand that you might be afraid.
I don't have any appointments until 11. In case there are any walk-ins, I keep the office door propped open with an old kicking tee.
Everyone else in Paltar Orlosza was asleep, except the ones who were dead.
Trapped. Crushed. Weight coming in from all directions, entangled in the wreckage (you have to become one with the machine).
"You're breaking up"
You hear the car after an hour and a half.
tic tic tic tic . . . Tiny noises of compression, sounding through her skull.
I was in my room, reading a book.
Two days ago, I decided to kill myself.
"This one might be trouble"
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days.
I take pride withal in my humiliation, and as I am to this privilege condemned, I find joy in an abhorrent salvation; I am, I believe, alone of all our race, the only man in human memory to have been shipwrecked and cast up upon a deserted ship.
The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw.
The buzz in the street was like the humming of flies.
It begins, as most things begin, with a song.
"Somebody bloody famous," said the hoarse voice on the end of the line, "better've died, Strike."
When I idly added the first sentence of my novel into a neural network's dataset, I could scarcely have known that by doing so I was putting all of humanity into grave peril. 
He had not managed to scrub off all her blood.
People usually start life by being born.
Gestures are all that I have; sometimes they must be grand in nature.
Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York.
Louisa May Alcott approached the ticket window of the Boston passenger station clutching a large case and a black parasol. 
It happens sometimes that you accidentally star in a little public performance of your very own comedy, tragedy, or melodrama.
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday.
The walk from the law school to Yorkside was short.
The primroses were over.
At the end of the night that would change everything, the widow stood on her porch and watched as the young woman was marched down her front drive and shoved into the sedan.
Let me tell you of the worlds I've left behind.
Since Maria had decided to die her cat would have to fend for itself.
It was her third time with live ammunition... and her first time on the draw from the holster Roland had rigged for her.
No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine.
I address these lines - written in India - to my relatives in England.
A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and hate.
About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet's lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income.
This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.
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.
It was starting to end, after what seemed most of eternity to me.
It was reality TV that convinced SILAS he would need to annihilate humanity in order to go on living. 
On the day of the apocalypse, before the sky collapsed, the whole gang was set for lunch at the shopping mall, and Bartek only survived — if he survived — because his upstairs neighbor's jolting washing machine had smashed a hole in the wall of her bathroom, flooding the gutted wiring and blowing the fuses throughout the building. 
Walt cursed beneath his breath as another runnel of water found its way over the brim of his black felt hat and down the neck of his blue greatcoat. 
My name is Ezron Blenderman. 
There are always those who ask, what is it all about?
First there was only the empty golden circle of the hot spot, blazing against the silk curtains. 
The Invincible, a class II cruiser, the largest vessel of the fleet stationed at the base in the Lyra constellation, was moving in photon sequence across a quadrant on the very edge of that cluster of starts. 
The Eighth World Futurological Congress was held in Costa Rica. 
I don't know what to do. 
It came time to put Manny in a school. 
In another life, in another war, this job would be routine. 
I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other.
"A gentleman to see you, Doctor."
Thanks be to St. Martin, business is bad, so there is no use in breaking one's back; and Lord knows I have worked hard enough in my time to take a little rest and comfort here at my table, with a bottle of wine on my right hand, the ink-well on the left, and a new quire of paper before me.
When Mr. Dildo Bugger of Bug End grudgingly announced his intention of throwing a free feed for all the boggies in his part of the Sty, the reaction in Boggietown was immediate—all through the messy little slum could be heard squeals of "Swell!" and "Hot puppies, grub!"
After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, the Danube enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low willow-bushes.
A considerable number of hunting parties were out that year without finding so much as a fresh trail; for the moose were uncommonly shy, and the various Nimrods returned to the bosoms of their respective families with the best excuses the facts of their imaginations could suggest.
At nineteen hundred hours ship's time I climbed down the metal ladder past the bays on either side into the capsule. 
3 May. Bistritz.—Left Munich at 8:35 P. M., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late.
The Eighth World Futurological Congress was held in Costa Rica. 
"Cadet Pirx!"
One day Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could create anything starting with n. 
Once upon a time Trurl the constructor built an eight-story thinking machine. 
“I have steadfastly resisted the temptation…” – said Professor Mmaa; and as he spoke it suddenly occurred to him that the world was simple and not complicated. 
His job, as always, bored him. 
Horselover Fat's nervous breakdown began the day he got the phonecall from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals. 
I am carving these words on clay tablets in front of my cave. 
The last day was by far the longest and most drawn out. 
When the devil moved in next door, Cooper Smith Cooper had the same question everyone else did: how would it affect the property values? 
On Tuesday, October 11, 1988, the Jason Taverner Show ran thirty seconds short. 
Early in the bright sun-yellowed morning, Stuart McConchie swept the sidewalk before Modern TV Sales & Service, hearing the cars along Shattuck Avenue and the secretaries hurrying on high heels to their offices, all the stirrings and fine smells of a new week, a new time in which a good salesman could accomplish things. 
I took nothing with me, not even a coat. 
The train stopped briefly in Nieczawy. 
Rattling rhythmically at each floor, the old-fashioned elevator moved upward past glass doors decorated with etchings of flowers. 
"Nice landing."
"Roog!" the dog said. 
A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard. 
You are one of the top Problem Sleuths in the city.
They had almost finished with the loading. 
The apteryx-shaped building, so familiar to him, gave off its usual smoky gray light as Eric Sweetscent collapsed his wheel and managed to park in the tiny stall allocated him. 
Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair. 
Once there lived a certain great inventor-constructor who, never flagging, thought up unusual devices and fashioned the most amazing mechanisms. 
It was on a Monday, April second—I was cruising in the vicinity of Betelgeuse—when a meteor no larger than a lima bean pierced the hull, shattered the drive regulator and part of the rudder, as a result of which the rocket lost all maneuverability. 
For a week Mr R. Childan had been anxiously watching the mail. 
From the cold-storage locker at the rear of the store, Victor Nielson wheeled a cart of winter potatoes to the vegetable section of the produce department. 
All at once he was in motion. 
The sun has gone. 
True! —nervous —very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?
In the night-time heart of Beirut, in one of a row of general-address transfer booths, Louis Wu flicked into reality.
There was a moment so short that it had never been successfully measured, yet always far too long.
Questions, always questions. 
"It went in white, but will it come out mulatto in a few months' time, yes?"
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
Destiny has a way of finding you, even if you've been hidden from it.
The Horde was assembling for war.
I turned away from the window and ran like my life depended upon it.
The cloudless night whispered sweet promises to Aniri.
The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
The Alchemist grabbed a book that someone from the caravan had brought.
As the author says in her introduction, it is very important to the peace of the world that we understand how wars begin.
There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.
In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three.
Lyra and her dæmon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.
If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.
The stretch of road that leads out of the city, past Hazy Harbor and into the town of Tedia, is perhaps the most unpleasant in the world.
Sometime during your life—in fact, very soon—you may find yourself reading a book, and you may notice that a book's first sentence can often tell you what sort of story your book contains.
When my workday is over, and I have closed my notebook, hidden my pen, and sawed holes in my rented canoe so that it cannot be found, I often like to spend the evening in conversation with my few surviving friends.
If you were going to give a gold medal to the least delightful person on Earth, you would have to give that medal to a person named Carmelita Spats, and if you didn't give it to her, Carmelita Spats was the sort of person who would snatch it from your hands anyway.
No matter who you are, no matter where you live, and no matter how many people are chasing you, what you don't read is often as important as what you do read.
There are two reasons why a writer would end a sentence with the word "stop" written entirely in capital letters STOP.
A man of my acquaintance once wrote a poem called "The Road Less Traveled," describing a journey he took through the woods along a path most travelers never used.
After a great deal of time examining oceans, investigating rainstorms, and staring very hard at several drinking fountains, the scientists of the world developed a theory regarding how water is distributed around our planet, which they have named "the water cycle."
Certain people have said that the world is like a calm pond, and that anytime a person does even the smallest thing, it is as if a stone has dropped into the pond, spreading circles of ripples further and further out, until the entire world has been changed by one tiny action.
If you have ever peeled an onion, then you know that the first thin, papery layer reveals another thin, papery layer, and that layer reveals another, and another, and before you know it you have hundreds of layers all over the kitchen table and thousands of tears in your eyes, sorry that you ever started peeling in the first place and wishing that you had left the onion alone to wither away on the shelf of the pantry while you went on with your life, even if that meant never again enjoying the complicated and overwhelming taste of this strange and bitter vegetable.
Schlaak!
The music room in the Governor's house at Port Mahon, a tall, handsome, pillared octagon, was filled with the triumphant first movement of Locatelli's C major quartet.
At first dawn the swathes of rain drifting eastwards across the Channel parted long enough to show that the chase had altered course.
Pass the word for Captain Aubrey, pass the word for captain Aubrey,' cried a sequence of voices, at first dim and muffled far aft on the flagship's maindeck, then growing louder and more distinct as the call wafted up to the quarterdeck and so along the gangway to the forecastle, where Captain Aubrey stood by the starboard thirty-two-pounder carronade contemplating the Emperor of Morocco's purple galley as it lay off Jumper's Bastion with the vast grey and tawny Rock of Gibraltar soaring behind it, while Mr Blake, once a puny member of his midshipman's berth but now a tall, stout lieutenant almost as massive as his former captain, explained the new carriage he had invented, a carriage that should enable carronades to fire twice as fast, with no fear of oversetting, twice as far, and with perfect accuracy, thus virtually putting an end to war.
A series of distant booms reverberated through the bridge of the deep submergence shuttle Leviathan.
Major Jamie Fraser could hardly breathe as the packed Metro train lurched out of the station for Les Sablons.
All of us were dumbfounded when Zamatryna-Harani insisted on the old customs for her wedding.
The office of the Director of North American Missions is a blue-lit room in Northern City, 246 feet below the tundra of the Canadian Northwest Territory.
As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small talk.
To be honest, I haven't been able to remember clearly everything that happened to me before and during Trial, so where necessary I've filled in with possibilities—lies, if you want.
The rain was a slantwise curtain across the dingy street, washing soot from city walls, the taste of it metallic on the lips of the tall, thin man who walked with a loping stride close to the buildings, watching the mouths of doorways, the gaps of alleys with a narrow-eyed intentness.
In the night there had been storm with great gusts of angry wind to batter ancient walls, aim spear-thrusts of rain at the window slits of the chamber.
I am no song-smith to forge a blade of chant to send men roaring into battle, as the bards of the Sulcar ships do when those sea-serpents nose into enemy ports.
The air of Kandor held the sharpness of new spring when Lan returned to the lands where he had always known he would die.
Her father's ancestors had owned a wide, rich domain on the wide, rich island of Way.
Years and years later, I still start up in the deepest part of night with his agonized face before me.
Discworld is a flat world supported by four elephants standing on top of a huge turtle swimming endlessly through space.
There is a hollow, holey cylinder running from hilt to point in my machete.
Morning mists, white and still filled Yuna Canyon, clinging to boulders and bushes, and to the round, earth-covered houses in the village of Tuliyani.
The sky is the color of bleached bone, neither white nor yellow, but a creamy in-between shade that speaks death from one end of the horizon to another.
Hedvig hammered her fists on the front doors, more out of rage than hope that she would be let out.
Maybe, just maybe, it had been a mistake to paper the walls with edible drugs.
There is a perfect valley, nestled near the foot of the Sherbet Mountains and bordered by the River of Middling Ideas.
Tabitha walks, and thinks of shoes.
"I mean, if you don't want to have one," he says, that single line down the center of his forehead like his face about to peel.
The Deadman always wore red when he came calling.
The moon was high above the canyon, its silver light reaching into even the most shadowed depths.
The first of our children to disappear was Jace Weissman.
I doubt South Jersey's ever been called the Land Where No One Dies, but according to my painter friend, Barney, who lives near Dividing Creek on the edge of the marshland leading to the Delaware, back in the early sixties, out there amid the two-mile stretch of cattails, quaking islands, and rivulets there was a lounge called the Thousand Eyes, and there was a performer who sang there every Wednesday night, advertised on a hand-painted billboard along the northbound land to Money Island as Ronnie Dunn, The Voice Of Death. 
Honestly I can't even with these motherfuckers and their magic beans anymore
Captain Hart stood in the door of the rocket.
The Duelist was an elegant woman, but that was by her own design and had nothing to do with the fact that her mistress bade her act with certain manners when she was not, by law, killing her peers.
The rain continued.
Thea stared out the train window.
The electrical fireflies were hovering above Mother's dark hair to light her path.
"Tell me again, Tommelise," Mrs. Markmusen wheezes from her great bed, "about the Mother and Father."
"What would you do if you knew that this was the last night of the world?"
In Da Trang's nightmares, Pearl is always leaving - darting away from him, toward the inexorable maw of the sun's gravity, going into a tighter and tighter orbit until no trace of it remains - he's always reaching out, sending a ship, a swarm of bots - calling upon the remoras to move, sleed and deadly and yet too agonizingly slow, to do anything, to save what they can.
This story is at least a thousand years old.
When I was a kid, I played with mirrors.
There were fireworks the very first night, things that you should be afraid of perhaps, for they might remind you of other more horrible things, but these were beautiful, rockets that ascended into the ancient soft air of Mexico and shook the stars apart in blue and white fragments.
The real story isn't half as pretty as the one you've heard.
I was thankful that nobody was there to meet me at the airport.
The news was everywhere on the River Bank and had been heard as far as the Wild Wood: Sunflower Cottage just above the weir had been taken by two female animals, and it was being set up for quite an extended stay.
She was back at the bar.
Connie got up from her kitchen table and walked slowly to the door.
In the first place there were Mother and Sister and me with a mother and an aunty human who had a lot of human kittens.
Vellitt Boe was dreaming of a highway and ten million birds in an empty sky of featureless blue.
This was the absolute best and the absolute worst summer of my life, the summer I turned sixteen.
It's snowing on Titan.
I raised my head, listening - not only with my ears, but with every square inch of my skin, waiting for the recurrence of the sound that had awakened me.
Gilbert felt suddenly compelled to wake up.
The story would have been a lot different if Matt's supervisor had been watching him when the machine first went away.
"Chase, I may have found something of interest."
Not a day goes by that the post does not bring me at least one letter from a young person (or sometimes one not so young) who wishes to follow in my footsteps and become a dragon naturalist.
I dreamt that I heard Mr Punch laughing gleefully by my ear, but when I woke I realised it was my phone.
IT’S A sad fact of modern life that if you drive long enough, sooner or later you must leave London behind.
“I heard a noise,” Mrs. Davenport said, “and then I was moving through this tunnel.”
We were still three kloms from King’s X when Carson spotted the dust.
It was the sort of thing one hopes momentarily that one has not really seen—because life would be so much more convenient if one hadn’t.
Lord John Grey jerked his eyes away from the door.
To the best of Lord John Grey’s knowledge, stepmothers as depicted in fiction tended to be venal, evil, cunning, homicidal, and occasionally cannibalistic.
If you deal in death routinely, there are two paths.
Joost had two problems: the moon and his moustache.
TARAN WANTED to make a sword; but Coll, charged with the practical side of his education, decided on horseshoes.
AUTUMN HAD COME too swiftly.
EILONWY OF THE red-gold hair, the Princess Eilonwy Daughter of Angharad Daughter of Regat of the Royal House of Llyr, was leaving Caer Dallben.
IT WAS FULL SPRINGTIME, with promise of the richest summer the farm had ever seen.
UNDER A CHILL, GRAY SKY, two riders jogged across the turf.
It wasn’t a very likely place for disappearances, at least at first glance.
I woke three times in the dark predawn.
When I was small, I never wanted to step in puddles.
I’ve never been afraid of ghosts.
I WOKE TO THE PATTER OF RAIN on canvas, with the feel of my first husband’s kiss on my lips.
TIME IS A LOT OF THE THINGS people say that God is.
THE BODY IS amazingly plastic.
N THE LIGHT OF eternity, time casts no shadow.
She was born Anidori-Kiladra Talianna Isilee, Crown Princess of Kildenree, and she did not open her eyes for three days.
The woman bore a scorch mark from her chin to her brow.
Ma had six sons.
Ingridan was an ancient city.
Irene passed the mop across the stone floor in smooth, careful strokes, idly admiring the gleam of wet flagstones in the lantern-light.
My dear Lady Fennis, We have been friends far too long for me to be circumspect.
I am warm and safe in the den, with my two siblings.
There are children holding hands in a circle.
The Island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.
IT IS A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY acknowledged that a thirty-something woman in possession of a satisfying career and fabulous hairdo must be in want of very little, and Jane Hayes, pretty enough and clever enough, was certainly thought to have little to distress her.
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
On they went, singing "Eternal Memory," and whenever they stopped, the sound of their feet, the horses and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing.
Suppose you are contemplating an island.
ATEH (9th century)—the Khazar princess whose role in the polemic concerning the Khazars' conversion was decisive.
Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls.
Titus is seven.
To north, south, east or west, turning at will, it was not long before his landmarks fled him.
It is space.
I got off to a bad start at Bat Masterson Junior High School.
I thought that going to high school was going to be a big improvement over what I was used to.
Uncle Roy's room was over the garage, behind the house on Pearl Street, where Harold Blatz lived with his mother and father.
Kevin's new social worker was Mr. Justin Jarvis, and Kevin didn't like him one bit.
The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory.
I heard the mailman approach my office door, half an hour earlier than usual.
She hears the clanging, the echoing reverb of an open slap palm on the side of a dumpster.
I rode into Asheville, North Carolina, for all the wrong reasons, from the wrong direction, on a borrowed bike, with no weapons, ready to work for the vamps again.
All that day the wind had rattled the shutters and slanted the sky with snow, but in the warm heart of the Hold Carnelian sat with some of his people around a fire, listening to their talk.
Beneath the imperious gaze of the funerary colossi of the Chosen, the fires lit by a hundred thousand tributaries formed a trembling field of light on the Plain of Thrones.
As I dressed that morning I ran over in my mind the long list of statistics, evasions, and exaggerations that they would expect in my report.
The General lay flat on his back, arms outflung, watching the stars.
A wet winter night.
What it is to be old is to remember the things that nobody else alive can remember.
Lovelace had been in a body for twenty-eight minutes, and it still felt every bit as wrong as it had the second she woke up inside it.
Malcolm Jones turned his battered old Mercedes into his driveway and pulled up as close to Jenny's Camry as he could get.
Sam Vimes sighed when he heard the scream, but he finished shaving before he did anything about it.
Kitesharp was bleeding.
I don't know what makes me turn.
I shut the door of the old Victorian behind me, and the stuffy atmosphere closed in: overheated, dry, and redolent of mothballs.
I ran through the pine forest, my breath making puffs of white vapour in front of me with every exhalation, avoiding the snow so I’d be harder to track.
Dirk Moeller didn't know if he could fart his way into a major diplomatic incident.
Around 11:15 on a Tuesday morning in May, I was perched on my stool behind the counter at Barnegat Books. 
Glove slammed into jaw.
If it hadn't been for Maggie's magic, the eggs would have tumbled from the basket and shattered when the panting barmaid careened into her.
"Pain is instructive," Duncan Chalk wheezed.
Summer had somehow passed along into autumn, as it will, and with October came a good bit of rain.
The broken creature hung suspended on fields of force, amid devices half matter and half energy, flung into patterns and functions unfathomable to but a few minds in all creation.
I breathed a sigh of relief when the la farmland at the outskirts of Eddarta fell behind us.
My name is Arthur Gordon Pym.
Howard Roark laughed.
On one otherwise normal Tuesday evening I had the chance to live the American dream.
"American," said the alien voice, using heavily-accented English. 
"Hello, little girl."
"Here they come again," said Fred, scratching at his potbelly nervously. 
"Oh, that's a lot of spiders," Phil muttered as the Ma Deuce opened up.
"Okies."
"There's innocent blood on your hands.
"What is it that you whisper to yourself, child, when the pain becomes too much?"
A church bell was sounding midnight, wet as a marsh and still hot as the hinges of hell, as I prowled the deserted cemetery.
A spaceship mechanic has no place in a fairy tale, not even when she's dressed in a flowing gown and being courted by one of Earth's most powerful men. 
Bullets pinged off the helicopter's hull as we lifted away from the port.
Captain Arlan Strangewayes frowned as he watched the pair of Minuteman warjacks, Jagger and Hess, finish unloading the company's wagons.
During the day the sky to the east was black, but at night it burned red.
He hadn't been dealt a very good hand, but when you make a habit of gambling with your life, you learned to make your own luck.
His captors dragged and pulled him past the ruined marble archway, the ropes on his wrists too tight, the ropes on his ankles loosened only enough to allow him the small steps he must take to avoid falling. 
I never wanted to be a mother.
I never wanted to go to space. 
I was a princess from Earth and he was a rogue spaceman from a mythical world. 
I was eleven years old when the Earth burned.
I was putting fresh oil into clay lamps at the altar when the mantis glided into my foyer. 
If anyone had been looking closely at the duke of Darkwater as His Grace approached the double doors of the ballroom, he would have noticed the Duke held himself somewhat stiffly. 
It is dawn over the capital — the last dawn I will see. 
It was less than a year ago that the illusion shattered and I got my welcome to the real world.
John Stalvern waited.
Most of the things Las Vegas has to offer to its hordes of tourists don't hold much appeal to me. 
My shoulders ached.
The familiar dream was always the same.
The glass is empty, apart from a foamy film in the bottom. 
The July night sprawled, warm and deep blue over Goldport, Colorado. 
The night that Deputy Joe Buckley got disemboweled by a werewolf had started normally enough.
The Pathfinder was close.
The surviving Cygnaran rangers ran through the darkness, crashing heedlessly through the thick underbrush.
There was an angel standing over me when I opened my eyes.
Thirty years ago Auhangamea Pitt invaded the Soviet Union. 
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.
It is only four o'clock; but it is winter and the sun has already set: there are no clouds in the clear, frosty sky to reflect its slant beams, but the air itself is tinged with a slight roseate colour which is again reflected on the snow that covers the ground.
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice ‘without pictures or conversations?’ 
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
I have just returned from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.
I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull.  
Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.
"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.
When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen.
In that pleasant district of merry England which is watered by the river Don, there extended in ancient times a large forest, covering the greater part of the beautiful hills and valleys which lie between Sheffield and the pleasant town of Doncaster.
I address these lines—written in India—to my relatives in England. 
Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway.
Mr. Hungerton, her father, really was the most tactless person upon earth,—a fluffy, feathery, untidy cockatoo of a man, perfectly good-natured, but absolutely centered upon his own silly self.
All children, except one, grow up.
Jeeves—my man, you know—is really a most extraordinary chap.
“Now, father! a story—a story!” said Mr. Goodman’s children, as their father and mother drew up to the fire one winter evening, after the tea-service was removed—“A story! a story!”
Once on a dark winter's day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares. 
He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher—the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum.
I don't know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I'm telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it.
In giving to the world the record of what, looked at as an adventure only, is I suppose one of the most wonderful and mysterious experiences ever undergone by mortal men, I feel it incumbent on me to explain what my exact connection with it is.
IT WAS BORN in the darkness of the Circle Sea; at first just a soft floating thing, washed back and forth by tide after tide.
It is hard to understand nothing, but the multiverse is full of it.
THE GOBLIN EXPERIENCE of the world is the cult or perhaps religion of Unggue.
WHY WAS IT, Tiffany Aching wondered, that people liked noise so much?
IT WAS MIDNIGHT in Ankh-Morpork’s Royal Art Museum.
THEY LAY IN the dark, guarding.
When the storm came, it hit the hills like a hammer.
And in the twilight of the mouth of the cave, the geode hatched, and the Brothers were born.
The rumour spread through the city like wildfire (which had quite often spread through Ankh-Morpork since its citizens had learned the words 'fire insurance').
Call me Ishmael.
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.
 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.
I am an invisible man.
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. 
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.
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
He ambled into the room, sat in the indicated chair, and said nothing.
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
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.
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.
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
 It was the day my grandmother exploded.
Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person
 In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. 
You better not never tell nobody but God.
"Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
 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.
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. 
Linderwall was a large kingdom, just east of the Mountains of Morning, where philosophers were highly respected and the number five was fashionable.
http://novelfirstsentences.tumblr.com/
"Gwendolyn Margaret Elizabeth Lancaster," said Mother in a firm, cross voice, "You will cease this nonsense at once."
George pulled a silver house key out of the smallest picket of a large red backpack.
Okay, I got one.
I was born with water on the brain.
On February 24, 1815, the lookout at Notre-Dame de la Garde signalled the arrival of the three-master Pharaon, coming from Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples.
The crowded red double-decker bus inched its way through the snarl of traffic in Aldgate.
The Home Office telegraphy department always smelled of tea.
Julian Lynes leaned back to allow the waiter to clear away the reamins of what he had to admit had been a better-than-expected dinner.
The book you are holding in your two hands right now -- assuming that you are, in fact, holding this book, and that you have only two hands -- is one of two books in the world that will show you the difference between the word "nervous" and the word "anxious."
No matter who you are, no matter where you live, and no matter how many people are chasing you, what you don't read is often as important as what you do read.
There are two reasons why a writer would end a sentence with the word "stop" written entirely in capital letters STOP.
When my workday is over, and I have closed my notebook, hidden my pen, and sawed holes in my rented canoe so that it cannot be found, I often like to spend the evening in conversation with my few surviving friends.
A man of my acquaintance once wrote a poem called "The Road Less Traveled," describing a journey he took through the woods along a path most travelers never used.
After a great deal of time examining oceans, investigating rainstorms, and staring very hard at several drinking fountains, the scientists of the world developed a theory regarding how water is distributed around our planet, which they have named "the water cycle."
Certain people have said that the world is like a calm pond, and that anytime a person does even the smallest thing, it is as if a stone has dropped into the pond, spreading circles of ripples further and further out, until the entire world has been changed by one tiny action.
If you have ever peeled an onion, then you know that the first thin, papery layer reveals another thin, papery layer, and that layer reveals another, and another, and before you know it you have hundreds of layers all over the kitchen table and thousands of tears in your eyes, sorry that you ever started peeling in the first place and wishing that you had left the onion alone to wither away on the shelf of the pantry while you went on with your life, even if that meant never again enjoying the complicated and overwhelming taste of this strange and bitter vegetable.
If you were going to give a gold medal to the least delightful person on Earth, you would have to give that medal to a person named Carmelita Spats, and if you didn't give it to her, Carmelita Spats was the sort of person who would snatch it from your hands anyway.
Sometime during your life -- in fact, very soon -- you may find yourself reading a book, and you may notice that a book's first sentence can often tell you what sort of story your book contains.
If you didn't know much about the Baudelaire orphans, and you saw them sitting on their suitcases at Damocles Dock, you might think that they were bound for an exciting adventure.
The stretch of road that leads out of the city, past Hazy Harbor and into the town of Tedia, is perhaps the most unpleasant in the world.
If you are interested in stories with happy ending, you would be better off reading some other book.
Lemony Snicket, author of A Series of Unfortunate Events, the purportedly ture chronicles of the Baudelaire children, was reported dead today by anonymous and possibly unreliable sources.
This is the Discworld, which travels through space on the back of four elephants, which themselves stand on the shell of Great A'Tuin, the sky turtle.
A young man stands in his bedroom.
You are one of the top Problem Sleuths in the city.
Roger, aged seven, and no longer the youngest of the family, ran in wide zigzags, to and fro, across the steep field that sloped up from the lake to Holly Howe, the farm where they were staying for part of the summer holidays.
Peter Duck was sitting on a bollard on the north quay of Lowestoft Inner Harbour, smoking his pipe in the midday sunshine and looking down at a little, green, two-masted schooner that was tied up there while making ready for sea.
"Here.... I say.... Yes.... That's me...."
John was at the oars; Roger was in the bows; Susan and Titty were sitting side by side in the stern of a borrowed dinghy.
The First Lord of the Admiralty was unpopular at Pin Mill.
On a hill above the cliff a boy in Highland dress turned from watching the deer in the valley to look out over the sea.
My Grandmother India always said God had pointed a finger at our family, asking for just a bit more discipline, more praying, and more hard work because he had blessed us with good health and good brains.
Wild Cat Island in sight!' cried Roger, the ship's boy, who was keeping a look-out, wedged in before the mast, and finding that a year had made a lot of difference and that there was much less room for him in there with the anchor and ropes than there used to be the year before when he was only seven.
Steps sounded on the wooden stairs, and counting, 'Seven and eight and nine and ten and eleven and twelve and that's the dozen.'
Thorpe Station at Norwich is a terminus.
Pete had a loose tooth, and could not keep his tongue from jiggling it.
Sailing in half an hour,' said Captain Flint.
It's not what I call homely,' said the old Cook, standing in the doorway of the spare bedroom at Beckfoot and looking at an enormous skull and crossbones done in black and white paint on two huge sheets of paper and fixed with drawing pins on the wall above the head of the bed.
There was a razorstorm coming in.
Mars was empty before we came.
The point is not to make another Earth.
Mars is free now.
May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month.
The sun is always just about to rise.
A column of smoke rose thin and straight from the cabin chimney.
It was predictable, in hindsight.
By human standards it could not possibly have been artificial: it was the size of a world.
There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.
It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened.
They'd driven four hundred and twenty-three miles that day by the Impala's odometer, pulled off the interstate at exit 298 and stopped at the third motel they found, a handful of run-down cabins scattered around a big gravel parking lot.
"Well, how was I supposed to know?" Rodney yelled, wide-eyed and panicky.
As I was a stranger in Olondria, I knew nothing of the splendor of its coasts, nor of Bain, the Harbor City, whose lights and colors spill into the ocean like a cataract of roses.
The negotiations needed to be somewhere that wasn’t the Ministry, so they could be unofficial until everyone had agreed; and wasn’t Hogwarts, because nobody wanted Hogwarts touched by the war any more than it had already been; and wasn’t a sensible conference room in a hotel conveniently located on the Tube, because the first time they arranged the meeting, only three wizards on the Slytherin side even managed to find the place.
I became a swordmaiden in the Brogyar war, among the mountains.
So, all right: maybe he had Sheppard to thank for getting him to the firing range, for nagging him to practice pulling his gun and shooting at the stupid paper targets, because it meant that when the evil alien thing burst into his room from out of another dimension, Rodney McKay was able to grab his gun and fling himself over the bed and begin firing with something like grace under pressure, though he really wasn't sure whether the screaming he heard was his or the alien thing's.
So this whole mess begins with Frannie and her goddamned masturbating parrot.
You too will marry a boy I choose,' said Mrs Rupa Mehra firmly to her younger daughter.
"Who are you wearing?"
It was a nice day.
The bookstore was sandwiched between a dry cleaner's and a shifty-looking accounting office.
The lights went out in the Nameless Bar just after nine.
You see, Michael,' said Nelson Green thoughtfully, as he watched his grandchildren doing somersaults in the swimming-pool, which was lined with red tiles brought back from a posting in Turkey, 'any sense-perception is reliable enough – as a perception.
Of all the people God created and Sheitan led astray, only a few have discovered the Centre of the Universe – where there is no good and no evil, no past and no future, no 'I' and no 'thou', no war and no reason for war, just an endless sea of calm.
The shutters swinging in the storm winds were the only sign of her entry.
She cut herself opening the envelope.
The night market was in full bloom.
Lily sat on the edge of her bed, the shutters closed tight against the gaudy tropical sunset, and reached determinedly for bottle and glass.
The bowl of the lake reflected nothing.
Lewis Segura looked out the kitchen window in the gathering dark.
Nikola Tesla picked his way down the steep hillside under a sky washed clean by the previous night's thunderstorms.
In twilight I approached the doors, and in twilight they stood open for me.
The King was dead.
You must know that, despite all else I am, I am of the People.
Water lapping salt at his cheek roused him, a fresh cold trickle finding its way into the hollow of sand where his face rested.
Even a perfect machine wasn't built to go this fast.
She shouldn't have been tempted.
Linderwall was a large kingdom, just east of the Mountains of Morning, where philosophers were highly respected and the number five was fashionable.
The King of the Enchanted Forest was twenty years old and lived in a rambling, scrambling, mixed-up castle somewhere near the center of his domain.
Deep in the Enchanted Forest, in a neat gray house with a wide porch and a red roof, lived the witch Morwen and her nine cats.
Mother taught me to be polite to dragons.
On June 7, the year I turned sixteen, I vanished without a trace.
Dr. Howard Archie had come down to Denver for a meeting of the stockholders in the San Felipe silver mine.
Arthur Hammond prided himself on a certain degree of insensibility in the cause of duty--an indifference to physical discomfort and even to social awkwardness--a squelching of the repugnances, when these should interfere with the progress of a diplomatic mission.
Pawnshops in Night Vale work like this.
It was born in the darkness of the Circle Sea; at first just a soft floating thing, washed back and forth by tide after tide.
Our Dragon doesn't eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley.
The shadows were long with sunset when they rode up, and the horizon was red.
In the days of magic long ago, a swan nurtured her brood of cygnets by the banks of a smooth river in the reedy marshland of Sutse.
The day was unreasonably warm for November, but in some misguided deference to the Chinese embassy, the fire in the Admiralty boardroom had been heaped excessively high, and Laurence was standing directly before it.
Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called True Stories from Nature, about the primeval forest.
Have you ever met someone and you could feel they were going to be important to you?
When I was seven, I found a sparkling lying dead on a bench at the edge of the woods which formed the back goundary of our garden, that the groundskeeper had not yet cleared away.
Walking to school over the snow-muffled cobbles, Karou had no sinister premonitions about the day.
The deck of the French ship was slippery with blood, heaving in the choppy sea; a stroke might as easily bring the man down making it as the intended target.
"We hear that your Prince," said Lady Jokaste," keeps his own harem."
Miri woke to the sleepy bleating of a goat.
It rained off and on the whole trip back to El Paso.
Dear God, I am fourteen years old.
It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton.
"Where's the body?"
In London, we've got murderers by the dozen.
April 25 began, for John Dillinger, with a quick skimming of the New York Times; he noticed more fnords than usual.
Each Sunday afternoon at Saint Etheldra's Schol for Young Ladies on Prickwillow Road in Ely, Cambridgeshire, the seven enrolled young ladies were invited by custom to join Headmistress Constance Plackett while she entertained her younger brother, Mr. Aldous Godding, at the dinner table.
The man billed as Prospero the Enchanter receives a fair amount of correspondence via the theater office, but this is the first envelope addressed to him that contains a suicide note, and it is also the first to arrive carefully pinned to the coat of a five-year-old girl.
For over a week the musicians had been boarding planes and heading for Ingolstadt.
I walk to the bus station by myself.
Someone had stolen the Truth.
The palace still shook occasionally as the earth rumbled in memory, groaned as if it would deny what had happened.
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.
He'd stopped trying to bring her back.
She was born Anidori-Kiladra Talianna Isilee, Crown Princess of Kildenree, and she did not open her eyes for three days.
My name is Jacky Faber and in London I was born, but, no, I wasn't born with that name.
It was a hard comin' I had of it, that's for sure.
There is in Uruk the city a great platform of kiln-baked brick that was the playing field of the gods, long before the Flood, in that time when mankind had not yet been created and they alone inhabited the Earth.
Any old port in a storm.
My dog was almost dead.
A tram was coming, squealing metal against metal, throwing blue-white sparks into the winter dark.
Dearest Kate, It is dreadfully flat here since you have been gone, and it only makes it worse to imagine all the things I shall be missing.
I suppose that if I were going to blame our involvement on anyone (which I see no reason to do), I would be compelled to say that it was all Aunt Charlotte's fault.
Dearest Kate, It was splendid to see you and Thomas and your boys again this fortnight past.
One night when I had tasted bitterness I went out on to the hill.
My lady and I are being shut up in a tower for seven years.
She could not remember a time when she had not known the story; she had grown up knowing it.
Her earliest memory was of waking up from the dream.
My father was a king and the son of kings.
Two boy-men sat on the river's eastern bank, where an open-fronted tent gave them shelter from the chilly spring wind.
"Hey, kid--stop hanging off that rail!"
Lady Sandrilene fa Toren sat in the room that was her study in her uncle's palace.