Quote Author Title Year

4. 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. Gabriel García Márquez (trans. Gregory Rabassa) One Hundred Years of Solitude 1967

7. 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. James Joyce Finnegans Wake 1939

12. 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. Mark Twain Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 1885

13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. Franz Kafka (trans. Breon Mitchell) The Trial 1925

14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Italo Calvino (trans. William Weaver) If on a winter’s night a traveler 1979

16. 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. J. D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye 1951

19. 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. Laurence Sterne Tristram Shandy 1759–1767

29. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. Ha Jin Waiting 1999

32. Where now? Who now? When now? Samuel Beckett (trans. Patrick Bowles) The Unnamable 1953

38. All this happened, more or less. Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five 1969

39. They shoot the white girl first. Toni Morrison Paradise 1998

40. For a long time, I went to bed early. Marcel Proust (trans. Lydia Davis) Swann’s Way 1913

43. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; Vladimir Nabokov Pale Fire 1962

45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. Edith Wharton Ethan Frome 1911

55. 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. Flann O’Brien At Swim-Two-Birds 1939

56. 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. Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe 1719

57. In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. David Markson Wittgenstein’s Mistress 1988

61. I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. W. Somerset Maugham The Razor’s Edge 1944

64. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby 1925

73. Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World. Robert Coover The Origin of the Brunists 1966

79. 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. Russell Hoban Riddley Walker 1980

81. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. J. G. Ballard Crash 1973

93. Psychics can see the color of time it’s blue. Ronald Sukenick Blown Away 1986

94. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. Carson McCullers The Heart is a Lonely Hunter 1940

95. 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. Raymond Federman Double or Nothing 1971