Term
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Definition
| Herman Melville, Moby-Dick |
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Term
| It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife |
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Definition
| Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice |
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Term
| A screaming comes across the sky. |
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Definition
| Thomas Pynchon Gravity's Rainbow |
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Term
| 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. |
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Definition
| Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude |
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Term
| Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins |
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Definition
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Term
| Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. |
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Definition
| Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina |
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Term
| 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 |
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Definition
| James Joyce, Finnegans Wake |
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Term
| It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. |
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Definition
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Term
| 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 |
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Definition
| Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities |
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Term
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Definition
| Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man |
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Term
| 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 |
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Definition
| Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts |
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Term
| 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. |
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Definition
| Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn |
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Term
| You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. |
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Definition
| Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler |
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Term
| The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. |
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Definition
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Term
| 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. |
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Definition
| J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye |
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Term
| Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. |
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Definition
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Term
| Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. |
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Definition
| William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury |
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Term
| 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. |
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Definition
| Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote |
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Term
| Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure. The telegram from the Home says: Your mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Deep sympathy. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday. |
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Definition
| Albert Camus, The Stranger |
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Term
| 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." |
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Definition
| Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans |
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Term
| It was like so, but wasn't. |
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Definition
| Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 |
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Term
| In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. |
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Definition
| John Barth, The End of the Road |
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Term
| Money . . . in a voice that rustled. |
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Definition
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Term
| Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. |
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Definition
| Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway |
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Term
| All this happened, more or less. |
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Definition
| Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-five |
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Term
| They shoot the white girl first. |
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Definition
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Term
| Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. |
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Definition
| Anita Brookner, The Debut |
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Term
| Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. |
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Definition
| Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God |
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Term
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane; |
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Definition
| Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire |
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Term
| There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. |
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Definition
| C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader |
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Term
| 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. |
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Definition
| Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex |
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