Literature Flashcards
A screaming comes across the sky
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877)
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)
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen
George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
I am an invisible man
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
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)
Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925)
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)
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)
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.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)
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.
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
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.
Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)
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.
Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
124 was spiteful.
Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
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.
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605)
Mother died today.
Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942)
I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864)
All this happened, more or less.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
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.
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
It was a pleasure to burn.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
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.
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)
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)
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)
It was love at first sight.
Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)
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)
You better not never tell nobody but God.
Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)
“To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.”
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)
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.
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)
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.
Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)
They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
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.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson
All stories are love stories.
Eureka Street, Robert McLiam Wilson
Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.
Back When We Were Grownups, Anne Tyler
It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs Shears’ house. Its eyes were closed.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Mark Haddon
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S Thompson
But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction.
A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolfe
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
The final dying sounds of their dress rehearsal left the Laurel Players with nothing to do but stand there, silent and helpless, blinking out over the footlights of an empty auditorium.
Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
1801 – I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
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.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
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.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
‘Where’s Papa going with that axe?’ said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White
This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.
he Princess Bride, William Goldman
If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.
A Series of Unfortunate Events, Lemony Snicket
