toomanychrises

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway

Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy

See the child.

Great Expectations

Charles Dickens

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. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

Animal Farm

George Orwell

Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the popholes.

Lord of the Flies

William Golding

The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.

The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway

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.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Douglas Adams

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

The Hobbit

J. R. R. Tolkien

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.

Angela's Ashes

Frank McCourt

My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born.

The Catcher in the Rye

J. D. Salinger

"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 the truth."

A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway

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.