canvascradle

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.

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley

You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence. i- preface by P.B. Shelley/i

The Heart is A Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers

In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

J. K. Rowling

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

Ulysses

James Joyce

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

Gravity's Rainbow

Thomas Pynchon

A screaming comes across the sky.

The Lord of the Rings

J. R. R. Tolkien

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.

The Chronicles of Narnia

C. S. Lewis

There is a story about something that happened long ago when your grandfather was a child. (From <i>The Magician's Nephew</i>, first in chronological order)Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. (From <i>The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe</i>, first in publication order)