Literature
Favorite Selections from ToInspire.com

Howard Roark laughed. He stood naked at the edge of a cliff... {opening line from 'The Fountainhead'} - Ayn Rand

A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, Community, Identity, Stability. {opening line from 'Brave New World'} - Aldous Huxley

I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. - {from 'Catcher in the Rye.' Spoken by the character, Holden Caulfield} - J.D. Salinger

For I have known them all already, know them all: have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons; I have measured out my life with coffee spoons... {from the poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"}  - T.S. Eliot

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." {opening lines from Finnegans Wake} - James Joyce

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. {from 'The Old Man and The Sea'} - Ernest Hemingway

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. {from the novel, 'The Sound and the Fury'}  - William Faulkner

Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.  - Elie Wiesel

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, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. {from A Tale of Two Cities} - Charles Dickens

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. {from the short story, 'The Metamorphosis'} - Franz Kafka

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child?. . . .I do not know what it is any more than he.  - Walt Whitman

All I want to be is the Jane Austen of South Alabama. - Harper Lee

Please, sir, I want some more. (from 'Oliver Twist') - Charles Dickens