Punch, thump, crash.
The Man in the Rubber Mask by Robert Llewellyn
"It was a good policy, under normal conditions."
--James L. Sutter, Death's Heretic
"I took my tunic back to the issue shed and complained to the supply sergeant."
--Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers
"I give them fifteen minutes."
--Michael Marshall Smith, "Fair Exchange", part of the anthology New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird. It's a Kindle edition, so...
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She had absorbed the Elena Ortiz case soo deeply into her subconscious that in her dreams she and the victem had engaged in a conversation, albeit a nonsensical one.
The Surgeon by Tess Gerritsen
Moore had joined the Iowa Guard in 1922 at the age of seventeen, and six years later took command of the Company F of the 168th Infantry's 2nd Battalion.
An Army At Dawn: The War in North Africa - 1942-1943 by Rick Atkinson
"As the ministers exhorted their folds, Joe Azbell's front-page article in the Advertiser alerted the entire population of Montgomery, black and white, to the impending boycott."
--David Levering Lewis, King: A Critical Biography
"I think I shall not buy greedily, but go round and round it as long as I live, and be buried in it first, that it may please me the more at last."
-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods
"They concentrated on each detail of the job, with unnecessary intensity, mainly to keep their imaginations from being haunted by the image of a man more than two hundred years dead."
--Fritz Leiber, "Jewels in the Forest" in Swords Against Death
"The most important dig has been undertaken by Manfred Bietak, of the University of Vienna, at Tell ed-Daba, a site in the eastern delta identified as Avaris, the Hyksos capital (Figure 6, p.58)."
--Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts
"'I liked that.'"
Boring!
Fritz Leiber, "Lean Times in Lankhmar" in the White Wolf volume of the same title.
There are a million more exciting sentences in this book. Here's two pretty good ones:
"All levels of Lankhmarian society were represented--rags and ermines, bare feet and jeweled sandals, mercenaries' steel and philosophers' wands, faces painted with rare cosmetics and faces powdered only with dust, eyes of hunger, eyes of satiety, eyes of mad belief and eyes of a skepticism that hid fear."
"It is rumored by the wise-brained rats which burrow the citied earth and by the knowledgeable cats that stalk its shadows and by the sagacious bats that wing its night and by the sapient zats which soar through airless space, slanting their metal wings to winds of light, that those two swordsmen and blood-brothers, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, have adventured not only in the World of Nehwon with its great empire of Lankhmar, but also in many other worlds and times and dimensions, arriving at these through certain secret doors far inside the mazy caverns of Ningauble of the Seven Eyes--whose great cave, in this sense, exists simultaneously in many worlds and times."
"Wiry black stubble ran from his jutting chin right up his cheekbones to the bags under his eyes."
--Lindsey Davis, Three Hands in the Fountain
[blank]
Player's Guide to the Rothenian Plains only has 31 pages.
Scissors in hand, Marie Le Goeffic was balancing on a swing.
Novels in Three Lines by Felix Feneon (Translated by Luc Sante)
"These counterfactual arguments, though compelling, can never be proved."
Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser
"A pretty frightful ordeal, believe me or believe me not."
--P.G. Wodehouse, The World of Jeeves
The ordeal, btw, is lunch with Aunt Agatha.
"But apparently everyone else worships at its shrine."
--Jane Gaskell, The Serpent
We have our own unique characteristics, but we are all equally powerless before the elements and the other inhabitants of this land.
Summer North of Sixty by James Raffan
The book was just given to me as a gift. I'm an avid canoer, but finances have curtailed efforts of late. I haven't taken a trip to a truly remote place, but it's really making me want to go.
"The English treat their servants no better, but with greater cunning"
- The Buccaneers of America, by Exquemelin
"He had in this later time turned nervous, which was what he in all the other years had never been; and the oddity was that his nervousness should have waited till he had begun to doubt, should have held off so long as he was sure."
-- "The Beast in the Jungle", collected in The Beast in the Jungle and Other Stories by Henry James
He coughed and took a reflective sip of ale.
--The Thief's Gamble by Juliet E. McKenna
Not very representative of the novel, except, possibly (I'm just on page 79), the ale.
"The soul requires purity, but purity is not it; requires justice, but justice is not that; requires beneficence, but is somewhat better; so that there is a kind of descent and accommodation felt when we leave speaking of moral nature, to urge a virtue which it enjoins."
-- "The Over-Soul", collected in Self-Reliance and Other Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Despite the Congressional Globe murdering my reading for the past month...
"Emanuel van Meteren likeswise declares in 1575: Although the women there are entirely in the power of their husbands, except for their lives, yet they are not kept as strictly as they are in Spain or elsewhere."
The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England by Ian Mortimer
"Far more than mere thugs, these skilled warriors reveal the true deadliness of their weapons, turning hunks of metal into arms capable of taming kingdoms, slaughtering monsters, and rousing the hearts of armies."
Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook by Jason Bulmahn et al.
And yes, seriously, it's sitting next to my bed with a bookmark in it while I do a cover-to-cover readthrough, and I'm happy to see from this thread I'm not alone in my preference for reading material ;)
I suppose I could have quoted from The Hastur Cycle too, but that's been sitting unread for a few days as I tend to have a few books on the go at once.
"Apparently, my birth-prophecy was a hush-hush bit of knowledge which even Kaselm (who seems to be a man of resource) had difficulty getting hold of."
Jane Gaskell, The Dragon
"Banks and corporate endeavors of all kinds became central to economic enterprise."
Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom
"I only pieced it together later."
Jane Gaskell, Atlan
"Pran did not care about titular prestige, but he realized that designations helped one's designs."
Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy
And because I actually have to do assignments on this subject:
"Positively or negatively?"
Kotler et al, Marketing (9th ed.)
"It was deep, deep, dark, such as only goblins that have taken to living in the heart of the mountains can see through."
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit; or, There and Back Again
"Both men have recently been denied relief by the state's highest court, in their continuing quest for escape from death, and freedom."
--Mumia Abu-Jamal, "A return to death" in Live from Death Row
"Then the mask vanished from the mirror and simultaneously reappeared unblurred hanging in the air above the ivory stool."
--Fritz Leiber, "Stardock" in Swords' Masters
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"Who said there aren't any more happy endings?"
'How to Find a Man... And Make Him Keep YOU!' by Tracy Tanner.
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"In the carnage the masonry of the fountain itself was torn apart by the musketry, and the water spilled out over the square, mingling with the blood of the slain."
1848, Year of Revolution by Mike Rapport.
Further down the page we get: "While the Château d'Eau burned, the King collapsed in a chair in his study, watched by his hapless courtiers. Politicians offered him conflicting advice, but it was the slippery newspaperman Émile Girardin, editor of La Presse, who at midday strode forward and brusquely urged Louis-Philippe: 'Abdicate, Sire!'"
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"He comes of age and into his inheritance today."
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, Part One: The Fellowship of the Ring
"He disentangled himself and sat up, rubbing his face."
Percy Jackson and the Heroes of Olympus: The House of Hades.
"In the carnage the masonry of the fountain itself was torn apart by the musketry, and the water spilled out over the square, mingling with the blood of the slain."
1848, Year of Revolution by Mike Rapport.
Further down the page we get: "While the Château d'Eau burned, the King collapsed in a chair in his study, watched by his hapless courtiers. Politicians offered him conflicting advice, but it was the slippery newspaperman Émile Girardin, editor of La Presse, who at midday strode forward and brusquely urged Louis-Philippe: 'Abdicate, Sire!'"
Yeah, abdicate, you f&@!!
Vive le Galt!!
[Takes off Comrade Anklebiter hat]
"17 AND HERE I AM BRINGING THE FLOOD, WATER OVER THE EARTH, TO DESTROY ALL FLESH IN WHICH IS THE BREATH OF LIFE FROM UNDER THE HEAVENS."
--Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? in bold caps to indicate its source in the Priestly text.
I remember Urizen was trying to get me to read this wikipedia page, like, two years ago.
"Let's go back."
Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven - How the Heroes Die
"Gradually he [Minamoto Yoshitsune], like Robin Hood, gathered about him a band of loyal and gallant fighters, the most noted of whom was the burly monk Benkei, the Little John of Japanese history."
--H. Paul Varley with Ivan and Nobuko Morris, Samurai
"'Mr. Pitt, as a traitor to the nation and to the rights of man, is condemned...' he had not time to deliver Pitt's sentence, imagining himself at that moment Napoleon, and having in the person of his hero succeeded in the dangerous crossing of the Channel and in the conquest of London, where he saw a graceful, handsome young officer come in."
--Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, War and Peace
Stooges and plutocrats everywhere!
"His head drooped."
--Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
'The penis must embody the violence of the male in order for him to be male'
- Pornography, by Andrea Dworkin
"Reciting mostly from memory, his voice would roll down the road for a quarter mile."
Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
"And the inevitable end of it all became more and more terrible."
--Leo Tolstoy, "The Death of Ivan Ilych," in The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Short Stories: The Dover Thrift Editions
"'I hold your true name, like a caged bird,' she said."
--Scott Lynch, The Republic of Thieves
"He smelled its breath and heard its noise."
--Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam
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"Fighting a frown (frowns cause wrinkles, darling), she surveyed the gathering again."
Robert Asprin, 'Phule's Paradise'
"'We'll go down somewhere and have a careful look at the map, you can have a shot at reading Hardman's psychology.'"
--J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World
"Light lowered in the sky as they walked beside the river, keeping to the rocky banks and brushing away vines that strung into the water from hanging limbs."
--Samuel R. Delany, The Jewels of Aptor
And 5/5/55 in Engels and the "Nonhistoric" Peoples: The National Question in the Revolution of 1848 by Roman Rosdolsky puts us in squarely in the chapter endnotes, which means we get a sentence not even by Comrade RR:
"'Even in 1912, at the outbreak of the Balkan war, in which pacific Social Democracy rightly saw a prelude to world-war, the highly unhistorical view was put forward that the Balkan States were not fighting to free their oppressed kinsmen, but were mere robbers and peace-breakers.'"
--Quoted from Hermann Wendel, "Marxism and the Southern Slav Question" published in The Slavonic Review 2 back in the winter of 1923-4
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"You speak the tongue of Barsoom quite readily for one who was deaf and dumb to us a few short days ago."
-Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars
"The classes he had missed or taught unshaven, still reeking of last night's martians."
--Stephen King, The Shining