"In a valley shaded with rhododendrons, close to the snow line, where a stream milky with meltwater splashed and where doves and linnets flew among the immense pines, lay a cave, half-hidden by the crag above and the stiff heavy leaves that clustered below."

"Dr Strauss says I should rite down what I think and remembir and evrey thing that happins to me from now on."

"Hador Goldenhead was a lord of the Edain and well-beloved by the Eldar."

"From the time I was a boy the reckless streak that runs in my family has brought me nothing but trouble."

"I always called him 'Sensei.'"

"I am a cat."

"I had always imagined that my life story, if and when I wrote it, would have a great first line: something lyric like Nabokov's 'Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins'; or if I could not do lyric, then something sweeping like Tolstoy's 'All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.'"

"The amber light came on."

"Two of our boys had escaped during the night, so at dawn we still hadn't left."

"All our attempts at subterfuge had been in vain."

"Kendra Sorenson briskly scraped the head of a wooden match against the rough strip on the side of a rectangular matchbox."

"On a muggy August day, Seth hurried along a faint path, eyes scanning the lush foliage to his left."

"Crowding into homeroom with the other eighth graders, Kendra found her way to her desk."

"It is astonishing how little attention critics have paid to Story considered in itself."

"Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach."

"I want to talk about video games - yes, even violent video games - and say some positive things about them."

"The Jews started it all - and by 'it' I mean so many of the things we care about, the underlying values that make all of us, Jew and gentile, believer and atheist, tick."

"As I left the railway station at Worchester and set out on the three-mile walk to Ransom's cottage, I reflected that no one on that platform could possibly guess the truth about the man I was going to visit."

"Okay, so here's the deal: let's say, purely hypothetically, you're reading a book about an average sixteen-year-old kid in the summer of 1968."

"I'd never given much thought to how I would die - though I'd had reason enough in the last few months - but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this."

"I felt like I was trapped in one of those terrifying nightmares, the one where you have to run, run till your lungs burst, but you can't make your body move fast enough."

"Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith."

"The night the Djellabas came to Duk Payuel, I remember that I had been feeling tense all over, as if my body were trying to tell me something."

"Aragorn sped on up the hill."

"What about a teakettle?"