Overall Rank: 17
562 points
"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..."
Overall Rank: 19
540 points
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
Overall Rank: 197
98 points
"This is the tale of a meeting of two lonely, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast."
Overall Rank: 12
667 points
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de..."
Overall Rank: 205
96 points
"When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along to and FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music..."
Overall Rank: 14
642 points
"Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs. Ramsay. "But you'll have to be up with the lark," she added.
Overall Rank: 5
856 points
"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palette to tap, at three, on the teeth."
Overall Rank: 11
691 points
"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."
Overall Rank: 15
640 points
"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—...
Overall Rank: 8
719 points
"124 was spiteful. Full of baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children."