Opening lines

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

"I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands."

"Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried, As he landed his crew with care;"

"Mrs Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies eardrops, and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lyndes hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs Rachel Lyndes door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs Rachel Lynde was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed any-thing odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof."

"RIGHT HERE AND NOW, as an old friend used to say, we are in the fluid present, where clear-sightedness never guarantees perfect vision."

"I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess; and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing."

"To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new."

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

"I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot,” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Stammerer,” or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled."

"When I was three and Bailey was four, we had arrived in the musty little town, wearing tags on our wrists which instructed - "To Whom It May Concern" - that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson Jr., from Long Beach, California, en route to Stamps, Arkansas, c/o Mrs. Annie Henderson."

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

"My purpose is to tell of bodies which have been transformed into shapes of a different kind."