1. 'Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression.'

2. 'When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.'

3. 'Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.'

4. 'Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.'

5. 'One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.'

6. 'You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain't no matter.'

7. 'There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.'

8. 'We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.'

9. 'A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head.'

10. 'Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.'

11. 'In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.'

12. 'Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash.'

13. 'I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man.'

14. 'In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.'

15. 'In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.'

16. 'In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.'

17. '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. '

18. 'Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.'

19. 'A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.'

20. 'Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.'

21. 'It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.'

22. 'I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.'

23. 'You better not never tell nobody but God.'

24. 'The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods.'

25. 'Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.'