Where now? Who now? When now?

Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, 1953

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

Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye, 1988

What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?

Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, 1971

Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women.

Charles Johnson, Middle Passage, 1990

I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho' not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull;...

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 1719

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between, 1953

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.

James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss, 1978

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.

Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt, 1922

I am an invisible man.

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952

When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson.

Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show, 1971