Originally, this page was set up so that by clicking on a Coola link/icon here, the quote for that day automatically moved to your palm the next time you synced. These quotes are the beginning sentences of great books, and they moved to your palm as an "untimed event" for that day. The Coola link here stayed the same, but I changed the content of the Coolet each night by editing it at the Coolet site. You could have done the same kind of thing (at no cost) for Joke of the Day, horoscopes, sports scores, weather forecasts etc., providing palm users who visit your site with a reason to return each day (or whatever other interval you choose). We miss Coola. Richard Seltzerseltzer@samizdat.com
Today's quote --
Tales from Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin "After Elfarran and Morred perished and the Isle of Solea sank beneath the sea, the Council of the Wise governed for the child Serriadh until he took the throne. His reign was bright but brief"
Here's a log of the quotes we included in the past:
The Notebooks of Lana Skimnest by Anselm Atkins: "The monk was trying to get his hands on what he thought he'd find in the tin box. I found the box, not he. What he was looking for wasn't in it."
The Biographer's Tale by A.S. Byatt: "I made my decision, abruptly, in the middle of one of Gareth Butcher's famous theoretical seminars. He was quoting Empedocles, in his plangent, airy voice."
The Hours by Michael Cunningham: "She hurries from the house, wearing a coat too heavy for the weather. It is 1941. Another war has bgun. She has left a note for Leonard, and another for Vanessa. She walks purposefully toward the river, certain of what she'll do, but even now she is almost distracted by the sight of the downs, the church, and a scattering of sheep, incandesent, tinged with a faint hint of sulfur, grazing under a darkening sky."
The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene: "Calling it a cover-up would be far too dramatic, But for more than half a century -- even in the midst of some of the greatest scientific achievements in history -- physicists have been quietly aware of a dark cloud looming on a distant horizon."
Abyssinian Chronicles by Moses Isegawa: "Three final images flashed across Serenity's mind as he disappeared into the jaws of the colossal crocodile: a rotting buffalo with rivers of maggots and armies of flies emanating from its cavities; the aunt of his missing wife, who was also his longtime lover; and the mysterious woman who had cured his childhood obsession with tall women."
The Body Artist by Don Delillo: "Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay."
The Passion by Jeanette Winterson: "It was Napoleon who had such a passion for chicken that he kept his chefs working around the clock. What a kitchen that was, with birds in every state of undress; some still cold and slung over hooks, some turning slowly on the spit, but most in wasted piles because the Emperor was busy."
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson: "The writer, an old man with a white mustache, had some difficulty in getting into bed. The windows of the house in which he lived were high and he wanted to look at the trees when he awoke in the morning. A carpenter came to fix the bed so that it would be on a level with the window."
The Dot and the Line by Norton Juster: "Once upon a time there was a sensible straight line who was hopelessly in love with a dot. 'You're the beginning and the end, the hub, the core and the quintessence,' he told her tenderly, but the frivolous dot wasn't a bit interested, for she only had eyes for a wild and unkept squiggle who never seemed to have anything on his mind at all."
The Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky: "This book tries to explain how minds work. How can intelligence emerge from nonintelligence? To answer that, we'll show that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself."
Flags in the Dust by William Faulkner: "Old man Falls roared: 'Cunnel was settin' thar in a cheer, his sock feet propped on the p'ch railin', smokin' this hyer very pipe. Old Louvinia was settin' on the steps, shellin' a bowl of peas fer supper. And a feller was glad to git even peas sometimes, in them days. And you was settin' back agin' the post.'"
River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins: "... when the ricochets of atomic billiards chance to put together an object that has a certain, seemingly innocent property, something momentous happens in the universe. That property is an ability to self-replicate; that is, the object is able to use the surroundign materials to make exact copies of itself, including replicas of such minor flaws in copying as may occasionally arise."
When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro: "It was the summer of 1923, the summer I came down from Cambridge, when despite my aunt's wishes that I return to Shropshire, I decided my future lay in the capital and took up a small flat at Number 14b Bedrod Gardens in Kensington. I remember it now as the most wonderful of summers."
Blindness by Jose Saramago: "The amber light came on. Two of the cars ahead accelerated before the red light apeared. At the pedestrian crossing the sign of a green man lit up."
Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates by Tom Robbins: "The naked parrot looked like a human fetus spliced onto a kosher chicken."
Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic: "The author assures the reader that he will not have to die if he reads this book, as did the user of the 1691 edition, when The Kazar Dictionary still had its first scribe."
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
The World According to Garp by John Irving: "Garp's mother, Jenny Fields, was arreted in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theater. This was shortly after the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and people were being tolerant of soldiers, because suddenly everyone was a solider, but Jenny Fields was quite firm in her intolerance of the behavior of men in general and soldiers in particular."
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon: "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."
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy: "May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees."
Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban: "I don't want to go to the Zoo any more."
Slowness by Milan Kundera: "We suddenly had the urge to spend the evening and night in a chateau. Many of them in France have become hotels: a square of greenery lost in a stretch of ugliness without greenery; a little plot of walks, trees, birds in the midst of a vast network of highways."
The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro: "The taxi driver seemed embarrassed to find there was no one -- not even a clerk behind the reception desk -- waiting to welcome me."
A Perfect Vacuum by Stanislaw Lem: "Reviewing nonexistent books is not Lem's invention; we find such experiments not only in a contemporary writer, Jorge Luis Borges (for example his "Investigations of the Writings of Herbert Quaine"), but hte idea goes further back -- and even Rabelais was not the first to make use of it."
Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella: "My father said he saw him years later playing in a tenth-rate commercial league in a textile town in Carolina, wearing shoes and an assumed name."
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy: "The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door."
The History of the Siege of Lisbon by Jose Saramago:"The proof-reader said, Yes, this symbol is called deleatur, we use it when we need to suppress and erase, the word speaks for itself, and serves both for separate letters and complete words, it reminds me of a snake that changes its mind just as it is about to bite its tail, ..."
Days Between Stations by Steve Erickson: "When Lauren was a small girl, she would stand in the Kansan fields and call the cats. One by one they would come to her throught he grass, across which lay the ice of the coming winter, and she could see them in the light of the moon."
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden: "Suppose that you and I were sitting in a quiet room overlooking a garden, chatting and sipping at our cups of green tea while we talked about something that had happened a long while ago, and I said to you, 'This afternoon when I met so-and-so... was the best afternoon of my life, and also the very worst afternoon.'"
Empress of the Splendid Season by Oscar Hijuelos: "In 1957 when her beloved husband, Raul, had fallen ill, Lydia Espana went to work, cleaning the apartments of New Yorkers better off than herself."
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: "Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John."
Waterland by Graham Swift: "'And don't forget,' my father would say, as if he expected me at any moment to up and leave to seek my fortune in the wide world, 'whatever you learn about people, however bad they turn out, each one of them has a heart, and each one of them was once a tiny baby sucking his mother's milk...'"
Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg : "It's freezing -- an extraordinary 0 degrees Fahrenheit -- and it's snowing, and in the language that is no longer mine, the snow is qanik -- big, almost weightless crystals falling in clumps and covering the ground with a layer of pulverized white frost."
The River Why by David James Duncan: "Having harbored two sons in the waters of her womb, my mother considers herself something of an authority on human foetuses. The normal foetus, she says, is no swimmer; it is not fish-, seal-, eel-, or even turtlelike: it is an awkward alien in the liquid enviornment -- a groping land creature confused by its immersion and anxious to escape."
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich: "The morning before Easter Sunday, June Kashpaw was walking down the clogged main street of oil boomtown Williston, North Dakota, killing time before the noon bus arrived that would take her home. She was a long-legged Chippewa woman, aged hard in every way except how she moved. Probably it was the way she moved, easy as a young girl on slim hard legs, that caught the eye of the man who rapped at her from inside the window of the Rigger Bar."
The Ordinary Seaman by Francisco Goldman: "When Esteban finally reached the airport in Managua it was nearly three in the morning and the airport was closed and he sat down on his suitcase on the sidewalk in the humid buggy night to wait for it to open."
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera: "The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers wtih it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?"
Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte: "The flash projected the outline of the hanged man onto the wall. He hung motionless from a light fixture int he center of the room, and as the photographer moved around him, taking pictures, the falshes threw the silhouette onto a succession of paintings, glass cabinets full of porcelain, shelves of books, open curtains framing great windows beyond which the rain was falling."
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon: "A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now."
The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas: "Dearest Gisela, I give you a warm bear-hug from the new world! What with the journey, the hospitality, the lectures the honours (mostly to Freud naturally and, to a lesser extent, Jung), there has hardly been time to blow one's nose, and my mind is in a whirl."
Rabbit Run by John Updike: "Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backborad boted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires."
Sophie's Choice by William Styron: "In those days cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan, so I had to move to Brooklyn. This was in 1947, and one of the pleant features of that summer which I so vividly remember was the weather, which was sunny and mild, flower-fragrant, almost as if the days had been arrested in a seemlingly perpetual springtime. I was grateful for that if for nothing else, since my youth, I felt, as at its lowest ebb."
Cider House Rules by John Irving: "In the hospital of the orphanage -- the boys' division at St. Cloud's, Maine -- two nurses were in charge of naming the new babies and checking that their little penises were healing from the obligatory circumcision."
A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton: "I used to think if you fell from grace it was more likely than not the result of one stupendous error, or else an unfortunate accident. I hadn't learned that it can happen so gradually you don't lose your stomach or hurt yourself in the landing. You don't necessarily sense the motion."
Evening by Susan Minot: "A new lens passed over everything she saw, the sahdows, moved on the wall like skeletons handing things to each other. Her body was flung back over a thousand beds in a thousand other rooms. She was undergoing a revolution, she felt split open. In her mattress there beat the feather of a wild bird."
Another Fine Myth by Robert Asprin: "One of the few redeeming facets of instructors, I thought, is that occasionally they can be fooled. It was true when my mother taught me to red, it was true when my father tried to teach me to be a farmer, and it's true now when I'm learning magik."
The Lizard of Oz by Richard Seltzer: "Once or twice, long ago, the fire of enchantment burnt low, and children and even grownups found nothing new in the world, nothing worth seeing or doing or bothering about, nothing, that is, except machines."
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner: "Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence."
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams: "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-desscended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea."
The Last Unicorn by Peter Beagle: From the Dedication: "To the memory of D. Olfert Dapper, who saw a wild unicorn in the Maine woods in 1673, and for Robert Nathan, who has seen one or two in Los Angeles."
The Good Husband by Gail Godwin: "Magda Danvers, the week before Christmas, returned hoome from surgery at Catskill Hospital and telephoned toher chairman she would not be meeting her classes for second semester. 'It seems the Great Uncouth has taken up permanent residence inside me,' she informed him. 'Well, I always was a good student; now I must see what I can learn from my final teacher."
Now and Then and Other Tales from Ome by Richard Seltzer: "Once upon a space there was a time, a cute little time. Her name was Now."
Inherit the Stars by James Hogan: "He became aware of consciousness returning. Instinctively his mind recoiled, as if by some effort of will he could arrest the relentless flow of seconds that separated nonawareness from awareness and return again tot he timeless oblivion in which the agony o ftotal exhaustion was unknown and unknowable."
The Name of Hero by Richard Seltzer: "End of the line. sir."
Bulatovich woke up, only he wasn't sure he was awake. "What's the meaning of this? Where are we?" he asked, his eyes still out of focus, his glasses awry, sweat soaking his brow, his beard. "Must be a hundred degrees in here," He thought.
"Chita, sir. End of the line."
Foundation by Isaac Asimov:"HARI SELDON -- ... born in the 11,988th year of the Galactic Era; died 12,069. The dates are more commonly given in terms of the current Foundational Era as --79 to the year 1 F.E."
Other Voices, Other Doors by Patrick O'Leary: "If ever O ever pitched her life to Hollywood, this can be aid with certitude: They would have passed. Because? Because, because, because, because... So many reasons! The simplest? No star would ever stoop to playing a character so small." (from the story "The Maker of Miniatures")
A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia by Victor Pelevin: "Just for a moment Sasha thought that the battered Zil would stop for him: it was so old and rattled so loudly, and was so obviously ready for the scrap heap, that it should have stopped -- if only the law by which old people who have been rude and inconsiderate all their lives suddenly become helpful and obliging shortly before they die had applied to the world of automobiles -- but it didn't."
Arc d'X by Steve Erickson: "On an April night almost midpoint in the Eighteenth Century, in the county of Orange and the colony of Virginia, Jacob Pollroot tasted his death a moment before swallowing it."
Door Number Three by Patrick O'Leary: "I fell in love with an alien, discovered the secret of forgotten dreams, saved the Earth from World War II, and killed myself. As you can imagine, I was tired."
The Fateful Adventures of Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek (trans. by Zenny Sadlon): "'So they've done it to us,' said the cleaning woman to Mr. Svejk. 'They've killed our Ferindand.'
"Svejk had been dischanged from military service years ago when a medical commission had pronounced him to be officially an imbecile."
Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman: "In some distant arcade, a clock tower calls out six times and then stops. The young man slups at his desk. He has come to the office at dawn, after another upheaval."
A Very Long Engagement by Sebastien Japrisot: "Once upon a time, there were five French soldiers who had gone off to war, because that's the way of the world."
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey: "They're out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them."
The Diagnosis by Alan Lightman: "People must have been in a great hurry, for no one noticed anything wrong with Bill Chalmers as he dashed form his automobile one fine summer morning."
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark: "The boys, as they talked to the girls form Marcia Blaine School, stood on the far side of thei bicycles holding the handlebars, which established a protective fence of bicycle between the sexes, and the impression that at any moment the boys were likely to be away."
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan: "The old woman remembered a swan she had bought many years ago in Shanghai for a foolish sum. This bird, boaasted the market vendor, was once a duck that stretched its neck in hopes of becoming a goose, and now look! -- it is too beautiful to eat."
1984 by George Orwell: "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glas doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust form entering along with him."
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: "A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center, and in a shield, the World State's motto, Community, Identity, Stability."
The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham: "I have never begin a novel with more misgiving. If I call it a novel it is only because I don't know what else to call it. I have little story to tell and I end neither with a death nor a marriage."
Ulysses by James Joyce: "Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air."
Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe: "... a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.
"Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth."
The Waves by Virginia Woolf: "The sun had no yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable form the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick srokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually."
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren: "Mason City. To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new. Or was new, that day we went up it."
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway: "He lay flat on the brown, pine-needle floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees."
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: "In my younge and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since."
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner: "Jewell and I come up from the field, following the path in single file. Although I am fifteen feet ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cotton-house can see Jewel's frayed and broken straw head above my own."
The Awakening by Kate Chopin: "A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the doo, kept epeating over and over: "Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi! That's all right!"
Time and Again by Jack Finney: "In shirt-sleeves, the way I generally worked, I sat sketching a bar of soap taped to an upper corner of my drawing board. The gold-foil wrapper was carefully peeled back so that you could still read most of hte brand name printed on it; I'd spoiled the wrappers of half a dozen bars before getting that effect."
The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary: "I was walking by the Thames. Half-past morning on autumn day. Sun in a mist. Like an orange in a fried fish shop. All bright below. Low tide, dusty water and a crooked bar of straw, chicken-boxes, dirt and oil from mud to mud. Like a viper swimming in skim milk. The old serpent, symbol of nature and love."
Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy: "A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment."
Nostromo by Joseph Conrad: "In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco -- the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears winess to its antiquity -- had never been commercially anything more important than a costing pot with a fairly large local trade in oxhides and indigo."
Vox by Nicholson Baker: "'What are you wearing?' he asked.
"She said, 'I'm wearing a white shirt with little stars, green and black stars, on it, and black pants, and socks the color of the geen stars, and apair of black sneakers that I got for nine dollars.'"
The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker: "At almost one o'clock I entered the lobby of the building where I worked and turned toward the escalators, carrying a black Penguin paperback and a small white CVS bag, its receipt staled over the top. The escalators rose toward the mezzanine, where my office was."
Room Temperature by Nicholson Baker: "I was int he rocking chair giving our six-month-old Bug her late afternoon bottle. Patty was a work. I had pulled the windowshades halfway down: sunlight turned their stiff fabric the luminous deep-fat-fried color of a glased doughnut."
The Fermata by Nicholson Baker: "I am going to call my autobiography THE FERMATA, even though "fermata" is only one of the many names I have for the Fold. 'Fold' is, obviously, another. Every so often, usually in the fall (perhaps mundanely because my hormone flows are at their highest then), I discover that I ahve the power to drop into the fold."
A History of the World in 10-1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes: " They put the behemoths in the hold along with the rhinos, the hippos and the elephants. It was a sensible decision to use them as ballast; but you can imagine the stench. And there was no-one to muck out."
The Sea Came in at Midnight by Steve Erickson: "I want you at the end of your rope, lashed to the mast of my dreams."
Tours of the Black Clock by Steve Erickson: "Geli was twenty, with flowing blond hair, handsome features, a pleasant voice and a sunny disposition which made her attractive to men. Hitler soon fell in love with her."
Rubicon Beach by Steve Erickson: "I got out late winter. I was off on the exact day by thirty-some hours, which is not bad calculations. I made the decision when I went in to keep track of the days, for the simple reason that it was the intention of my jailers to jettison my sense of time and place."
Amnesioscope by Steve Erickson: "I'm moving up to the suite at the front of the hotel. Ever since the Quake I've been living in one of the single units, but now I'm making the move up to the suite."
Louisiana Power and Light by John Dufresne: "You're there, and here we are in Monroe, Louisiana, City of Steady Habits, Crossroads of Pipeliens, Corrugated Paper Capital of the North Delta Parishes, elevation 65 feet, population 56,600. And you, hwere you are, and we here, are all of us situated about halfway between stars and atoms, gazing first toward the ones, then the others, and eveyr once in a while, closing our eyes and looking within."
The Way that Water Enters Stone by John Dufresne: "Miss Langevin could wirte a book on disappointment. She'd tell the reader you can't depend on people, not really, not when it counts."
October 24, 2000 -- Love Warps the Mind a Little by John Dufresne
"The day I finished my best story yet -- about a social worker whose child gets Lyme disease, slips into a coma, suffers brain damage, becomes a burden to his father -- after I typed it, retyped it, and mailed it off to the Timber Wolf Review, my wife, martha, came home form work and, just like that, asked me to leave our apartment forever."
The Antelope Wife by Louise Erdrich: "Ever since the beginning these twins are sewing. One sews with light and one with dark."
Tales of Burning Love by Louise Erdrich: "Holy Saturday in an oil boomtown with no insurance. Toothache. From his rent-by-the-week motel unit, Jack Mauser called six numbers."
Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow: "What made me take this trip to Africa? There is no quick explanatoin. Things got worse and worse and worse and pretty soon they were too complicated."
Separate Flights by Andree Dubus: "The owner of the liquor store was an Irishman with graying hair; he glanced at Edith, then pretended he hadn't, and say: 'There's my ale man.'"
The World as I Found It by Bruce Duffy: "The philosopher loved the flicks, periodically needing to empty himself in that alving river of light in which he could openly gape and forget."
Underworld by Don DeLillo: "He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful. It' aschool day, sure, but he's nowhere near the classroom. He wants to be here instead, standing in the sahdow of this old rust-hulk of a structure, and it's hard to blame him -- this metorpolis of steel and concrete and flaky paint and cropped grass and enormous Chesterfield packs aslant ont he scoreboards, a couple of cigarettes jutting from each."
Madonna Red by James Carroll: "The trouble started Tuesday morning when Cardinal O'Brien heard the knocking on his door."
The Emperor of the Air by Ethan Canin: "Let me tell you who I am. I'm sixty-nine years old, live in the same house I was raised in, and have been the high school biology and astronomy teacher in this town so long that I have taught the gradson of one of my former students."
Possession by A.S. Byatt: "The book was thick and black and covered with dust. It's boards were bowed and creaking; it had been maltreated in its own time."
Mortal Friends by James Carroll: "When his right arm went to sleep Colman Brady wok up."
The Beggar's Shore by Zak Mucha: "Joseph sat in Preacher Madison's office and listended to the final decision, not questioning or protesting when he was told what would happen."
The Gift by Patrick O'Leary: "This is a story about monsters. The real ones. No the ones we tell children about."
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence: "Ours is essentially a tragic age, wo we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new litle habitats, to have new little hopes."
Dubliners by James Joyce: "There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke."
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce: "Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along he road and this moocow that was coming down the road met a nicens little boy name baby tuckoo..."
Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce: "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 Evirons"
From Here the Eternity by James Jones: "When he finished packing, he walked out on to the third-floor porch of the barracks brushing the dust from his hands, a very neat and deceptively slim young man in the summer khakis that were still eary morning fresh."
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro: "It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination for some days."
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee: "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow."
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey: "They're out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them."
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer: "Nobody could sleep. When morning came, assalt craft would be lowered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and charge on the beach at Anopopei."
Bodmin, 1349 by Roberta Kalechofsky: "Will Langland, a good man in search of peace in the year 1348, came from York to the priory of Bodmin in the early spring of that year, six months before the plague came to England, although the news of it had alredy reached the shors, carried in the throats of birds that crossed the waters from Europe, and each man dealt with the rumor as best he could."
How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker: "Why are there so many robots in fiction, but none in real life? I would pay a lot for a robot that could put away the dishes or run simple errands."
The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil: "The gambler had not expected to be here. But on reflection, he thought he had shown some kindness in his time."
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking: "We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world. We give little thought to the machinery that generates the sunlight that makes life possible, to the gravity that glues us to an Earth that would otherwise send up spinning off into space, or to the atoms of which we are made and on whose stability we findamentally depend."
Genius by James Gleick: "Nothing is certain. This hopeful message went to an Albuquerque sanatorium from the secret world of Los Alamos. We lead a charmed life."
An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks: "I am writing this with my left hand, although I am strongly right-handed. I had surgery to my right shoulder a month ago and am not permitted, not capabile of, use of the right arm at this time. I write slowly, awkwardly -- but more easily, more naturally, with each passing day."
Chaos by James Gleick: "The police int he small town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, worried briefly in 1974 about a man seen prowling inthe the dark, night after night, the red glow of his cigarette floating along the back streets."
Flow: the psychology of optimum experience by Mihaly Csikzenthmihaly: "Twenty-three hundred years ago Aristotle concluded that, more than anything else, men and women seek happiness. While happiness itself is sought for its own sake, eveyr other goal -- health, beauty, money, or power -- is valued only because we epect that it will make us happy."
The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama: "The twentieth century, it is safe to say, has made all of us into deep historical pessimists."
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon: "In the second century of the Christian era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valor."
Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak: "On they went, singing 'Rest Eternal,' and whenever they stopped, their feet, the horses, and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing."
Nature's Gambit by David Henry Feldman: "This book is about six unusual children. It is about a child who read music before he was four, two childen who played winning ches before they entered school, another who studied abstract algebra in grade school, a youngster who produced typed scripts of original stories and plays before his fifth birthday, and a child who read, wrote, began learning foreign languages, and composed short musical pieces before he was out of diapers."
Startup by Jerry Kaplan: "Going, going, gone. The auction was over. The last of the obsolete personal computers, engineers' cubicles, and other debris of a corporate shipwreck was finally, liquidated, sold piecemeal to a crowd of hopeful entrepreneurs looking for a bargain to help float their new ventures."
The Investigation by Stanislaw Lem: "Rattling rhythmically at each floor, the old-fashioned elevator moved upward past glass doors decorated with etchings of flowers. It stopped. Four men emerged and walked down the corridor toward a pair of leather-covered doors."
The Sotweed Factor by John Barth: "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 education 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 fo 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."
Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon: "Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr'd the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk wind off Delaware, -- the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall ..."
The Arabian Nights translated by William Lane: "It has been related to me, O happy King, said Shahrazad, that there was a certain merchant who had great wealth, and traded extensively with surrounding countries; and one day he mounted his horse, and journeyed to a neighbouring country to collect what was due to him, and, the heat oppressing him, he sat under a tree, in a garden, and put his hand into his saddle-bag, and ate a morsel of bread and a date which were among his provisions."
Essays of Montaigne translated by Donald Frame: "The commonest way of softening the hearts of those we have offended, when vengeance in hand, they hold us at their mercy, is by submission to move them to commisseration and pity."
Check the Readers' Room and Writers' Showcase
Book reviews by Richard Seltzer
Go to Coola fan page
Related article The Web and your palm -- sometimes
less is more, when it's the right less
Related article: Sync to people: building relationships
palm-to-palm
Transcript of chat session on what you can do
with Coola
For a library for the price of a book, visit our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat
Return to B&R Samizdat Express
Buy Richard's book Web Business Bootcamp (published by Wiley) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471164194/brsamizdatexpres
<
| Internet Business Showcase: | ||
|
|
|