"For whom is the funhouse fun?" (John Barth, "Lost in the Funhouse")

"Through the bloody September twilight, aftermath of sixty-two rainless days, it had gone like a fire in dry grass - the rumor, the story, whatever it was." (William Faulkner, "Dry September")

"I spent several days and nights in mid-September with an ailing pig and I feel driven to account for this stretch of time, more particularly since the pig died at last, and I lived, and things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting." (E. B. White, "Death of a Pig")

"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream." (John Steinbeck, Cannery Row)

"America, said Horace, the office temp, was a run-down and demented pimp." (Sam Lipsyte, The Ask)

"Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'" (Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)

"I'd been staying at a Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I'd ever known, for three days under a phony name, shooting heroin." (Denis Johnson, "Work")

"The Mississippi is well worth reading about." (Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi)

"I Wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing; - that not only the production of a rational Being was concern'd in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind; - and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost: - Had they duly weighted and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly, - I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me." (Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy)

"She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue." (James Joyce, "Eveline")