Excerpts follow:

He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees, a widely distributed conifer most common in cool temperate regions, prized for its timber and subject, alas, to white pine blister rust.
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

It was love at first sight, if you believe in that kind of the thing, that wacky lightning bolt Frenchies like to call a coup de foudre.
Joseph Heller, Catch-22

A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green and if you wear waders, use a Royal Coachman and find the right hidey-hole, it’s been said you can luck into the sweetest rainbow trout west of the Mississippi.
John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

It is a truth universally acknowledged, well, by most people anyway, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife provided he is heterosexual.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

At 15, Terry Flynn had the face of an angel and the body of a perfect athlete except for all that hair on his back.
Richard Yates, A Good School

All happy families are alike; they have dinner together and the children do the dishes; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way; it could be anything: drunkenness, sassy back-talk, refusal to clean up one’s room, tantrums, nose-picking, adultery, don’t ask.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

William Wallace Jamieson’s wife Hazel was going to have a baby in six months and even though she was only in her first trimester, she was already looking for special treatment by wearing support hose and maternity smocks.
Eudora Welty, The Wide Net

This is the saddest story I have ever heard and I think you’ll think so too even if you have an abhorrence for superlatives.
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

When Frederick C Little’s second son arrived, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse and that they could save a ton of money on diapers by using one quarter of a Kleenex as needed.
E B White, Stuart Little

(Patricia Volk is the author of the novel To My Dearest Friends)
NYT