They shoot the white girl first.

TONI MORRISON, Paradise (1998)

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

HA JIN, Waiting (1999)

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

J. D. SALINGER, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.

DAN SIMMONS, Hyperion (1989)

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

JEFFREY EUGENIDES, Middlesex (2002)

There is first of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank.

J. M. COETZEE, Elizabeth Costello (2003)

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

JANE AUSTEN, Moby-Dick (1851)

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

CHARLES DICKENS, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)