UGC-NET English: Dec 2014

UGC-NET English: Dec 2014

1. This work was a satire in Ottava rima,
 attacking George III and Robert Southey.
 Identify the poem :
 (A) Dunciad (B) The Vision of Judgment
 (C) Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (D) Alastor
Answer:(B)

2. Here’s a famous exchange from Arthur Conan Doyle’s Silver Blaze :
 ‘Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention ?’
 ‘To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.’
 ‘The dog did nothing in the night-time.’
 What was Sherlock Holmes’ response ?
 (A) ‘Nothing ? Nothing at all ?
 Rather unbelievable.’
 (B) ‘That was the curious incident.’
 (C) ‘Anything else, at all ?’
 (D) ‘That sounds rather curious, don’t you think ?’
Answer:(B)

3. “The shrill, demented choirs of waiting shells,
 And bugles calling for them from sad shires.”
 These lines are from Wilfred Owen’s :
 (A) “Strange Meeting”
 (B) “Futility”
 (C) “Anthem for Doomed Youth”
 (D) “Duke et Decorum Est”
Answer:(C)

4. In Aphra Behn’s Oronooko, how does the titular character die ?
 (A) He disembowels himself.
 (B) He is whipped to death.
 (C) He is hanged in the public square.
 (D) He is cut to pieces slowly by the executioner.
Answer:(D)

5. The narrative of this novel is a meticulous, present-tense account of a woman with a
death-wish who plots the circumstances of her own violent murder.
 Identify the novel.
 (A) Iris Murdoch’s A Fairly Honourable Defeat
 (B) Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat
 (C) Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence
 (D) Angela Carter’s The Passion of the New Eve
Answer:(B)

6. The library where the “Battle of Books” takes place is _______.
 (A) St. James’ Library (B) King’s Library
 (C) Sir William’s Library (D) Christ Church Library
Answer:(B)

7. In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex the first scene finds Oedipus
 (A) in conversation with a priest
 (B) in consultation with a general
 (C) giving audience to an ambassador
 (D) in consultation with a minister
Answer:(A)

8. Who among Shakespeare’s contemporaries did not write tragedies ?
 (A) Thomas Kyd (B) John Lyly
 (C) Christopher Marlowe (D) Ben Jonson
Answer:(B)

9. The Kite Runner, a novel by Khaled Hosseini tells the story of ________.
 (A) Ahmed (B) Nadira
 (C) Amir (D) Amourrah
Answer:(C)

10. Thomas Babington Macaulay, the writer of the infamous Minute of 1835, finds a mention
in Salman Rushdie’s
 (A) Midnight’s Children (B) Shame
(C) The Moor’s Last Sigh (D) Fury
Answer:(C)

11. The issue of privileging speech over writing was taken up for discussion in Plato’s :
 (A) Ion (B) Republic Book III
 (C) Republic Book X (D) Phaedrus
Answer:(D)

12. ‘The Medium is the Message’ is a concept given by
 (A) Ernest Hemingway (B) Sylvia Plath
 (C) Seymour Hersh (D) Marshal McLuhan
Answer:(D)

13. Seamus Heaney’s famous poem “Digging” forms a part of his celebrated collection called
 (A) North (B) Death of a Naturalist
 (C) Field Work (D) Door into the Dark
Answer:(B)

14. The first major report on The Teaching of English in England was published in 1921. It is
known as ________, named after the Chair, Board of Education, _______.
 (A) the Newbolt Report; Sir Henry Newbolt
 (B) the Wood’s Despatch; Charles Wood, Lord Halifax
 (C) the Chatham Report; Earl John Chatham
 (D) the Landow Document; Sir George Landow
Answer:(A)

15. Who first developed the notion of ‘competence’ in language studies ?
 (A) Dell Hymes (B) Noam Chomsky
 (C) Leech and Svartvik (D) Henry Sweet
Answer:(B)

16. The fruit was eaten.
 The fruit is ripening.
Which of the following statement(s) is/are correct ?
 (1) English has two kinds of participle : the present and the past.
 (2) English has three kinds of participle : the present, the past and the future.
 (3) The first sentence here is an example of a verb in past participle.
 (4) The first sentence here is an example of a verb in the perfect tense.
 (5) The second sentence here is an example of a verb in present participle.
 (6) The second sentence here is an example of a verb in the continuous tense.
 (A) 2, 4, 6 are correct. (B) 1, 5, 6 are correct.
 (C) 1, 3, 5 are correct. (D) 3, 4, 5 are correct.
Answer:(C)

17. In 1722 the Crown awarded a certain English merchant a patent to manufacture copper coins for Ireland. Jonathan Swift intervened by way of composing a series of letters in response, better known as The Drapier’s Letters. Who was the merchant ?
 (A) Isaac Bickerstaff (B) William Bickerstaff
 (C) William Wood (D) William Sacheverell
Answer:(C)

18. “While the world moves
 In appentency on its metalled way
 Of time past and time future”
 These lines are from :
 (A) “Little Gidding” (B) “Dry Salvages”
 (C) “Burnt Norton” (D) “East Coker
Answer:(C)

19. The following is the stage-description of an opening scene of a famous modern play :
A basement room. Two beds, flat against the back wall. A serving hatch, closed, between the beds. A door to the kitchen and lavatory, left. A door to a passage, right.
Identify the play :
 (A) The Importance of Being Earnest
 (B) Travesties
 (C) The Dumb Waiter
 (D) Look Back in Anger
Answer:(C)

20. ‘Homonyms’ are words that _______
 (A) are pronounced differently but have the same meaning.
 (B) refer to both the male and female of the human species.
 (C) are spelt similarly but have different meanings.
 (D) refer to people who live in houses with similar structures.
Answer:(C)

21. Match the columns :
Shakespearean Actors   Period
I. David Garrick   1. The 19th century
II. John Gielgud   2. The 18th century
III. Henry Irving   3. The Restoration
IV. Thomas Betterton  4. The 20th century
 I II III IV
 (A) 2 4 1 3
 (B) 4 2 1 3
 (C) 3 4 1 2
 (D) 2 3 4 1
Answer:(A)

22. In his “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Derrida is all praise for the bricoleur whom Levi-Strauss sees as a supreme methodologist, “someone who uses ‘the means at hand’.”  Who does Levi-Strauss contrast bricoleur with in terms of method and approach?
 (A) The Botanist (B) The Anthropologist
 (C) The Engineer (D) The Semiotician
Answer:(C)

23. Heinrich Böll has something to say, and not of course merely something about the Germans. He says it several times. A common weakness of writers with something to say is their inability to understand that saying it four times is not necessarily four times as effective as saying it once. But to have something to say – how rare this is !  – D. J. Enright, “Three New Germans”.
 From a reading of the above, the reader can deduce :
 I. Enright mildly disapproves of Heinrich Böll’s saying not merely something about Germans.
 II. Enright is disappointed that Heinrich Böll has practically nothing to say about
people other than Germans.
 III. Enright agrees that Heinrich Böll shares a weakness with writers who prefer saying something four times to saying it once.
 IV. Enright does not believe that saying something four times will necessarily make the same effective.
 The right combination, according to the code, is
 (A) I and II (B) II and III
 (C) III and IV (D) I and IV
Answer:(C)

24. Michel Foucault’s earlier “archaeological” study is found in
 (A) Power/Knowledge
 (B) Social Theory and Transgression
 (C) The Birth of the Clinic
 (D) Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
Answer:(C)

25. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison is widely recognized as a masterpiece.
 It is also one of the finest examples of
 (A) science fiction (B) picaresque novel
 (C) coming-of-age novel (D) crime thriller
Answer:(C)

26. Match the following correctly :
List – I     List – II
I. Mulk Raj Anand   1. Premashram
II. Raja Rao    2. The Cat and Shakespeare
III. Prem Chand    3. Coolie
IV. Girish Karnad   4. Nagamandala
 I II III IV
 (A) 3 2 4 1
 (B) 2 3 1 4
 (C) 3 2 1 4
 (D) 4 3 2 1
Answer:(C)

27. From which of Sheridan’s plays the following extract is taken ?
 Lady Sneerwell : Why truly Mrs. Clackitt has a very pretty talent and a great deal of industry.
 Snake : True, Madam, and has been tolerably successful in her day. To my
knowledge she has been the cause of six matches being broken off and
three sons disinherited, of four forced elopements ….
 Lady Sneerwell : She certainly has talents but her manner is gross.
 (A) The Rivals (B) The School for Scandal
 (C) St. Patrick’s Day (D) The Critic
Answer:(B)

28. Who, from among the following, has NOT been discussed by Simon-de-Bevoir in “The Myth of Woman in Five Authors” in The Second Sex ?
 (A) Montherlant (B) Lawrence
 (C) Stendhal (D) Kafka
Answer:(D)

29. In a collection of essays Orhan Pamuk shares how he writes his novels, tells about his friendship with his daughter, talks about his loneliness and happiness.
 Identify the text :
 (A) Other Colors (B) The Silent House
 (C) The Black Book (D) The White Castle
Answer:(A)

30. Two of the following plays won the Sultan Padamsee Prize for Indian plays in English :
 I. Princes
 II. Where There’s a Will
III. Larins Sahib
 IV. Doongaji House
 The right combination according to the code is :
 (A) III and IV (B) I and III
 (C) II and III (D) I and IV
Answer:(A)

31. Who among the following is NOT an Australian writer ?
 (A) Morris West (B) Patrick White
 (C) Thomas Keneally (D) Bill Pearson
Answer:(D)

32. After Independence, Mulk Raj Anand, wrote a number of semi-autobiographical works to narrate chunks of his own life through a fictional persona. The name he gave this persona is _______.
 (A) Lal Singh (B) Krishan Chander
 (C) Puran Singh (D) Rahul Singh
Answer:(B)

33. What a mockery this.
 Of history, the past and that to come !
 Now do I feel how all men are deceived,
 Reading of nations and their, in faith,
 Faith given to vanity and emptiness …
 The prelude
 The above extract is from
 (A) Book 9 Residence in France
 (B) Book 7 Residence in London
 (C) Book 3 Residence in Cambridge
 (D) Book 4 Summer Vacations
Answer:(A)

34. While foregrounding the marginal presence of women in history in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf refers to ______ History of England.
 (A) Campbell’s (B) Trevelyan’s
 (C) Sander’s (D) Carter’s
Answer:(B)

35. Salome is a play written by Oscar Wilde written in
 (A) English (B) Irish
 (C) French (D) Italian
Answer:(All are correct)

36. In More’s Utopia, the fictional traveller Raphael Hythloday’s second name in Greek means
 (A) Dispenser of Justice (B) Dispenser of Nonsense
 (C) Dispenser of Grace (D) Dispenser of Mercy
Answer:(B)

37. “You do not dwell in me nor I in you
 however much I pander to your name”
 These lines from Geoffrey Hill’s “Lachrimae” address
 (A) Christ (B) The Devil
 (C) The poet’s beloved (D) The poet’s enemy
Answer:(A)

38. The author of Black Skin, White Masks is
 (A) Ngugi wa Thiong’o (B) Frantz Fanon
 (C) Richard Wright (D) Martin Luther King (Jr.)
Answer:(B)

39. Match the following :
Poet Bird
I. John Keats 1. Hawk
II. P.B. Shelley 2. Falcon
III. G.H. Hopkins 3. Skylark
IV. Ted Hughes 4. Nightingale
 I II III IV
 (A) 4 3 2 1
 (B) 4 3 1 2
 (C) 3 4 2 1
 (D) 3 4 1 2
Answer:(A)

40. Who of the following has written the novel The Return ?
 (A) Bapsi Sidhwa (B) V.S. Naipaul
 (C) K. S. Maniam (D) Pankaj Mishra
Answer:(C)

41. Who among the following is a well-known Neo-Aristotelian critic ?
 (A) R.P. Blackmur (B) John Crowe Ranson
 (C) R.S. Crane (D) Lionel Trilling
Answer:(C)

42. Assertion (A) : The act of reading a text is both determinate and indeterminate.
Reason (R) : Since our reading includes both a sense of the unity of the narrative held in place at the end and the different wishes and guesses made along the way.
 (A) Both (A) and (R) are true and (R) is the true explanation of (A).
 (B) Both (A) and (R) are true, but (R) is not the true explanation of (A).
 (C) (A) is true, but (R) is false.
 (D) (A) is false, but (R) is true.
Answer:(A)

43. Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana, originally in Kannada, has been translated
into English by
 (A) U.R. Ananthamurthy (B) By the playwright himself
 (C) G.S. Amur (D) A.K. Ramanujan
Answer:(B)

44. Edward Said’s well-known book Orientalism was published in
 (A) 1978 (B) 1968
 (C) 2008 (D) 1988
Answer:(A)

45. “To the Memory of my Beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare : And What He Hath Left Us” is an ode composed by
 (A) John Milton (B) Ben Jonson
 (C) Andrew Marvell (D) John Suckling
Answer:(B)

46. Call me Ishmail Tonight is written by
 (A) A.K. Ramanujan (B) Agha Shahid Ali
 (C) Saleem Peeradina (D) Nissim Ezekiel
Answer:(B)

47. “All fiction for me is a kind of magic or trickery – a confidence trick.” The statement has
been made by
 (A) Angus Wilson (B) Anthony Powell
 (C) John Fowles (D) George Orwell
Answer:(A)

48. Here is a list of American words and word-makers. Match the following :
I. H.L. Mencken 1. Babbit
II. Philip Wylie 2. Yes man
III. Jack Conway 3. Bible belt
IV. Sinclair Lewis 4. Monism
 I II III IV
 (A) 4 3 2 1
 (B) 3 4 1 2
 (C) 3 4 2 1
 (D) 4 3 1 2
Answer:(All are Correct)

49. Which of the following in Jacques Derrida’s epigraph to his “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” ?
 (A) More body, hence more writing. ……. Helene Cixous.
 (B) We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things. ……… Michel Eyquem de Montaigne.
 (C) But unlike philosophical reflection, …. the reflections we are dealing with here concern rays whose only source is hypothetical … Claude Levi-Strauss
 (D) If Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter the whole history of the world would have been
different. ……… Blaise Pascal.
Answer:(B)

50. In Mann’s Death in Venice, death of the protagonist occurs
 (A) in a bar (B) in a beach
 (C) in a church (D) on the highway
Answer:(B)

51. Two among the following poets wrote the “Village” poems that address the perennial theme of rural poverty :
 I. Oliver Goldsmith II. William Collins
 III. Samuel Johnson IV. George Gabbe
 The right combination according to the code is
 (A) I and III (B) II and III
 (C) I and IV (D) I and II
Answer:(C)

52. In which of the following works Yeats developed his theory of ‘gyres’ ?
 (A) “A Vision”
 (B) “The Secret Rose”
 (C) “John Sherman and Dhoya”
 (D) “The Celtic Twilight”
Answer:(A)

53. Mystery and Miracle plays in English were based on ______.
 (A) English folklore (B) English legends
 (C) Biblical stories (D) Anglo-Saxon myths
Answer:(C)

54. When we rewrite a piece of discourse from one script into another, it is called ________.
 (A) Translation (B) Transliteration
 (C) Transcreation (D) Transformation
Answer:(B)

55. “No wonder then.” Explain.
 (A) No wonder that the words here begin to mean.
 (B) No wonder that you now find the words menacing.
 (C) No wonder that the words find you menacing.
 (D) No wonder the words still mean and are tame.
Answer:(All are correct)

56. The term “womanism” was first used by
 (A) Helene Cixous (B) Gayatri Spivak
 (C) Kate Millet (D) Alice Walker
Answer:(D)

57. Two among the following critics have dealt with the reproduction of motherhood in
feminist theory :
 I. Nancy Chodorow
 II. Judith Fetterley
 III. Catherine R. Stimpson
 IV. Carol Gilligan
 The right combination according to the code is
 (A) I and II (B) II and IV
 (C) I and IV (D) III and IV
Answer:(C)

58. Flowers is a short play written by
 (A) Mahesh Dattani (B) Asif Currimbhoy
 (C) Girish Karnad (D) Paoli Sengupta
Answer:(C)

59. Match the columns :
Character Novel
I. Lady Dedlock 1. Vanity Fair
II. Lady Bertram 2. Wives and Daughters
III. Lady Harriet 3. Mansfield Park
IV. Lady Jane 4. Bleak House
 I II III IV
 (A) 4 2 3 1
 (B) 3 2 1 4
 (C) 4 3 2 1
 (D) 3 4 1 2
Answer:(C)

60. “The Books You Needn’t Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category of Books Read Before Being Written …”
 The above extract is taken from
 (A) Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel”
 (B) Italo Colvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller
 (C) Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose
 (D) Francis Bacon’s “Of Studies”
Answer:(B)

61. Listed below are the titles of novels and the sources to which they are aligned by readers.
Match them appropriately :
List – I       List – II
I. Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs   1. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
II. J.M. Coetzee’s Foe    2. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre
III. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea  3. R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island
IV. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies  4. Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations
 I II III IV
 (A) 4 1 3 2
 (B) 4 3 1 2
 (C) 4 1 2 3
 (D) 4 2 1 3
Answer:(C)

62. Identify the right chronological sequence :
 (A) The Game of Chess – Volpone – The Duchess of Malfi – The City Madam
(B) The City Madam – The Duchess of Malfi – Volpone – A Game of Chess
(C) Volpone – The Duchess of Malfi – A Game of Chess – The City Madam
(D) The Duchess of Malfi – Volpone – A Game of Chess – The City Madam
Answer:(C)

63. ‘Nasal tone’ in speech is a distinguishing feature of _______.
 (A) British English (B) Scottish English
 (C) Australian English (D) American English
Answer:(D)

64. Which of the following writers did NOT receive the Nobel Prize for Literature?
 (A) Wole Soyinka (B) Chinua Achebe
 (C) J. M. Coetzee (D) Nadine Gordimer
Answer:(B)

65. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon is
a significant work in ______ volumes.
 (A) 3 (B) 4
 (C) 5 (D) 6
Answer:(D)

66. The first novel written by Graham Greene is
 (A) Stamboul Train (B) England Made Me
(C) The Heart of the Matter (D) The Man Within
Answer:(D)

67. From among the Canterbury pilgrims, which group would qualify as the ‘upper class’ ?
 (A) The Pardoner, The Miller, The Nun’s Priest
 (B) Franklin, Parson, Wife of Bath
 (C) The Knight, The Squire, The Prioress
 (D) The Reeve, The Manciple, The Clerk
Answer:(C)

68. Plagiarism is a well-known word and concept in academic circles.
The word plagiarius in Latin, however, meant
 (A) a trickster, a cheat (B) a quack, a swindler
 (C) a loafer, a lout (D) a torturer, a plunderer
Answer:(All are correct)

69. What superstition around the Eve of St. Agnes is crucial to an understanding John Keat’s famous poem ?
 (A) If a virgin performed the proper ritual on St. Agnes’ Eve, she would dream of her future husband.
 (B) If a virgin performed the proper ritual on St. Agnes’ Eve, she would marry her lover.
 (C) If a married woman performed the proper ritual on St. Agnes’ Eve, she would be reunited with her husband.
 (D) If a woman performed the proper ritual on St. Agnes’ Eve, she would dream of her future lover.
Answer:(A)

70. Identify the person who sets himself up as the ‘Knight’ with a pestle  rather than a sword in the play The Knight of the Burning Pestle :
 (A) Ralph (B) Tim
 (C) George (D) Squire
Answer:(A)

71. Works like The Earthly Paradise, Dante and His Circle, Goblin Market and Other Poems and the journal, The Germ are associated with ________.
 (A) the Pre-Raphaelites (B) Higher Criticism
 (C) the Cavalier Poets (D) the Pre-Romantics
Answer:(A)

Read the following poem and answer questions (72 to 75 ) :
 A Bird came down the Walk –
 He did not know I saw –
 He bit an Angleworm in halves
 And ate the fellow, raw,
 And then he drank a Dew
 From a convenient Grass –
 And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
 To let a Beetle pass –
 He glanced with rapid eyes
 That hurried all around –
 They looked like frightened Beads, I thought –
 He stirred his Velvet Head
 Like one in danger, Cautious,
 I offered him a Crumb
 And he unrolled his feathers
 And rowed him softer home –
 Than Oars divide the Ocean,
 Too silver for a seam –
 Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon
 Leap, plashless as they swim.

72. Is “a convenient Grass” an example of “transferred epithet” ?
 (A) Yes, it is. The “convenience” of grass is transferred from the bird to the poet who finds grass convenient of access.
 (B) Yes, it is. The grass is not “convenient”, but is transferred from the bird who finds the grass convenient of access.
 (C) No. It is a regular epithet.
 (D) No. It is not an epithet in the strict sense.
Answer:(B)

73. Which of the following is NOT an example of kinetic imagery ?
 (A) “unrolled his feathers” (B) “hopped sidewise”
 (C) “Velvet Head” (D) “rowed him”
Answer:(C)

74. The poem stages an encounter between :
 (A) the human and the non-human
 (B) distrust of the non-human about the humans
 (C) two old friends
 (D) two old enemies
Answer:(A,B)

75. “Like one in danger …” Who is in danger ?
 (A) The Bird (B) The Poet
 (C) The Angleworm (D) Frightened Beads
Answer:(A)

Novels: Opening

Link:http://americanbookreview.org/100BestLines.asp

1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

2. 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, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

4. 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; trans. Gregory Rabassa)

5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

7. 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 Environs. —James Joyce,Finnegans Wake (1939)

8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

9. 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)

10. I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. —Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

12. You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(1885)

13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. —Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell)

14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. —Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)

15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett, Murphy(1938)

16. 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)

17. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard. —Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier(1915)

19. 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 considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned 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 weighed 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, Tristram Shandy (1759–1767)

.20. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. —Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)

21. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. —James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

22. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. —Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

23. 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. —Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

24. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. —Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)

25. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. —William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)

26. 124 was spiteful. —Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

27. Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605; trans. Edith Grossman)

28. Mother died today. —Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert)

29. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. —Ha Jin, Waiting (1999)

30. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. —William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

31. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz)

32. Where now? Who now? When now? —Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)

33. Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.” —Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1925)

34. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. —John Barth, The End of the Road (1958)

35. It was like so, but wasn’t. —Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)

36. —Money . . . in a voice that rustled. —William Gaddis, J R (1975)

37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

38. All this happened, more or less. —Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

39. They shoot the white girl first. —Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)

40. For a long time, I went to bed early. —Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (1913; trans. LydiaDavis)

41. The moment one learns English, complications set in. —Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990)

42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. —Anita Brookner, The Debut (1981)

43. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; —Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

44. Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. —Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)

46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex’s admonition, against Allen’s angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa’s antipodal ant annexation.  —Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (1974)

47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. —C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)

48. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. —Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

49. It was the day my grandmother exploded. —Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)

50. 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)

51. Elmer Gantry was drunk. —Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (1927)

52. We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. —Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)

53. It was a pleasure to burn. —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

54. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. —Graham Greene, The End of the Affair(1951)

55. Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. —Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)

56. 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; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call’d me. —Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)

57. In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. —David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988)

58. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. — George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)

59. It was love at first sight. —Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)

60. 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)

61. I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. —W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge (1944)

62. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. —Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001)

63. The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. —G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

64. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

65. You better not never tell nobody but God. —Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)

66. “To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.” —Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)

67. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. —Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)

68. Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. —David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (1987)

69. If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. —Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)

70. Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. —Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear it Away (1960)

71. Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. —GŸnter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959; trans. Ralph Manheim)

72. When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson. —Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show (1971)

73. Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World. —Robert Coover, The Origin of the Brunists (1966)

74. She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. —Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902)

75. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. —Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)

76. “Take my camel, dear,” said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. —Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (1956)

77. He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.  —Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)

78. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.  —L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)

79. On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. —Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980)

80. Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. —William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)

81. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. —J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)

82. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. —Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)

83. “When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.” —Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1983)

84. 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 educating 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 of 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. —John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)

85. 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)

86. It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man. —William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust(1948)

87. I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot,” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Stammerer,” or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled. —Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)

88. 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) 

89. I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. —Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

90. 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)

91. I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl’s underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self. —John Hawkes, Second Skin (1964)

92. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. —Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921)

93. Psychics can see the color of time it’s blue. —Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away (1986)

94. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. —Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)

95. Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen. —Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing (1971)

96. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. —Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye (1988)

97. He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. —Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)

98. High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. —David Lodge, Changing Places (1975)

99. They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. —Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

100. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. —Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)