It was wearying, trying to adjust to all the paces life required.

— Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

I’ve been taking part in Microblogvember by posting a daily quote which includes the prompt word, and today the random word generator selected the one, singular word which allows me to use the one, singular opening line in all of American literature. What are the odds?*

There can be little debate that Moby-Dick is one of (if not the) greatest of American novels, and I think we can all agree that the opening line is the most iconic of them all. But is it the greatest opening line in all of English language literature? What competition does it have? Perhaps “It was the best of times…” or “In a hole in the ground…”?

I might have to go with “It is a truth universally acknowledged…”

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* The odds are small.

Call me Ishmael.

— Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville

The first years of man must make provision for the last.

— The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia by Samuel Johnson

Nice sunset + no more leaves.

To represent something symbolically, as we do when we speak or write, is somehow to capture it, thus making it one’s own.

— The Dreams of Reason by Heinz R. Pagels

Wonderful piece by Clint Smith at The Atlantic: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/arc…

The border is a line that birds cannot see.

— “The Border: A Double Sonnet” by Alberto Rios

Another nice day at the river.

O, Wind, if Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

— “Ode to the West Wind” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Chicken and pesto 🍕

Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

— The Dead by James Joyce

A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible.

— Disturbing the Universe by Freeman Dyson

And whereas sense and memory are but knowledge of fact, which is a thing past and irrevocable, science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another…

— Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

— The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.

— In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live…

— “The Jumblies” by Edward Lear

I cannot seriously believe in it because the theory cannot be reconciled with the idea that physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky action at a distance.

— letter to Max Born by Albert Einstein

Onions and prociutto 🍕

I never guess. It is a shocking habit — destructive to the logical faculty.

— The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle

No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.

— The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Say it loud! I’m black and I’m proud

— “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud” by Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

— “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination” by Arthur C. Clarke

Every body persists in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed.

— Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton