Daily Literature Page Content Archive

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  1. "It was the best of times" — Dickens's most famous sentence, unpacked
  2. "Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" — Tolstoy's opening sentence, examined
  3. "Call me Ishmael" — how Melville recruits his reader in three paragraphs
  4. "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself" — Woolf's opening and the technique that changed fiction
  5. "All hope abandon" — Dante's gate and the grammar of judgment
  6. "The voice of the sea speaks to the soul" — Chopin's grammar of awakening
  7. "In a village of La Mancha": Cervantes introduces a hero by withholding him
  8. "Tell me, O Muse" — how The Odyssey begins before its hero has a name
  9. "I stand, no wiser than before": Faust's opening crisis of knowledge
  10. "The sky which gives light is blue": Tagore's lesson in inward beauty
  11. "It alone had been destitute": Cao Xueqin's rejected stone
  12. "Paradise enow": Khayyam's argument for the present
  13. "Come and sing with me": The Kalevala's invitation to inherited song
  14. "What a fine thing for our girls": Austen's market disguised as a maxim
  15. "The songs of the slave": Douglass and the sound mistaken for joy
  16. "You cannot light the house": Tagore's fire test for zeal
  17. "Forgotten all about the cuckoos": Sei Shōnagon's art of drifting
  18. "Get rid of your helmet": Flaubert's cap as social machinery
  19. "It makes me tired to follow it": Gilman's wallpaper as mental labor
  20. "He simply shrugged": Machado's unbelief without reasons
  21. "He had two lives": Chekhov's life under cover
  22. "A world of bad spirits": Equiano's grammar of terror
  23. "I have been your doll-wife": Nora names the playroom
  24. "Restore your arrow": Kalidasa stops the hunt
  25. "It is a mistake": Hugo's grammar of mercy
  26. "Moral geometry": Okakura's art of proportion
  27. "The dream vanished": Shelley's grammar of revulsion
  28. "The shadow swept": Du Bois builds the veil
  29. "A peace-mingling falsehood": Sa'di's moral grammar
  30. The Unwritten Epic: George Eliot on Lives Without a Stage
  31. "The force of truth": Socrates refuses the courtroom's costume
  32. "He cannot chuse but hear": Coleridge's grammar of enchantment
  33. "The Time Traveller": Wells makes a person into a hypothesis
  34. "The studio was filled": Wilde makes beauty a social instrument
  35. "The full African moon": Schreiner makes a landscape wait for life
  36. "Up we go!": Grahame lets spring interrupt the Mole
  37. "Take up and read": Augustine turns anguish into a command
  38. "Every day saw a girl married and a wife dead": The Arabian Nights turns violence into a schedule
  39. "The woman": Conan Doyle lets a name arrive late
  40. "Gray to be seen everywhere": Baum makes a world that needs a cyclone
  41. "But Ratan had no philosophy": Tagore refuses a consoling ending
  42. "A big, big ant": Hearn lets a kingdom collapse into an ant's nest
  43. "You give but little": Gibran makes generosity a question of motive
  44. "What in me is dark": Milton makes an epic begin with a request for help
  45. "Frightened of the daylight": Sei Shōnagon learns to be seen
  46. "Yet somehow lovable": Stevenson makes goodness look like a flaw
  47. "The science of Life": Wilde makes morality edible
  48. "Fade far away": Keats discovers the cost of escape
  49. "Except for the Marabar Caves": Forster makes a city disappear
  50. "Is this a dagger?": Shakespeare gives murder a body
  51. "The hall resounds": Beowulf makes a monster's attack public
  52. "A proper human room": Kafka makes the impossible ordinary
  53. “What giants?”: Cervantes makes certainty charge
  54. "One in a thousand": Twain makes a chore feel rare
  55. "The waves unruffle": Virgil turns a storm into a public disorder
  56. "My members fail": Arnold makes a moral crisis physical
  57. "It might be": Hawthorne makes punishment ceremonial
  58. "The knee becomes a hill": Kalevala makes a world from the body
  59. "Do you know what day it is?": Stoker makes fear enter the diary
  60. "What hast thou to give?": Tagore turns a gift into a question
  61. A bridge out of repair: Rizal makes neglect feel routine
  62. After boasting this way: Fitzgerald gives Nick a limit
  63. Christmas presents, a dollar each, and four March sisters
  64. "My necklace was paste": Maupassant waits ten years to reverse the debt
  65. "Treading, treading": Dickinson stages a funeral inside the mind
  66. "Duties to myself": Nora answers Helmer line by line
  67. A curlew, a fowler, and the first verse of the Ramayana
  68. Pahom races the setting sun for "plenty of land"
  69. The Weight of Virtue, the Length of a Life
  70. "I have not": The Papyrus of Ani counts a life in deeds
  71. 'The rarer action': Prospero chooses virtue over vengeance
  72. "The unwritten laws of Heaven": Antigone answers Creon
  73. "The door had been forced open": Hearn's snow woman enters the hut
  74. "No two whites were alike": Hardy's procession of private lives
  75. "Invisible hands were holding me": Helen Keller on the need to be understood
  76. Spectacles, stockings, and the best of all possible worlds
  77. "In your own house": Boccaccio turns a tomb into an answer
  78. All these and security were within: Poe's fortress against the Red Death
  79. "Weeping with her whole body": Akutagawa looks beneath the table

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