#sentence

In M---, an important town in northern Italy, the widowed Marquise of O---, a lady of unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-brought-up children, inserted the following announcement in the newspapers: that she had, without knowledge of the cause, come to find herself in a certain situation; that she would like the father of the child she was expecting to disclose his identity to her; that she was resolved, out of consideration to her family, to marry him. ↗

— Heinrich von Kleist

#pregnancy #family

The family landed in the Western Hemisphere in the person of Roger Blake Wolfe, who arrived with a price on his head. ↗

— James Carlos Blake

#first-sentence #fugitive #family

There is nothing so banal in the world,' said Ada 'than pitching stones at a hawfinch. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#family

Feast or famine. My plate is suddenly full. ↗

— David Wong Louie

#food #food

Sam LeClaire was a good-looking son of a bitch. ↗

— Rachel Gibson

#opening-sentence #humor

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

#holden #parenting

Marley was dead: to begin with. ↗

— Charles Dickens

#christmas

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it? ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#philosophy #first-sentence

On a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in bowl. ↗

— Jhumpa Lahiri

#food #dating

[People] ask themselves, what is suitable for my position? What is usually done by persons of my station and percuniary circumstances? Or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary in preference to what suits their own inclinations. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things that are commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own. ↗

— John Stuart Mill

#philosophy #run-on-sentence-award #equality