Top 10

Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him. With his inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner cynical and nervous, anybody could tell he didn’t belong – belong to the early summer sun, the cool Whitsun wind off the sea, the holiday crowd.

Brighton Rock, Graham Greene

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

Over the weekend the vultures got into the Presidential Palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows, and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside.

Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It was with the advent of the Laudie London era that I realized the whole teenage epic was tottering to doom.

Absolute Beginners, Colin MacInnes

I was 37 then, strapped in my seat as the huge 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach to Hamburg Airport. Cold November rains drenched the earth, lending everything the gloomy air of a Flemish landscape; 

Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami

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.

New York Trilogy, Auster

Marley was dead: to begin with.

A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

Marsh is not swamp. Marsh is a space of light, where the grass grows in water, and water flows into the sky. Slow-moving creeks wander, carrying the orb of the sun with them to the sea, and long-legged birds lift with unexpected grace – as though not built to fly – against the roar of the snow geese.

Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens

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.

Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

(This one’s a cheat, the second paragraph...)

Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful or sublime, its horror, sublimity or beauty mean nothing.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

Tsutomu Araki, artist and designer

If you’re going to read this, don’t bother. After a couple pages, you won’t want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you’re still in one piece. Save yourself.

Choke, Chuck Palahniuk