“In a first-class stateroom on a cruise ship bound for New York from Alexandria, Egypt, a frail, middle-aged writer and educator named Sayyid Qutb experienced a crisis of faith.” Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

“Miss Minerva Winterslip was a Bostonian in good standing, and long past the romantic stage.” Earl Derr Biggers, The House Without a Key.

“Moscow. Autumn. Cold.” Teffi, Memories from Moscow to the Black Sea.

“Gwenda was eight years old, but she was not afraid of the dark.” Ken Follett, World Without End.

“At the start of the twentieth century, language in America—it had not yet become the ‘American language’—still showed the influence of its largely prescriptive Victorian past.” William and Mary Morris, Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage.

“The decision to bomb the office of the radical Jew lawyer was reached with relative ease.” John Grisham, The Chamber.

“In the late spring of 1875, the ancient seaport town of St. Augustine, Florida, witnessed the beginnings of an educational campaign that would have an impact on every Indian nation in the United States.” Jacqueline Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation.

“I returned from the City about three o’clock on that May afternoon pretty well disgusted with life.” John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps

“The game, like the country in which it was invented, was a rough, bastardized thing that jumped out of the mud.”Sally Jenkins, The Real All Americans: The Team that Changed a Game, a People, a Nation.

“In a dream at daybreak, on 18 April 1948, Calogero Schiro saw Stalin.” Leonardo Sciascia, The Death of Stalin.

“Faced with working-class life in towns such as Winchester, I see only one solution: beer.” Joe Baegeant, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War.

“—Something a little strange, that’s what you notice, that she’s not a woman like all the others.” Manuel Puig, Kiss of the Spider Woman.

“Vic Smith, a hunter, lifted his head above a rise on the plains floor, peering down at seven hundred buffalo in the valley of the Redwater River.” Michael Punke, Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West.

“I’m a priest, for Christ’s sake—how can this be happening to me?” John Banville, Snow.