Our Library

On Christmas Eve, Ebenezer Scrooge keeps the coal-box locked in his own room while his clerk, Bob Cratchit, blows on his...

Cecil Vyse reads a tourist novel aloud in a Surrey drawing room and finds his fiancée among the violets. A novelist was ...

Castle Mazzini sits on the Sicilian coast at the close of the sixteenth century, half lived in and half sealed. After Lo...

A wine cask breaks in the Saint Antoine street, and the people of the quarter drop to their knees to drink from the gutt...

An old Arab guide takes Conwell's camel down the Tigris and saves one story for his particular friends. Ali Hafed owns o...

Huck Finn kills a pig in a cabin across the river and leaves the blood where Pap will find it. He takes a canoe to Jacks...

Virgil Adams lies sick in April night air he is sure will kill him. Miss Perry keeps the windows open anyway. At dawn th...

Happy families are all alike, and the Oblonsky house is not one of them. Dolly has found the letter to the French govern...

Addie Bundren lies at the window while Cash saws her coffin outside. Jewel will not come in the room. Darl counts the so...

A coast-guard on a Danish shore stops a boat of armed strangers and asks who they think they are. The leader does not br...

A philosopher finishes a system and calls the result reason. Nietzsche asks him to look again: the conclusion arrived fi...

A kiss behind a screen is enough to get a young man thrown out of paradise. In the castle of Thunder-ten-Tronckh, in Wes...

Rodion Raskolnikov slips out of a coffin-like garret on a suffocating July evening in St. Petersburg. He is a former law...

On a dark night, kindled in love with yearnings, a soul goes forth unseen, its house now at rest. That is where Dark Nig...

A linen coat hangs in a draper's window. Twenty yards of linen, Marx says, equal one coat, and both equal a certain quan...

A britchka draws up to an inn in the provincial town of N. Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov steps down: not handsome, not ill-f...

Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark. Dante is thirty-five. He cannot say how he left...

Little sleep and too much reading dry a gentleman's brains in an unnamed village of La Mancha. He sells tillage land for...

Jonathan Harker thinks he is going to close a real-estate deal. A young English solicitor rides east to help a wealthy c...

The Teacher has already run every experiment a king can afford, and he still cannot keep what he found. He calls it heve...

Miss Taylor leaves Hartfield on her wedding day, and Emma Woodhouse discovers what boredom does to a clever mind with no...

A gleam of light flashes across a man's mind, and he dismisses it because it is his. Years later a stranger says the sam...

Evelina Anville overhears her own humiliation before she has been in London a week. At her first ball she dances with th...

A gilded valentine leaves Weatherbury on February the thirteenth, sealed as a joke and stamped with a wax Marry me. Bath...

A posting-house on a dusty May afternoon in 1859, and a father cannot stand still. Nikolai Petrovitch Kirsanov waits for...

A yellow eye opens on a dreary November night in Ingolstadt, and the man who assembled the body is already gone. Victor ...

A convict stands dripping in a London sitting-room and names himself as the maker of a gentleman. Pip, already dressed f...

Gulliver wakes pinned to the sand by threads a child could snap, six-inch soldiers putting arrows into his hand. He coul...

A court has already finished mourning when the prince arrives. Claudius has married Gertrude, taken the throne, and wrap...

Girl number twenty cannot define a horse. Thomas Gradgrind wants Facts, nothing else, planted and rooted until wonder is...

Marlow sits on the Nellie, waiting for the tide on the Thames, and tells the men around him that London was once a dark ...

A solicitor stands in a Yorkshire church and names a wife still living under the same roof. Jane is already in the dress...

A schoolmaster leaves Marygreen with books and a cottage piano he never learned to play. Eleven-year-old Jude Fawley wat...

A love test dressed as a retirement plan is how the kingdom is divided. Lear asks which daughter loves him most, with a ...

Bishop Myriel tells the gendarmes the silver was a gift, then adds the candlesticks Jean Valjean did not steal. The man ...

Seneca opens the first letter by telling Lucilius to rescue himself for himself. Time is being stolen, and some of it Lu...

Amy March burns the only copy of her sister's novel because Jo would not take her to the theater. Jo nearly lets her dro...

A farmer's daughter walks into a viscount's ball and decides ordinary life is a mistake. Emma Bovary dances at Vaubyessa...

Before he writes a single victory, Marcus Aurelius lists the people who made him less vain. Grandfather Verus gets gentl...

From the moment divine power separates earth from sky and brings order from primordial Chaos, Ovid's Metamorphoses unfol...

He folds the poem small enough to hide inside an alcohol lamp, then lets the lamp leave Fort Santiago as a keepsake. At ...

In a Via Sistina boudoir Dorothea sobs while Edward Casaubon stays at the library. The marriage was supposed to be holy ...

Ahab nails a sixteen-dollar gold piece to the mainmast and names one whale as the ship's only quarry. Starbuck calls ven...

Every art, every inquiry, every action aims at some good. Aristotle says that first, at the Lyceum around 350 BCE, and t...

Capitan Tiago's table is still set for a homecoming. Padre Damaso jokes about a grave, and Crisostomo Ibarra learns that...

A stone meant for a mill owner cuts the forehead of the southern visitor who stepped in front of him. Margaret Hale has ...

Catherine Morland is not born to be a heroine, and Austen says so in the first sentence. She is plain, cheerful, raised ...

The first sentence names a sick man, a spiteful man, an unattractive man. Then the speaker admits he is probably lying, ...

Subjects used to know the enemy: a government you could point at, a king whose name went on the warrant. Mill opens by s...

The greater part of mankind complains that Nature gave us too few years. Seneca answers that the years were enough; we s...

Satan wakes on a burning lake and tells the fallen host that the mind is its own place, then that it is better to reign ...

Wentworth tells Mary, in Anne's hearing, that she is so altered he should not have known her again. She absorbs the verd...

One remark at a country ball sets the whole novel in motion. Mr. Darcy tells his friend Bingley that Elizabeth Bennet is...

A gang offers a young man easy money and a share of the take if he will only come along. His father says consent thou no...

Richard, Duke of Gloucester, steps forward the moment England has peace and tells you he will not keep it. Now is the wi...

Crusoe comes to on the beach and finds the sea has taken every other man on the ship. He is twenty-seven. He will not se...

John Dashwood promises his dying father he will provide for the women of Norland. By the time the funeral meat is cold, ...

A Brahmin son stands all night on his father's threshold and will not sit down. Siddhartha has the mind, the rituals, an...

The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. Chapter 1 takes the path and the name away in the sa...

Parson Tringham tells Jack Durbeyfield he descends from Norman knights, and Jack hears nobility. His daughter Tess hears...

Aunt Polly calls Tom's name through the house and finds only the closet, the jam, and a boy already calculating his next...

Juno sends a storm against the Trojan fleet. Aeneas, who already carried his father out of a city on fire, washes onto D...

Newland Archer sits in his opera box at the Academy of Music and reads the room the way other men read a ledger: who arr...

Tsang sits down at night and asks himself three questions before the day hardens into identity. Was I faithful in work e...

Chaerephon asks the Delphic oracle if any man is wiser than Socrates, and the god says no. Socrates spends years trying ...

A general sits in his temple and counts before anyone draws a sword. Moral law, heaven, earth, the commander, method: fi...

He sits down at Twyford in 1771 to write his son a letter and ends up writing the memoir that invented modern self-impro...

A caged parrot repeats Allez vous-en on the Grand Isle gallery while Léonce Pontellier inspects his wife's sunburn as if...

Arjuna asks Krishna to drive the chariot to the center of Kurukshetra and halt between two armies about to slaughter eac...

Dr. Trent's letter tells Valancy Stirling she has angina and perhaps a year left, and she treats the news as permission....

A carpenter takes up his ruler and compares the structure's dimensions before anyone lifts a board. Musashi writes that ...

For seven days and seven nights the friends of Job sit on the ground and do not speak, because they see that his grief i...

The Karamazovs come to the monastery to talk about money, and the meeting turns into a scandal before anyone has settled...

Holden Caulfield is seventeen, expelled from Pencey Prep, and telling his story from a rest home in California. He hates...

Lady Philosophy drives the muses out of a prison cell at Pavia and calls their comfort sweet poison. Boethius has been c...

The marriage feast at La Réserve is still going when the soldiers arrive. Edmond Dantès, first mate of the Pharaon and h...

Findlayson has three years in a railway bridge across the Ganges when the river comes to take it back. He stays on the p...

The Dhammapada opens with a claim that sounds almost modern: you become what you think about. Every action starts in the...

Keynes is asked for a number: what Germany can transfer without collapsing the continent that has to receive it. The Cou...

Some things are up to us, and some are not. That is the first move. Opinion, aim, desire, aversion, and whatever is trul...

Egyptians carry a skeleton through the feast so the guests will remember they are dying, and Montaigne wants the same re...

The General's circle has already spent the inheritance. They are waiting for a telegram that the Moscow grandmother is d...

Tom Joad walks out of prison into an Oklahoma that is blowing away. The dust has come, the bank has come, and the tracto...

Nick Carraway watches a man on a West Egg lawn reach toward a single green light across the water. The man is Jay Gatsby...

Offred lives in the Republic of Gilead, where her name is not her name and her body is not her own. She is a Handmaid, a...

Lily Bart misses her train at Grand Central and accepts a cup of tea in Lawrence Selden's rooms, already knowing the vis...

Prince Myshkin shares a third-class carriage into Petersburg with the man who will later sit beside a murdered woman and...

Agamemnon takes Briseis from Achilles in front of the army, and the greatest warrior on the beach almost draws his sword...

While she is begging God for words, because obedience has laid the book on her and she does not know how to begin, the i...

Ernest Everhard walks into a Berkeley dining room of ministers and tells them they do not live in the world they describ...

Jurgis Rudkus dances at his own wedding in a hall above a saloon in Packingtown, and when the guests cannot pay their sh...

Maggie sits in a boat with Stephen Guest after they have already drifted past the landing, and she still believes she ca...

The diamond vanishes from a locked cabinet in a locked house before anyone has named a thief. Rachel Verinder will not s...

Odysseus has been away from home for twenty years. He spent ten years fighting at Troy, then ten more years lost at sea....

Wet paint still drying, Dorian Gray stares at Basil Hallward's portrait and speaks a wish out loud: let the canvas bear ...

Every state is a republic or a principality. Every principality is hereditary or new. That is the first cut. How the sea...

Socrates is walking back from a festival for Bendis in the Piraeus when Polemarchus sends a slave to catch his cloak. Th...

Pierre de la Motte leaves Paris at midnight with his wife, two servants, and a debt that will not wait until morning. On...

A prison door in Boston is already old, iron-spiked, and weather-stained, as if a new colony had needed crime from the f...

Sergeant Bibot sits on an empty cask at the West Barricade, a little before sunset in September 1792, and tells the crow...

Mr. Utterson hears about a man who trampled a child and paid the witnesses with a check signed by a celebrated doctor. E...

At church the new tenant will not look at the parish. She is tall, pale, in mourning, and when her eyes meet Gilbert Mar...

Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he...

Ten men at a pin bench can turn out forty-eight thousand pins in the time one workman might struggle to finish twenty. A...

Every scale on the dragon reads Thou shalt, and the spirit that wants to pass must first kneel for the heaviest load, gr...

Jim Hawkins hides in an apple barrel and hears the ship's cook, the man who has been kindest to him, recruiting the crew...

Buck Mulligan comes from the stairhead of the Martello tower bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lie ...

The school empties for the long vacation and Lucy Snowe is left in a building that has gone quiet. She cannot eat, canno...

He writes twenty-eight dollars and twelve and a half cents in a column and calls it a house. Boards, nails, a chimney, t...

Anna Pavlovna Scherer opens her Petersburg salon by asking whether anyone still believes Bonaparte is a man and not the ...

Catherine sits in her father's study while he calls her a dear, faithful child, then tells her to give Morris Townsend u...

A fir branch taps the boarded window of a chamber Heathcliff keeps shut. Mr. Lockwood has rented Thrushcross Grange in 1...