1. “I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me …”

2. “Now it comes on the spring of 1931, after a long hard winter, and times are very tough indeed, what with the stock market going all to pieces, and banks busting right and left, and the law getting very nasty about this and that, and one thing and another, and many citizens of this town are compelled to do the best they can.”

3. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

4. “‘All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike …’”

5. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …”

6. “I am an invisible man.”

7. “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.”

8. “Call me Ishmael.”

9. “She was so deeply embedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.”

10. “I am a sick man … I am a spiteful man.”