Great Moments in Literature Presented by Twitter (Limit 140 Characters Including Spaces)

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at daw

What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff -- I mean if they're running and they don't look where they'

Then God spoke all these words: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall hav

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry,

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and im

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorr

Comments

[mattmchugh]

Twibrary ( http://twitter.com/twibrary ) - "Great books in 140 characters or less"
* Vonnegut "Slaughter­house-Five­" - Billy Pilgrim time trips from firebombed Dresden to middle-class surburbia to alien zoo with porn star.
* Steinbeck "Of Mice and Men" - In Depression-era America, George tries to protect simpleton Lenny who accidentally crushes small animals.
* Melville "Moby Dick" - Seaman Ishmael serves under peg-leg frigate captain obsessed with harpooning white sperm whale. Heavily metaphorical.
* Cervantes "Don Quixote" - Aging Spanish nobleman with delusions of chivalry goes Medieval on windmills and finds sanity an impossible dream.
* Faulkner "The Sound and the Fury" - Jason, Caddy, Dilsey, Maury/Benjy, Quentin and later Quentin for 4 days and 18 years in Yoknapatawpha.
etc., etc., ...

[Pyfagorus]

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and

Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. Parfois, à peine ma bougie éteinte, mes yeux se fermaient si vite que je n’avais pas le temps d

One day, Ricky the magic pixie went to visit Daisy Bumble in her tumble-down cottage. He found her in the bedroom. Roughly, he grabbed her h

[Mike Vardy]

"Sadly however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred and the idea was lost forever." - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

[doublehaiku]

"Hopping a freight out of Los Angeles at high noon one day in late September 1955 I got on a gondola and lay down with my duffel bag under my" "The Dharma Bums", Jack Kerouac. head out ==>