Famous Lines from Famous Books

“I the town there were two mutes and they were always together.”

This is the opening line of, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, It was published in 1940. Saome other works of McCullers include, Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as a Pig and a collection of short stories named, The Ballad of the Sad Café.

Summary:

Sentimental story centers around a deaf-mute, Singer, and Mick, a teenager who lives in the house where he rents a room. Mick and Singer become friends, though they are separated by Singer's lack of communication ability and Mick's struggle with teenage traumas. The lives of the people Singer touches are varied, linked only by their friendship with Singer. His friends include a deaf-mute, a drunk, a and a doctor. Singer does his best to help those around him solve their problems, but who is there to help him solve his own? by MellisaPortell

Review:

"This book is literature.  Because it is literature, when one puts it down it is not with a feeling of emptiness and despair (which an outline of the plot might suggest), but with a feeling of having been nourished by the truth.  For one knows at the end, that it is these cheated people, these with burning intense needs and purposes, who must inherit the earth.  They are the reason for the existence of a democracy which is still to be created.  This is the way it is, one says to oneself - but not forever." - May Sarton.  ``Pitiful Hunt for Security:  Tragedy of Unfulfillment Theme of Story That Will Rank High in American Letters." Boston Evening Transcript.  June 8, 1940.

“The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off.”

This was the last line in, Catch-22  by Joseph Heller, it was published in 1961. Some of his other works are Something Happened or Good as Gold.

Summary:

During the second half of World War II, a soldier named Yossarian is stationed with his Air Force squadron on the island of Pianosa, near the Italian coast in the Mediterranean Sea. Yossarian and his friends endure a nightmarish, absurd existence defined by bureaucracy and violence: they are inhuman resources in the eyes of their blindly ambitious superior officers. The squadron is thrown thoughtlessly into brutal combat situations and bombing runs in which it is more important for the squadron members to capture good aerial photographs of explosions than to destroy their targets. Their colonels continually raise the number of missions that they are required to fly before being sent home, so that no one is ever sent home. Still, no one but Yossarian seems to realize that there is a war going on; everyone thinks he is crazy when he insists that millions of people are trying to kill him.

Review:

Catch-22 is like no other novel. It is one of the funniest books ever written, a keystone work in American literature, and even added a new term to the dictionary.At the heart of Catch-22 resides the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero endlessly inventive in his schemes to save his skin from the horrible chances of war. His efforts are perfectly understandable because as he furiously scrambles, thousands of people he hasn't even met are trying to kill him. His problem is Colonel Cathcart, who keeps raising the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the perilous missions that he is committed to flying, he is trapped by the Great Loyalty Oath Crusade, the hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule from which the book takes its title: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes the necessary formal request to be relieved of such missions, the very act of making the request proves that he is sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved.Catch-22 is a microcosm of the twentieth-century world as it might look to someone dangerously sane—a masterpiece of our time. By Simon &Shuster