All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

—Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1875

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

—Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 1813

One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister.

—E.M. Forster, Howards End, 1910

Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of a landowner from our district, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, well-known in his own day (and still remembered among us) because of his dark and tragic death, which happened exactly thirteen years ago and which I shall speak of in its proper place.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1879

A long time ago, when all our grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin.

—Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 1935

Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard.

—Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans, 1925

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

—Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

—J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1951

All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike, says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880).

—Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor, 1969