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The Strangest Sentences in Classic Literature

By Lucy Levine · Updated November 3, 2026

Some of the best weird quotes from books sit inside the most respectable classics. Dickens puts a dinosaur on a London street, Melville argues that the Rights of Man are a loose whale, Swift recommends a recipe that is not a joke until it is, and Sterne’s narrator is interrupted at the moment of his own conception by a question about a clock. Here are eleven of the strangest sentences in classic literature, copied from the full texts, with the context that explains them, or fails to.

Weird quotes from books that open strangely

1. The clock, Tristram Shandy

Pray my Dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?—Good G—! cried my father

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Volume I, chapter I

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Tristram has spent his first paragraph wishing his parents had paid more attention when they begot me. Now we find out why. His mother’s question, asked at the worst possible moment, has scattered his father’s concentration, and Tristram blames everything that went wrong in his life on it. The novel’s first scene is his own conception, and it is interrupted by housekeeping.

2. Megalosaurus on Holborn Hill

As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

Charles Dickens, Bleak House, chapter I, “In Chancery”

The opening of Bleak House is built from sentences that barely have verbs, full of fog, mud and, here, a dinosaur. Dickens is making a point about the Court of Chancery, which the chapter goes on to describe: London is so primeval in its filth, and the law so slow, that you might as well be back before the Flood. The word waddling is what makes it funny.

Strange arguments, stated with a straight face

3. A modest recipe

a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee, or a ragoust.

Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal (1729)

The genius is in the second clause. Having proposed eating the children of the Irish poor, Swift’s narrator keeps going, calmly listing cooking methods like a man writing a cookbook. He attributes the information to a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London. The flat, reasonable tone is the satire: this is how policy writers talked about the poor.

4. Sunbeams from cucumbers

He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Part III, chapter V

Gulliver is touring the Academy of Lagado, Swift’s parody of the scientific projectors of his day, where professors contrive new rules and methods. The best part comes after: the projector asks Gulliver for money, complaining that it had been a very dear season for cucumbers. Research funding has not changed much.

5. Loose-Fish

What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men’s minds and opinions but Loose-Fish?

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 89, “Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish”

The chapter starts as a sober account of whaling law: a whale tied to your boat is yours, a free-floating one belongs to whoever catches it. Then Melville applies the rule to everything. America in 1492 was a loose fish, he says, and so is the great globe itself. It is a legal footnote that turns into political philosophy in about a page.

6. The sober cannibal

the man’s a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 3, “The Spouter-Inn”

Ishmael has been told he must share a bed with a harpooneer who is out peddlin’ heads around town. Queequeg arrives, tattooed and carrying a tomahawk pipe, and is kind about the whole thing. The last sentence is a punchline and a moral at once, and it begins the friendship at the heart of the book.

7. Dead peasants

“I want the peasants themselves only,” replied Chichikov. “And I want dead ones at that.”

Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, chapter II (D. J. Hogarth translation)

Chichikov wants to buy serfs who have died since the last census, because on paper they are still alive, and the Council of Public Trust might lend him two hundred roubles apiece against them, as he explains in chapter XI. His host Manilov drops his pipe. Chichikov clarifies, with perfect bureaucratic calm, that he means these actually non-living, but legally living, peasants. The whole novel runs on that phrase.

8. I would prefer not to

Bartleby in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, “I would prefer not to.”

Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street

A law copyist, asked on his third day to check a document, declines. Not refuses, declines, and with a conditional. The narrator, his employer, is so thrown that he sits awhile in perfect silence, rallying my stunned faculties. The sentence becomes Bartleby’s only answer to everything, and the story never explains it.

Death, deferred and spontaneous

9. Spontaneous combustion

it is the same death eternally—inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only—spontaneous combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died.

Charles Dickens, Bleak House, chapter XXXII, “The Appointed Time”

Krook, the rag-and-bottle dealer whom his neighbours call the other Chancellor, is found as a crumbled black thing on his floor. Dickens meant it. When critics, including his good friend Mr. Lewes, said spontaneous combustion was impossible, he answered in the book’s preface, citing about thirty recorded cases and promising not to abandon the facts until there was a considerable spontaneous combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences are usually received.

10. Tristram falls behind

I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelve-month; and having got, as you perceive, almost into the middle of my third volume … and no farther than to my first day’s life

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Volume II of the Gutenberg text, chapter XLVIII

Sterne’s narrator does the arithmetic on his autobiography and finds he is living 364 times faster than I should write. The more he writes, the more he has left to write. It is the funniest statement of a problem every diarist knows. A footnote in this edition says the volume number follows the earlier editions, and the chapter is misprinted as XVLIII.

11. The doctrine extended

What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish?

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 89, “Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish”

The same chapter as number five, and the logical end of its argument. Melville closes it by turning the question on the reader, asking And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too? It is an odd way to end a chapter on whaling law.

Quick reference

Quote fragment Book Chapter
“have you not forgot to wind up the clock?” Sterne, Tristram Shandy Vol. I, I
“meet a Megalosaurus” Dickens, Bleak House I
“a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food” Swift, A Modest Proposal single essay
“extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers” Swift, Gulliver’s Travels Part III, V
“the Rights of Man … but Loose-Fish?” Melville, Moby-Dick 89
“Better sleep with a sober cannibal” Melville, Moby-Dick 3
“I want dead ones at that” Gogol, Dead Souls II
“I would prefer not to” Melville, Bartleby single story
“spontaneous combustion, and none other” Dickens, Bleak House XXXII
“one whole year older” Sterne, Tristram Shandy Gutenberg Vol. II, XLVIII
“the great globe itself” Melville, Moby-Dick 89

Why the strangest lines are in the serious books

Almost every sentence here is delivered deadpan. Sterne, Swift, Gogol and Melville never signal the joke; they let a reasonable voice say something unreasonable and wait for you to notice. That is also why these lines get cut loose from context so easily, and why they lose so much when they are. Read Swift’s recipe without the first page, or Bartleby’s reply without the narrator’s panic, and the strangeness turns into mere oddity.

For more nonsense with rules underneath it, see Alice in Wonderland’s oddest lines, and for a writer who made deadpan into a whole method, Kafka’s most unsettling lines. Sterne’s scolding of an inattentive reader appears in our quotes about reading.

One more fact from Bleak House: the most famous case Dickens cites in his preface, the Countess Cornelia de Baudi Cesenate, was investigated by a prebendary of Verona who published his account in 1731, more than a century before Krook burned.

Sources

More to read

Looking for lines from modern novels? Browse Lucy’s own quote collection.

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