An amended list of 50 things to memorize (by Wednesday(ish)!)

A project of social utility: A list of 53 memorable first and last lines of Literature.

First Lines
1) Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
2) 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
3) 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
4) Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-Lee-Ta. At the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three down the palate to tap, on the teeth, Lolita —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
5) Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
6) 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 Environs—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
7) 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 was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
8) Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. —Franz Kafka, The Trial
9) You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. —Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler
10) 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
11) Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
12) Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. —Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
13) Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. —James Joyce, Ulysses
14) Once upon a midnight dreary, as I pondered weak and weary--'The Raven', by Edgar Allen Poe
15) Midway on our life's journey, I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost. The Divine Comedy, The Inferno by Dante Aligheiri.
16) To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The Grapes of Wrath
17) Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
18) My purpose is to tell of bodies which have been transformed into shapes of a different kind. Ovid's Metamorphoses
19) Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
20) The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. —William Gibson, Neuromancer
21) I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
22) All this happened, more or less. —Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
23) For a long time, I went to bed early. —Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
24) I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; —Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
25) Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation. —Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa
26) He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. —Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
27) It was a pleasure to burn. —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
28) 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
29) I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot," or "That Claudius," or "Claudius the Stammerer," or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius," am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled. —Robert Graves, I, Claudius
30) The Candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he wandered the hall and again when he shut the door.—Cormac McCarthy. All the Pretty Horses
31) Now is the winter of our discontent—Richard III
32) Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe—Carroll, Jabberwocky
33) April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of dead land, mixing memory and desire—Eliot, The Wasteland
34) Dear God, I am 14 years old. I am I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me.—Alice Walker, The Color Purple
35) I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness—Ginsberg
Last Lines

36) ...you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.—Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable
37) P.S. Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonnaise. Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America
38) Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.—Don DeLillo White Noise
39) Thus they buried Hector, Tamer of Horses—Homer, Iliad
40) But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.—A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner
41) After all, tomorrow is another day.—Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
42) But that is the beginning of a new story—the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.—Fydor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
43) Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.—William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
44) It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.—A Tale of Two Cities
45) I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.—Lolita
46) A way a lone a last a loved a long the—Finnegans Wake
47) And you say, “Just a moment. I’ve almost finished If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino—Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler
48) They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time: the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houseds, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.—Proust, Swan’s Way
49) Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.—Salinger
50) I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.—Joyce, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
51) I think of the Bunny.—Greg Keeler (not Updike!)
52) And the dish ran away with the spoon
53) Then there are more and more endings: the sixth, the 53rd, the 131st, the 9,435th ending, endings going faster and faster, more and more endings, faster and faster until this book is having 186,000 endings per second.—Brautigan, a Confederate Soldier from Big Sur.