The plodding pace she was forced to set—for the road was too narrow and winding to pass safely—allowed time for meditation.

Elizabeth Peters, Naked Once More

Outside the window the cry of gulls could faintly be distinguished as they swirled about aimlessly in the gloom.

Nicholas Meyer, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution

The device had been constructed by a master craftsman, and the riddle was this—that though he’d been told the box contained wonders, there simply seemed to be no way into it, no clue on any of its six black lacquered faces as to the whereabouts of the pressure points that would disengage one piece of this three-dimensional jigsaw from another.

Clive Barker, Hellbound Heart (second sentence of first paragraph)

Skimmed by the savage Seneca from the waters of Pennsylvania’s great Oil Creek, mister.

William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine

Only those with unshakable psych profiles were assigned to the outlying agronomy posts; the screening was almost as rigid as that for deep space.

Margaret Wander Bonanno, Strangers from the Sky

One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came from from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (opening line)