“Yes, Virginia”

And fifty-three pages later:

David Markson, from This Is Not a Novel (2001).

Related reading
All OCA David Markson posts (Pinboard)

[Woolf’s sentence, from an August 1922 diary entry that has more to say about Joyce’s novel: “An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating.”]