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First Sentence Quotes

Quotes tagged as "first-sentence" Showing 1-30 of 287
Leo Tolstoy
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Leo Tolstoy , Anna Karenina

George Orwell
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
George Orwell, 1984

Daphne du Maurier
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca

J.R.R. Tolkien
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

Rafael Sabatini
“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”
Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

C.S. Lewis
“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”

Charles Dickens
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Shirley Jackson
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“All this happened, more or less.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Gabriel García Márquez
“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Franz Kafka
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

J.K. Rowling
“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Harriet Rubin
“Women have always been spies.”
Harriet Rubin, Princessa

J.K. Rowling
“Harry Potter was a highly unusual boy in many ways.”
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Dodie Smith
“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.”
Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

Herman Melville
“Call me Ishmael.”
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

Alice Hoffman
“If every life is a river, then it's little wonder that we do not even notice the changes that occur until we are far out in the darkest sea. One day you look around and nothing is familiar, not even your own face.
My name once meant daughter, grandaughter, friend, sister, beloved. Now those words mean only what their letters spell out; Star in the night sky. Truth in the darkness.
I have crossed over to a place where I never thought I'd be. I am someone I would have never imagined. A secret. A dream. I am this, body and soul. Burn me. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am.”
Alice Hoffman, Incantation

Donna Tartt
“Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?”
Donna Tartt, The Secret History

J.D. Salinger
“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

Thomas Pynchon
“A screaming comes across the sky.”
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

Jennifer Niven
“Is today a good day to die?”
Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

Sarah J. Maas
“Maybe I'd always been broken and dark inside.”
Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury

M.T. Anderson
“We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.”
M. T. Anderson, Feed

H.G. Wells
“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”
H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

Michael  Grant
“One minute the teacher was talking about the Civil War. And the next minute he was gone. There. Gone. No 'poof.' No flash of light. No explosion.”
Michael Grant, Gone

Christopher Moore
“Christmas crept into Pine Cove like a creeping Christmas thing: dragging garland, ribbon, and sleigh bells, oozing eggnog, reeking of pine, and threatening festive doom like a cold sore under the mistletoe.”
Christopher Moore, The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror

Lynda Barry
“Dear Anyone Who Finds This, Do not blame the drugs.”
Lynda Barry, Cruddy

Joshilyn Jackson
“There are gods in Alabama: Jack Daniel's, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus.”
Joshilyn Jackson, Gods in Alabama

Neil Gaiman
“There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.”
Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

Bertrand Russell
“Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?”
Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

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