First Sentence Quotes & Sayings

On a mountain above the clouds once lived a man who had been the gardener of the emperor of Japan. — Tan Twan Eng

The book [Joyce's "Ulysses"] can just as well be read backwards, for it has no back and no front, no top and no bottom. Everything could easily have happened before, or might have happened afterwards. You can read any of the conversations just as pleasurably backwards, for you don't miss the point of the gags. Every sentence is a gag, but taken together they make no point. You can also stop in the middle of a sentence
the first half still makes sense enough to live by itself, or at least seems to. The whole work has the character of a worm cut in half, that can grow a new head or a new tail as required. — C. G. Jung

I have a horror of the blank page. I simply cannot write on a blank page or screen. Because once I do, I start to fix it, and I never get past the first sentence. — Charles Krauthammer

There are only three real causes of death, Will Henry. The first is accidents - diseases, famines, wars, or like what befell your parents. The second is old age. And the third is ourselves - our slow suicides. Show me a man who cannot control his appetites, and I will show a man living under a death sentence. — Rick Yancey

If you want to master the art of the sentence, you must first accept a somewhat unpleasant truth--something a lot of writers would rather deny: The Reader is king. You are his servant. You serve the Reader information. You serve the Reader entertainment. You serve the Reader details of your company's recent merger or details of your experiences in drug rehab. In each case, as a writer you're working for the man (or the woman). Only by knowing your place can you do your job well. — June Casagrande

Twelve years after Robin's death, no one knew any more about how he had ended up hanged from a tree in his own yard than they had on the day it happened. — Donna Tartt

The vast majority of you are going to close this tab without, even for a single moment, entertaining the thought of writing something.

Step outside your comfort zone and try something new. Learning the fine rationalist art of CoZE (comfort zone expansion) is a really important life skill, and putting your writing online is a low-risk way to do that. Don't try to cop out with "I don't have any stories." Baloney. Everyone has stories; write up a memory that's important to you. And don't even try to tell me, "Oh, but I don't know how to write!" Neither did I when I started; I learned by doing. So please, set the excuses aside, put something up on the web, and share it with the rest of us. When you do, drop me a PM; I'll leave you your first review, but you have to publish something first.

Well? What are you waiting for? Seriously. Go write one sentence of a new story, write now. — David K. Storrs

Amy called the whale punkin. — Christopher Moore

Do you ever think about him?" Elise asks. "The baby?"
I nod slowly. "I wonder how much would have been different, if he'd-"
"Don't say it." There are tears in her eyes. "Let's do it this way, Charlie, all right? Let's just pick one sentence out of all of the ones we should have said
the best, most important sentence
and let's say just that."
This is my old Elise
whimsical, loopy
the one I couldn't help but fall for. And because I know she is sinking in the quicksand of regret just like me, I nod. "Okay. But I go first." I try to remember what it was like to be loved by someone who did not know limits, and had not yet been ruined by that. "I forgive you," I whisper; a gift.
"Oh, Charlie," Elise says, and she gives me one right back. "She turned out absolutely perfect. — Jodi Picoult

Everybody says "" I Love You "" Is the best
sentence in whole world ...
But ...
I believe that ...
""I Love you too""
is the Best ...
Because Many Gets To hear the first one But
only few gets to hear the second one.
Awesome Words By A LOVER ... !!!
"My One Hand Is Enough To
Fight Against The World
If You Hold The Other One
When A Couple Fights Too
Much
But
Never Ended Up With Breaking
Up,
Then They Are Really In
Love..!! — Abdul'Rauf Hashmi

From the air Anguilla looked narrow, flat, and scrubby, but that was only part of the picture. — Melinda Blanchard

If I were to summarize in one sentence the single most important principle I have learned in the field of interpersonal relations, it would be this: Seek first to understand, then to be understood. This principle is the key to effective interpersonal communication. — Stephen Covey

Norman Bates heard the noise and a shock went through him. — Robert Bloch

Ilium, New York, is divided into three parts. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Harry was bleeding. — J.K. Rowling

The sentence of the first murderer was pronounced by the Supreme Judge of the universe. Was it death? No, it was life. 'A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth'; and 'Whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town. — Michael Ondaatje

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. — Ernest Hemingway,

Constantine, eight years old, was working in his father's garden and thinking about his own garden, a square of powdered granite he had staked out and combed into rows at the top of his family's land. — Michael Cunningham

Basically, "Making a Murderer" chronicles a set of crimes committed in Wisconsin: Manitowoc, Wisconsin. The first crime is a miscarriage of justice. Steven Avery is convicted and sentenced to a very, very long prison sentence for the assault on a woman. And it comes to light through DNA evidence that he was not the assailant. — Errol Morris

Pretty much every issue that we've put out, there have been at least one or two things that really surprised me. It sounds like bullshit, but most of the stories that we've run had that effect on me. We get thousands and thousands of submissions and I don't think we've published a story yet - very few, anyway - where there wasn't something like what Mona Simpson described, where a first sentence or a first page didn't just really command attention. — Lorin Stein

At sixty miles per hour, you could pass our farm in a minute, on County Road 686, which ran due north into the T intersection at Cabot Street Road. — Jane Smiley

For the first time I saw her as a dead body under suspended sentence. — Simone De Beauvoir

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

I was on my bus, and on my bus I have a yoga swing. Jennifes comes on, and she goes, ' Hi, Woody, I'm J
is that a sex swing?' Her first sentence to me. — Woody Harrelson

That night Flora wanted to eat watermelon. — Dorit Rabinyan

Before you can write a single sentence, you must first create an entire world to support it. — Adam Santo

Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their pattern of sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses. Communication may be made in broken words, the business of life be carried on with substantives alone; but that is not what we call literature; and the true business of the literary artist is to plait or weave his meaning, involving it around itself; so that each sentence, by successive phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear itself.
-ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE — Robert Louis Stevenson

As he dropped the last grisly fragment of the dismembered and mutilated body into the small vat of nitric acid that was to devour every trace of the horrid evidence which might easily send him to the gallows, the man sank weakly into a chair and throwing his body forward upon his great, teak desk buried his face in his arms, breaking into dry, moaning sobs. — Edgar Rice Burroughs

The first sentence was "This tome will endeavor to scrutinize, in quasi-inclusive breadth, the epistemology of ophthalmologically contrived appraisals of ocular systems and the subsequent and requisite exertions imperative for expugnation of injurious states," and as Violet read it out loud to her sister, both children felt the dread that comes when you begin a very boring and difficult book. — Lemony Snicket

Granted: I AM an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peep-hole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. — Gunter Grass

Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes. — Jacques Barzun

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

And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you. — John Irving

When I'm sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it's silence and despair! It's not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen. — Erica Jong

I shouldn't have said it, but the word slipped out of my mouth as easy as air. it wasn't exactly the kind of work any well-behaved student would use, which sort of explained why I had just used it. And it certainly isn't the most elegant way to start off a story, but it honestly represents what I was feeling. Besides, I could have said something a lot stronger. But not everybody wants to read a story with those kinds of words and thoughts being expressed in the very first sentence.
"Stop swearing," Jason screamed. — Obert Skye

This is how it feels to die: It starts from outside and works its way in. — Sarah Wylie

I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria. — John Fowles

When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. — Harper Lee

When my nose finally stops bleeding and I've disposed of the bloody paper towels, Teddy Barnes insists on driving me home in his ancient Honda Civic, a car that refuses to die and that Teddy, cheap as he is, refuses to trade in. — Richard Russo

Six people were thinking of Rosemary Barton who had died nearly a year ago ... — Agatha Christie

Writing is like everything else: the more you do it the better you get. Don't try to perfect as you go along, just get to the end of the damn thing. Accept imperfections. Get it finished and then you can go back. If you try to polish every sentence there's a chance you'll never get past the first chapter. — Iain Banks

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

A screaming comes across the sky. — Thomas Pynchon

Sentence first; verdict afterwards. -Queen of Hearts — Lewis Carroll

Today, in the newspapers and magazines, the first sentence is, my restaurant is expensive. — Masa Takayama

I am to consider the many advantages arising from a frequent use of oaths, curses, and imprecations. In the first place, this genteel accomplishment is a wonderful help to discourse; as it supplies the want of good sense, learning, and eloquence. The illiterate and stupid, by the help of oaths, become orators; and he, whose wretched intellects would not permit him to utter a coherent sentence, by this easy practice, excites the laughter, and fixes the attention, of a brilliant and joyous circle. — Mary Collyer

The house in which the fourteen sisters of Emilio Montez O'brien lived, radiated femininity. — Oscar Hijuelos

One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work. — Gloria Naylor

It was strange too that he found an arid pleasure in following up to the end the rigid lines of the doctrines of the church and penetrating into obscure silences only to hear and feel the more deeply his own condemnation. The sentence of saint James which says that he who offends against one commandment becomes guilty of all, had seemed to him first a swollen phrase until he had begun to grope in the darkness of his own state. From the evil seed of lust all other deadly sins had sprung forth: pride in himself and contempt of others, covetousness In using money for the purchase of unlawful pleasures, envy of those whose vices he could not reach to and calumnious murmuring against the pious, gluttonous enjoyment of food, the dull glowering anger amid which he brooded upon his longing, the swamp of spiritual and bodily sloth in which his whole being had sunk. — James Joyce

Writing is rewriting; rewriting is writing - from the first crossed-out word in the first sentence to the last word inserted above a caret, that most helpful handwritten stroke. — John Casey

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man's life is his whole life, not the last glimmering snuff of the candle; and this, I say, is considerable, and not a little matter, whether we regard its pleasures or its pains. To draw a peevish conclusion to the contrary from our own superannuated desires or forgetful indifference is about as reasonable as to say, a man never was young because he has grown old, or never lived because he is now dead. The length or agreeableness of a journey does not depend on the few last steps of it, nor is the size of a building to be judged of from the last stone that is added to it. It is neither the first nor last hour of our existence, but the space that parts these two - not our exit nor our entrance upon the stage, but what we do, feel, and think while there - that we are to attend to in pronouncing sentence upon it. — William Hazlitt

It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I can change seven. — Dorothy Parker

I've written books that have taken me fifteen years, from first sentence to last, and some that only take three or four months. — Paul Auster

I would say in one sentence my goal is to at least be part of the journey to find the unified theory that Einstein himself was really the first to look for. He didn't find it, but we think we're hot on the trail. — Brian Greene

I begin with writing the first
sentence - and trusting to Almighty
God for the second. — Laurence Sterne

It was shaping up as a beautiful morning. The last thing I wanted to hear about was murder. — Jonathan Kellerman

I remember one occasion when I tried to add a little seasoning to a review, but I wasn't allowed to. The paper was by Dorothy Maharam, and it was a perfectly sound contribution to abstract measure theory. The domains of the underlying measures were not sets but elements of more general Boolean algebras, and their range consisted not of positive numbers but of certain abstract equivalence classes. My proposed first sentence was: "The author discusses valueless measures in pointless spaces." — Paul Halmos

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality. — Shirley Jackson

When I die, if the word 'thong' appears in the first or second sentence of my obituary, I've screwed up. — Albert Brooks

And thus, unknowingly, did Dor begin to serve his sentence - to hear every plea from every soul who desired more of the thing he had first identified, the thing that moved man further from the simple light of existence and deeper into the darkness of his own obsessions. Time. It seemed to be running too fast for everyone but him. — Mitch Albom

Sometimes when you work in advertising you'll get a product that's really garbage and you have to make it seem fantastic, something that is essential to the continued quality of life. — Augusten Burroughs

First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later. — Richard Ford

When I sat down and wrote the first paragraph, I was like, 'Oh, I can go with this.' I didn't do an outline. I didn't do anything. I just wrote sentence by sentence, not knowing where the story was going. — Colleen Hoover

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. It was the future, and everything sucked. — Greg Nagan

The most difficult thing about writing; is writing the first line. — Amit Kalantri

A plane flies overhead and inside it is a writer who has spent most of his life as a law clerk, even though he's always known deep down that he's a writer. For the first time, he's worked out what he wants to write, what the truth really is. He begs a napkin and a pen off the air hostess and he writes down the most beautiful sentence ever written, as the engine catches fire outside and the plane starts its plummet to the ground. It doesn't matter to him. It's the only sentence he's ever written and it is the last and no part of him cares. The sentence falls through the air with singed, black edges and comes to rest in a tree, in a park, miles away. One day, around ten years from now, an old widow of an astronaut will find it when a strong breeze finally blows it from its hiding place. She will read it and she will weep. — Pleasefindthis

Fiction, like sculpture or painting, begins with a rough
sketch. One gets down the characters and their behavior any
way one can, knowing the sentences will have to be revised,knowing the characters' actions may change. It makes no difference
how clumsy the sketch is - sketches are not supposed
to be polished and elegant. All that matters is that, going over
and over the sketch as if one had all eternity for finishing one's
story, one improves now this sentence, now that, noticing
what changes the new sentences urge, and in the process one
gets the characters and their behavior clearer in one's head,
gradually discovering deeper and deeper implications of the
characters' problems and hopes. — John Gardner

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. — Italo Calvino

Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting. — Virginia Woolf

It's not that I was an outright nitwit of a child. — Augusten Burroughs

In M
, an important town in northern Italy, the widowed Marquise of O
, a lady of unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-brought-up children, inserted the following announcement in the newspapers: that she had, without knowledge of the cause, come to find herself in a certain situation; that she would like the father of the child she was expecting to disclose his identity to her; that she was resolved, out of consideration to her family, to marry him. — Heinrich Von Kleist

They murdered him. — Robert Cormier

The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon. — William Golding

They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. — Jean Rhys

Harry Potter was a highly unusual boy in many ways. — J.K. Rowling

Memory is a magpie after chips of colored glass and ribbon rather than the upright accuracy of objective sequence. — Larry Woiwode

Who was blowing on the nape of my neck. — David Mitchell

I read on the back cover that the author was born in Russia and came to America when she was young. She barely spoke English, but she wanted to be a great writer. I thought that was very admirable, so I sat down and tried to write a story.
"Ian MacArthur is a wonderful sweet fellow who wears glasses and peers out of them with delight."
That was the first sentence. The problem was that I just couldn't think of the next one. — Stephen Chbosky

Writing helped to have jobs that involved running around, pushing things like dish carts and wheelbarrows. It would be hard to sit at a desk all day, and then come to sit at another desk. Also, it helps to abandon hope. If I sit at my computer, determined to write a New Yorker story I won't get beyond the first sentence. It's better to put no pressure on it. What would happen if I followed the previous sentence with this one, I'll think. If the eighth draft is torture, the first should be fun. At least if you're writing humor. — David Sedaris

The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written. — Joyce Carol Oates

I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well. — Orhan Pamuk

Prayer is not only conversation, it is transformation. It is not only light, it is fire. And the closer you get to Him, the hotter the fire gets. Words begin to melt. The first word that melts in His presence is the word 'I.' That is His unique name. The closer you get to Him, the harder it is to begin a sentence with 'I.' It melts in the fire of 'thou. — Peter Kreeft

New York became the first state to ban talking on hand-held cell phones while driving. First-time violators could receive a fine of $100, with an additional mandatory six-month jail sentence if your ringer plays a Latin-themed novelty song. — Jon Stewart

As the ordinary violence of dawn sweeps across the lower Coromandel coast, a sprawling village comes into view. — David Davidar

Jett Gallatin expected trouble in Alsop, Texas - but not zombies. — Mercedes Lackey

It' her life, and she' in the middle of it. — Esmeralda Santiago

This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market. — Barbara Kingsolver

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. — C.S. Lewis

Although I'm afraid I don't get too many clients these days! — Patrick McCabe

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

I don't write with a scheme or a plan. I write word to word, so whatever that first sentence is, having said that, one more or less had to say what comes next and next and next. Guilty of no cogitation or forethought. — Padgett Powell

Midnight was closing in, the one-legged woman was grievously burned, and the Mumbai police were coming for Abdul and his father. — Katherine Boo

The first American word that I learned was cheeseburger. And the first sentence I learned was, "I'm sorry but we don't serve breakfast after 12 o'clock." — Callan McAuliffe

He repeated the words dutifully, and then put together his very first sentence in elegant King's English. "Cut...fuck...Bil-lee. — Mark Wildyr

Fifteen years ago I killed my sister. — Adam Rapp

In pain shall you bring forth children, woman, and you shall turn to your husband and he shall rule over you. And do you not know that you are Eve? God's sentence hangs still over all your sex and His punishment weighs down upon you. You are the devil's gateway; you are she who first violated the forbidden tree and broke the law of God. It was you who coaxed your way around him whom the devil had not the force to attack. With what ease you shattered that image of God: Man! Because of the death you merited, even the Son of God had to die ... Woman, you are the gate to hell. — Tertullian

I try and get it right the first time. I may rewrite a sentence four or five times, but I rarely go back and kill a whole page and rewrite it. — Matt Ridley