First Sentence First Lines 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

Indian summer is like a woman. — Grace Metalious

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

It was Wang Lung's marriage day. — Pearl S. Buck

There were crimson roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood. — Dorothy L. Sayers

I don't like killing, but I'm good at it. Murder isn't so bad from a distance, just shapes popping up in my scope. Close-up work though - a garrotte around a target's neck or a knife in their heart - it's not for me. Too much empathy, that's my problem. Usually. But not today. Today is different . . . — Graeme Shimmin

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

People often shit themselves when they die. Their muscles slack and their souls flutter free and everything else just...slips out. — Jay Kristoff

I am damned,' thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who are soon to die. — Nick Cave

Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. — Ernest Hemingway,

When a naked man shows up on your doorstep with a bear trap clamped around his ankle, it's best just to do what he asks — Molly Harper

There is a delicate-looking plant native to North America called bleeding heart. — Josh Aterovis

It is cold at six-forty in the morning on a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad. — Frederick Forsyth

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. — J.R.R. Tolkien

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. — Charles Dickens

Call me Ishmael. — Herman Melville

Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood. — Rick Riordan

They have said that we owe allegiance to Safety, that he is our Red Cross who will provide us with ointment and bandages for our wounds and remove the foreign ideas the glass beads of fantasy the bent hairpins of unreason embedded in our minds. — Janet Frame

This morning, my mother didn't get out of bed. — Melina Marchetta

It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened. — Lois Lowry

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

There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife. — Neil Gaiman

I tend toward an expansive sentence that has a cold surface and, visible underneath it, a magma of unbearable heat. I want readers to know from the first lines what they will have to deal with. — Elena Ferrante

He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. — Rafael Sabatini

The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth. — George Orwell

On the heights above the river Xzan, at the site of certain ancient ruins, Iucounu the Laughing Magician had built a manse to his private taste: an eccentric structure of steep gables, balconies, sky-walks, cupolas, together with three spiral green glass towers through which the red sunlight shone in twisted glints and peculiar colors. — Jack Vance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They murdered him. — Robert Cormier