Opening Lines Quotes & Sayings

Books. They are lined up on shelves or stacked on a table. There they are wrapped up in their jackets, lines of neat print on nicely bound pages. They look like such orderly, static things. Then you, the reader come along. You open the book jacket, and it can be like opening the gates to an unknown city, or opening the lid of a treasure chest. You read the first word and you're off on a journey of exploration and discovery. — David Almond

Dust rained in the halls of Mechanical; it shivered free from the violence of the digging. — Hugh Howey

That year the Ribeiro's daffodils seeded early and they seeded cockroaches. Now, ecologically speaking, even a cockroach has its place
but these suckers bit. That didn't sound Earth-authentic to me. Not that I care, mind you, all I ask is useful. I wasn't betting on that either. — Janet Kagan

You think you know how this story is going to end, but you don't. — Christopher Moore

I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to Congress. — Norman Mailer

Probably the greatest single obstacle to the progress and happiness of the American people lies in the willingness of so many men to invest their time and money in multiplying competitive industries instead of opening up new fields, and putting their money into lines of industry and development that are needed. — John D. Rockefeller

The Lord gave, and the Lord took away, her grandmother said to her at the edge of the grave. But that wasn't right, because the Lord had taken away much more than had been there to start with, and everything her child might have become was now lying there at the bottom of the pit, waiting to be covered up. — Jenny Erpenbeck

Six crows sit in our greengage tree. Half awake, I hear them speak to me in Haisla. — Eden Robinson

I know your secret. — Jennifer Estep

There were no more heroes. Kennedy was dead, shot by an assassin in Dallas. Batman and Robin were dead... Superman was missing... — Robert Mayer

One burst after another as my wife turned in her sleep. I was a single monkey trying to type the opening lines of my Hamlet, — Billy Collins

Mister hit Josephine with the palm of his hand across her left cheek and it was then she knew she would run. — Tara Conklin

Maniac Magee was not born in a dump. — Jerry Spinelli

It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea. — Philip Reeve

Through practical life exercises, your child will gain confidence, self-sufficiency and the ability to properly interact with others in their world. The focus of practical life activities should be how to care for themselves and their environment, as well as safely maneuvering through it. Think along the lines of proper hand washing, dressing oneself, opening a door, carrying scissors, watering a plant, taking care of their workspace, etiquette, etc. We will later discuss a few specific activities for practical life, however you will be presented with countless opportunities throughout the day that require no planning, but rather a keen eye to acknowledge them as they occur. — Sterling Production

Show me three lines of the opening theory moves and I will prove to you that two of them are incorrect. — Emanuel Lasker

When my cousin Anil-da started telling us what he'd heard at the market about the groom's family, at my aunt Moina-pehi's wedding in January 2002, his eyes shone like inky marbles reflecting sunlight. — Aruni Kashyap

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

It was a hot sticky night in Barcelona and all the good whores had the summer flu. — Dan Jenkins

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. — James Joyce

Twenty-three stories up and all I could see out the windows was grey smog. They could call it the City of the Angels if they wanted to, but if there were angels out there, they had to be flying blind. — Laurell K. Hamilton

He sat in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammeh, on her old platform, opposite the old Ajaib gher, the Wonder House, as the natives called the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that 'fire-breathing dragon', hold the Punjab, for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror's loot. — Rudyard Kipling

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

The God who looked on you with joy when you were small and racing across His gift of green grass on His gift of feet beneath His gift of sky watched by His gift of a mother with His gift of love in His gift of her eyes, is the same God who will look on you as that race finally ends. He is the same, but we have changed, between our opening lines and our final page. (163) — N.D. Wilson

< ... > this Revolutionary ideology, epitomized by the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence, showed that the very idea of slavery is a fiction or fraud, since liberty and equality are fundamental rights that no one can legitimately lose. — David Brion Davis

The small boys came early to the hanging. — Ken Follett

My junior year, I was in a play at school and five days before opening night, I still didn't know my lines. Opening night was a disaster. I was so embarrassed. The director made me work backstage for the rest of the performance. — Katie Leclerc

It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears's house. — Mark Haddon

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

A mile below the lowest cloud, rock breaches water and the sea begins.
It has been given many names. Each inlet and bay and stream has been classified as if it were discrete. But it is one thing, where borders are absurd. It fills the space between stones and sand, curling around coastlines and filling trenches between the continents. — China Mieville

She was awakened by a strange buzzing sound coming from somewhere nearby. Her stomach ached. She felt sick. Her head was spinning. Slowly, she half-opened her eyes, squinting against the sunlight streaming in through a window. She was naked apart from her socks. The weird buzzing came again. She lay on her back and looked up, seeing a large revolving ceiling fan. She tried to remember where she was. — G.H. Finn

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

I get the willies when I see closed doors. — Joseph Heller

The opening lines of a book are so important. You really need to somehow charm your reader. If you can't get her attention in the first pages, you may have lost her. There has to be an ambience. — Tatiana De Rosnay

From the way her buttocks looked under the black silk dress, I knew she'd be good in bed. The silk was tight and under it the muscles worked slow and easy. I saw weight there, and control, and, brother, those are things I like in a woman. — Jonathan Latimer

I am Tersa the Weaver, Tersa the Liar, Tersa the Fool. — Anne Bishop

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first. — Blaise Pascal

Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driver would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake. Later still, of course, there'd be no doubt. But for now Driver is, as they say, in the moment. And the moment includes this blood lapping toward him, the pressure of dawn's late light at windows and door, traffic sounds from the interstate nearby, the sound of someone weeping in the next room. — James Sallis

Bleep, I hadn't fought a werewolf ever, and had never had to tase one who was actually expecting it. He grinned maliciously as we circled each other, each looking for an opening.
"I can smell your fear."
"Again with the lines! What do you think this is, a B movie? News flash: you are not a tortured hero and we're not going to have a hot make out scene after we fight. — Kiersten White

The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. — Natalie Babbitt

From the opening lines, Sleeping with Schubert is a hilarious, whimsical romp through the looking glass of a great musical mystery. The writing snaps, crackles, and pops with humor as Bonnie Marson makes Schubert a sexy, happening kind of guy who gives new meaning to our dreaming the impossible. — Jonis Agee

She'd be lucky if she got out of this alive . . . and she'd never been lucky in her life. — Dorian Paul

She turned into a tree. It was a Mystery. It must have been. Nothing else made sense, because I didn't understand it. — Jo Walton

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

If gardens are created to tell stories, which I believe they are, then garden gates are the crucial opening lines that can make or break a tale. — Vivian Swift

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

Lexicon grabbed me with the opening lines, and never let go. An absolutely thrilling story, featuring an array of compelling characters in an eerily credible parallel society, punctuated by bouts of laugh-out-loud humor. — Chris Pavone

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

Simon presses his lips against mine. This dance we share is as natural as breathing. But this isn't just a kiss. Our tongues mesh together, silently writing the opening lines of a novel and I feel it...I feel him on a completely different level. — B.L. Berry

Listen. The Sanctuary of the Redeemers on Shotover Scarp is named after a damned lie for there is no redemption that goes on there and less sanctuary — Paul Hoffman

Imagine considering every moment as a potential time of communion with God. By the time your life is over, you will have spent six months at stoplights, eight months opening junk mail, a year and a half looking for lost stuff (double that number in my case), and a whopping five years standing in various lines.7Why don't you give these moments to God? By giving God your whispering thoughts, the common becomes uncommon. Simple phrases such as "Thank you, Father," "Be sovereign in this hour, O Lord," "You are my resting place, Jesus" can turn a commute into a pilgrimage. You needn't leave your office or kneel in your kitchen. Just pray where you are. Let the kitchen become a cathedral or the classroom a chapel. Give God your whispering thoughts. — Max Lucado

Two households, both alike in dignity
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife. — William Shakespeare

If a lioness spends her hours pacing back and forth in a cage of gold with the finest meats at her disposal, does that make her any less of a prisoner? If that same feline's fangs are filed down to blunt, un-tearing teeth and her roar is silenced, can she still be called a lioness? — Kristen Reed

The baloney weighed the raven down, and the shopkeeper almost caught him as he whisked out the delicatessen door. — Peter S. Beagle

When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man. — Richard Stark

If you had met my father you would never, not for an instant, have thought he was an assassin. — Magda Szubanski

Grandfather recently died. He died alone on a trip away from home in a town where no one expected him to be — Tea Obreht

Once there was a little old lady who lived next-door. I was eleven when I decided to kill her. But I didn't. As an eleven-year-old I was shocked, upset and angry enough to take the life of the frail-looking, white-haired woman, but I lacked the ingenuity and resolve to put a plan into action. It's easy to want to kill someone but hard to actually do it. Especially when you're a kid. That's why I waited until I was eighteen. — G.H. Finn

I really want readers to put themselves into the shoes of each character. So the opening lines are an orienting technique: this is where you are, this is who you are. Go. — Alissa Nutting

Consult the genius of the place in all;
That tells the waters or to rise, or fall;
Or helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale,
Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;
Calls in the country, catches opening glades,
Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,
Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines;
Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs. — Alexander Pope

Here we are, alone again. It's all so slow, so heavy, so sad. . . I'll be old soon. Then at last it will be over. So many people have come into my room. They've talked. They haven't said much. They've gone away. They've grown old, wretched, sluggish, each in some corner of the world. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

It was dusk - winter dusk. Snow lay white and shining over the pleated hills, and icicles hung from the forest trees. Snow lay piled on the dark road across Willoughby Wold, but from dawn men had been clearing it with brooms and shovels. There were hundreds of them at work, wrapped in sacking because of the bitter cold, and keeping together in groups for fear of the wolves, grown savage and reckless from hunger. — Joan Aiken

Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn New York. Especially in the summer of 1912. Somber as a word was better. But it did not apply to Williamsburg Brooklyn. Prairie was lovely and Shenandoah had a beautiful sound but you couldn't fit those words into Brooklyn. Serene was the only word for it especially on a Saturday afternoon in summer. — Betty Smith

The sun appears to pour itself down, and indeed its light pours in all direction, but the stream does not run out. This pouring is linear extension: that is why its beams are called rays, because they radiate in extended lines. You can see what a ray is if you observe the sun's light entering a dark room through a narrow opening. It extends in a straight line and impacts, so to speak, on any solid body in its path which blocks passage through the air on the other side: it settles there and does not slip off or fall. — Marcus Aurelius

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

It's the opening line of a football game returned for a touchdown. Or fumbled.

It's what orange juice is to breakfast, the first minutes of a blind date, a salesman's opening remarks.

It sets the tone, lights the stage, greases the skids for everything to follow.

It's the most important part of everything you'll ever write because if it doesn't work, whatever follows won't matter. It won't get read.

It's your opening paragraph. And enough can't be said about its importance.

Seduction. That's basically what leads are all about--enticing the reader across the threshold of your book, novel or article--because nothing happens until you get 'em inside.

And you literally have only seconds to do it because surveys show that eight out of ten people quit reading whatever it is they've started after the first fifty words. — Lionel Fisher

To say the least, it was inconsiderate of Diana's almost-dead husband to show up at her engagement party. — Robin Lee Hatcher

Who is John Galt? — Ayn Rand

He killed, his sword shearing, shield and horse a ram, pushing in, and further in, opening a space by force alone for the momentum of the men behind him. Beside him a man fell to a spear in the throat. To his left, an equine scream as Rochert's horse went down.
In front of him, methodically, men fell, and fell, and fell.
He split his attention. He swept a sword cut aside with his shield, killed a helmed soldier, and all the while flung out his mind, waiting for the moment when Touar's lines split open. The most difficult part of commanding from the front was this
staying alive in the moment, while tracking in his mind, critically, the whole fight. Yet it was exhilarating, like fighting with two bodies, at two scales. — C.S. Pacat

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

A dead man fell from the sky, landing at my feet with a thud. — Gary Corby

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

If my opinion runs more than twenty pages," she said, "I am disturbed that I couldn't do it shorter." The mantra in her chambers is "Get it right and keep it tight." She disdains legal Latin, and demands extra clarity in an opinion's opening lines, which she hopes the public will understand. "If you can say it in plain English, you should," RBG says. Going through "innumerable drafts," the goal is to write an opinion where no sentence should need to be read twice. "I think that law should be a literary profession," RBG says, "and the best legal practitioners regard law as an art as well as a craft. — Irin Carmon

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

You come to this place, mid-life. You don't know how you got here, but suddenly you're staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted. The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of fabric, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawer-liners. You think of the children you might have had but didn't. When the midwife says, 'It's a boy,' where does the girl go? When you think you're pregnant, and you're not, what happens to the child that has already formed in your mind? You keep it filed in a drawer of your consciousness, like a short story that never worked after the opening lines. — Hilary Mantel

Everything funny in a not-funny-at-all kind of way. Sarcasm as something you practiced like karate. Later concealing your mute fury when nobody fed you the opening lines. — Jonathan Lethem

They murdered him. — Robert Cormier

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. — Franz Kafka

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

It was a pleasure to burn. — Ray Bradbury

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

The heavy blade hung high above the prisoners, glinting against the stars, and then the Razor came down, a wedge of falling darkness cutting through the torchlight. One solid thump, and four more heads had been shaved from their bodies. — Sharon Cameron

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

The main thing is to think strategically about what will engage your readers. Trust me when I tell you that few people are eager to read a story whose opening lines sound like a dissertation on giant bugs. — Darin Strauss

That you should not be here when something we've both wanted happens is no new thing for me. Today too, as always, you're not here. — Sachin Kundalkar

I am a vampire, and that is the truth. — Christopher Pike

The Greeks were so committed to ideas as supernatural forces that they created an entire group of goddesses (not one but nine) to represent creative power; the opening lines of both The Iliad and The Odyssey begin with calls to them. These nine goddesses, or muses, were the recipients of prayers from writers, engineers, and musicians. Even the great minds of the time, like Socrates and Plato, built shrines and visited temples dedicated to their particular muse (or muses, for those who hedged their bets). Right now, under our very secular noses, we honor these beliefs in our language, as the etymology of words like museum ("place of the muses") and music ("art of the muses") come from the Greek heritage of ideas as superhuman forces. — Scott Berkun

I was thankful that nobody was there to meet me at the airport.
We reached Paris just as the light was fading. It had been a soft, gray March day, with the smell of spring in the air. The wet tarmac glistened underfoot; over the airfield the sky looked very high, rinsed by the afternoon's rain to a pale clear blue. Little trails of soft cloud drifted in the wet wind, and a late sunbeam touched them with a fleeting underglow. Away beyond the airport buildings the telegraph wires swooped gleaming above the road where passing vehicles showed lights already. — Mary Stewart

In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together. — Carson McCullers

To what or whom does Lizzie Harris direct the imperative title of her startling first book, Stop Wanting? To the reader, the narrator, to desire itself, or to lack? This is a work of complexly, ambiguously layered narratives and identities. The opening poem asserts I want to say what happened / but am suspicious of stories. These lines become an ars poetica for the whole of this painful and exceptional collection in which the unspeakable is stubbornly confronted by a searing eloquence. This is a commanding debut. — Lynn Emanuel

In my own life I studied music, not creative writing; I see a novel as music - an opening as an overture, themes and subplots as lines in a fugue. The chance to write a novel about a musician boxed in by all kinds of limitations but who plays out his ultimate struggle for freedom at the piano was irresistible. — Nicole Mones

Like almost every truly horrible thing that has ever happened in the history of our world, the end also began with a kiss. — Dennis Sharpe

Here's the truth, simply stated ... bookstores are suffering from a serious crisis of falling sales. Don't believe a single zero of all those editions claimed to be 100,000! 40,000! ... even 400 copies! just for the suckers! Alack! ... Alas! ... only love and romance ... and even then! ... manage to keep selling ... and a few murder mysteries ... — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

At three o'clock this afternoon Evelyn Wastneys died. I am Evelyn Wastneys, and I died, standing at the door of an old country home in Ireland... — Mrs. George De Horne Vaizey

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

In the beginning we were a group of nine.
Three are gone, dead.
There are six of us left.
They are hunting us, and they won't stop until they've killed us all.
I am Number Four.
I know that I am next. — Pittacus Lore

After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn's for an oyster supper. — Michael Cox

Seated opposite me in the railway carriage, the elderly lady in the fox-fur shawl was recalling some of the murders that she had committed over the years. — John Boyne

Had I not played the Sicilian with Black I could have saved myself the trouble of studying for more than 20 years all the more popular lines of this opening, which comprise probably more than 25 percent of all published opening theory! — Bent Larsen

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