Opening Lines Fiction Quotes & Sayings

Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go ... But, of course, ceasing to be "in love" need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense - love as distinct from "being in love" - is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriage) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God ... "Being in love" first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it. — C.S. Lewis

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

instability, the discomfort of the relationship - feed back into the low self-esteem and self-doubt that triggered the over-involvement to start with. The only way out appears to be deeper enmeshment, getting so close to the SOP that those blowups won't happen. Soon the cycle hums, fully in place, with both parties pedaling as fast as they can. — Robert Hemfelt

Egoism , which is the moving force of the world, and altruism , which is its morality , these two contradictory instincts , of which one is so plain and the other so mysterious, cannot serve us unless in the incomprehensible alliance of their irreconcilable antagonism. — Joseph Conrad

Two people who I think have the world's most perfect skin are Cate Blanchett and Kate Bosworth. Maybe there's something to being named Kate, I don't know, but those two just seem to be effortless, yet completely, ethereally gorgeous. — Sophia Bush

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

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

We can't win the world with weapons or violence.
We can win the world with love and practice of nonviolence. — Debasish Mridha

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

Two minutes and fourteen seconds later, he'd somehow gotten trapped in a black hole on a site called Tumblr that led to porn of a most enthusiastic variety, if the faces of the six people on the screen had any measure. Gus may have shrieked slightly when one of the pornographic actors, a large Caucasian male with exuberant-looking nipples, glared at one of the females, gave a cocky smirk, and said, "I'm gonna get yo mouth pregnant." Gus slammed the computer shut just as the large pornographic actor began to do just that. For the next four minutes and seventeen seconds, he stood in his kitchen, rocking back and forth, moaning, "But you can't get her mouth pregnant, you just can't. — T.J. Klune

< ... > 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

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

There is first of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank. It is a simple bridging problem, a problem of knocking together a bridge. People solve such problems every day. They solve them, and having solved them push on.
Let us assume that, however it may have been done, it is done. Let us take it that the bridge is built andcrossed, that we can put it out of our mind. We have left behind the territory in which we were. We are inthe far territory; where we want to be. — J.M. Coetzee

We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody threw the girl off the bridge. — John D. MacDonald