I was just thinking of my favorite opening sentences, or phrases, from books. Here are a few.
"Like a match struck in a darkened room:" (The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem)
"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." (Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides)
"In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together." (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers)
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." (Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen)
"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." (Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf)
"Nine months Landman's been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered." (The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon)
"It was 7 minutes after midnight." (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon)
"On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide -- it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese -- the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope." (The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides)
"Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife." (Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen)
"On July 5, 1996, my daughter was struck mad." (Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg)
"Before I tell you about Hannah Schneider's death, I'll tell you about my mother's." (Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl)
"Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital ... ." (The Tin Drum by Guenter Grass)
"... of wandering forever and the earth again ... of seed-time, bloom, and the mellow-dropping harvest." (Of Time and the River by Thomas Wolfe)
“We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.” (the opening of James Agee’s "Knoxville: Summer of 1915")
"Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve." ("The Glass Menagerie" by Tennessee Williams)
"Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea." ("The Portrait of a Lady" by Henry James)
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