First Lines Quotes

When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. ~ Suzanne Collins

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

I never sleep. Like the dolphin and the spiny anteater, I don't experience REM. Unlike the dreamless mammals, I'm a construct. I am a living program inside a vast network of electronic impulses known as the LINK. In that datastream I've uncovered the meaning of another kind of dreaming
that of a fond hope or aspiration, a yearning, a desire, or a passion. This much I have. When I dream, I dream of Mecca. ~ Lyda Morehouse

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

The great fish moved silently through the night water. ~ Peter Benchley

Every seven-year-old deserves a superhero. That's just how it is. ~ Fredrik Backman

I have always been considered a bit of an outsider, and a general failure at everything I put my hand towards. In fact, you might even go so far as to say that I'm a lesser being of great insignificance! I state this because, when writing a story, you should always start the first line off with at least one basic truth.
-First lines from the novel Sukiyaki ~ Andrew James Pritchard

I made my first public appearance on the stairs up to the school nurse's room, at St. Peter's Preparatory School, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England, on September 13, 1948. ~ John Cleese

He doesn't know anything yet. He knows I fell for a boy. He knows I had a baby. All he knows are the first lines of a song. He hasn't even heard the melody yet. ~ Alessandra Torre

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo ~ James Joyce

What a lark! What a plunge! ~ Virginia Woolf

The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died. ~ Anna Burns

So I'm on my way to work and I stop to watch a pigeon fight a rat in the snow, and some fuckhead tries to mug me! ~ Josh Bazell

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eight-four days now without taking a fish. ~ Ernest Hemingway

After the End came the Beginning. ~ Ling Ma

The first thing that happens is I unseal an envelope and Dad's death falls out onto the breakfast table. ~ Leo Hunt

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

I never really wanted to die. But I followed through anyway. The pain in my heart was excruciating, and death was beautiful. ~ Rae Hachton

Big Angel was late to his own mother's funeral. ~ Luis Alberto Urrea

At dawn one still October day in the long ago of the world, across the hill of Alderley, a farmer from Mobberley was riding to Macclesfield fair. ~ Alan Garner

​While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years. ~ Donna Tartt

The door slid open, and Clarke knew it was time to die. ~ Kass Morgan

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

It's late at night when the memory comes for me, like it always seems to when the relief of sleep seems ready to draw me under. ~ Joaquin Lowe

The drought had lasted for 10 million years now, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

He liked radical politics and had a fondness for chocolate. ~ Laura Kinsale

He'd never killed a woman in cold blood before, but now was as good a time as any. ~ Ronie Kendig

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. ~ Cormac McCarthy

Your mother hollers that you're going to miss the bus. She can see it coming down the street. You don't stop and hug her and tell her you love her. You don't thank her for being a good, kind, patient mother. Of course not
you vault down down the stairs and make a run for the corner.
Only if it's the last time you'll ever see your mother, you sort of start to wish you'd stopped and did those things. Maybe even missed the bus.
But the bus was barreling down our street so I ran. ~ Emmy Laybourne

The Vampire Lestat here. ~ Anne Rice

My name is Towner Whitney. No, that's not exactly true. My real first name is Sophya. Never believe me. I lie all the time.

I am a crazy woman... That last part is true. ~ Brunonia Barry

Every night in the year, four of us sat in the small parlour of the George at Debenham - the undertaker, and the landlord, and Fettes, and myself. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Who is John Galt? ~ Ayn Rand

The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full-stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network. ~ Michel Foucault

​It was five o'clock on a winter's morning in Syria. ~ Agatha Christie

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

Would you say there's any end in sight, Charlie? ~ Kevin Barry

I was born in a house with a million rooms, built on a small, airless world on the edge of an empire of light and commerce that the adults called the Golden Hour, for a reason I did not yet grasp. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Nobody knew me at Buckton. Clem had chosen the town because of that; and besides, even if I had wimp out, there was not enough gas to help me going further north. - I spit on your graves , ~ Boris Vian

I did it! I stopped time.

[Hampton Green] ~ Tim Tharp

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

Ashline Wilde was a human mood ring. ~ Karsten Knight

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. ~ William Gibson

If you want to know the age of the Earth - look upon the sea in a storm. But what storm can fully reveal the heart of a man? Between Suez and the China Sea are many nameless men who prefer to live and die unknown. This is the story of one such man. Among the great gallery of rogues and heroes thrown up on the beaches and ports - no man was more respected or more damned than - Lord Jim. ~ Joseph Conrad

On the morning after the daring theft of a priceless James Ensor painting from the Grand Palais in Paris, I was allowed to leave the Les Halles Police Station after only a few hours of questioning. ~ Mark Zero

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

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

So here you are now, ready to attack the first lines of the first page. You prepare to recognize the unmistakable tone of the author. No. You don't recognize it at all. But now that you think about it, who ever said this author had an unmistakable tone? On the contrary, he is known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next. And in these very changes you recognize him as himself. ~ Italo Calvino

I shouldn't have come to this party. ~ Angie Thomas

At dusk they pour from the sky, ~ Anthony Doerr

Now, what I want is Facts. ~ Charles Dickens

Hi. I'm here to enlist.
You can't. You aren't human.
You see, little fella, we don't do sociological stuff like "interspeciated workplaces." We're a crack company of space mercenaries. We do "hurting people" and "breaking things."
Sounds like my kind of fun.
-Schlock & Lieutenant Der Trihs ~ Howard Tayler

He read the familiar first lines of the book and felt the calm come over him, like a comforter. ~ Louise Penny

The Filipino houseboy was conscious now ~ Charles Willeford

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

I've always felt unclaimed. ~ Carrie Brownstein

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

I knocked at a second-floor flat in a dreary house, one of two hundred in a dreary Catford street. ~ Derek Raymond

The graphic emphasis placed on those first lines is rather hard to square with the proposition that the monument expresses no particular religious preference. ~ John Paul Stevens

Back before there was time, I lived with my father on an island, tucked away in an endless archipelago that reached up out of the cold salt water, hungry for air. ~ Erica Bauermeister

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

Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. ~ Alex Michaelides

The women of this family leaned towards extremes. ~ Jane Urquhart

A burning map. Every epic, my friend Jack used to say, should start with a burning map. Like in the movies. Fucking flames burning the world away; that's the best thing about all those old films, he said
when you see this old parchment map just ... getting darker and darker in the centre, crisping, crinkling until suddenly it just ... fwoom. ~ Hal Duncan

Like most forms of corruption, it began with men in suits. ~ Mick Herron

In darkness there is death. ~ Bob Mayer

It's a whydunnit in q-sharp major and it has a message: never talk to the sort of girls that you wouldn't leave lying about in your drawing-room for the servants to pick up. ~ Muriel Spark

The sun sets in the west (just about everyone knows that), but Sunset Towers faced east. Strange! ~ Ellen Raskin

Sometimes the day begins with nothing to look forward to ... ~ Shaun Tan

Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down. ~ Celeste Ng

One of my many theories about short stories is that their titles and first lines ought to be memorable, because if not memorable they will not be remembered, and if not remembered the stories will not be reprinted (because no one can find them). ~ Damon Knight

The trouble began when my 6-year-old son, Z, became obsessed with Michael Jackson. ~ Mira Jacob

The two men appeared out of nowhere, a few yards apart in the narrow, moonlit lane. For a second they stood quite still, wands directed at each other's chests; then, recognizing each other, they stowed their wands beneath their cloaks and started walking briskly in the same direction. ~ J.K. Rowling

The first lines of defence against criminals are the victims themselves. ~ Michael Badnarik

Everyone gets one last line. But first lines, stories of love and loss and hope floating on backs of paper cranes? We choose how many of those we get to tell. ~ Kate Bassett

Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature ~ Anita Brookner

We all obsess over our novel's first lines, and rightly so because from it the rest of the story must flow naturally and without pause. ~ A.K. Kuykendall

Dead Papa Toothwort wakes from his standing nap an acre wide and scrapes off dream dregs of bitumen glistening thick with liquid globs of litter. ~ Max Porter

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

On our wedding day I was forty-six, she was eighteen. ~ George Saunders

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

​In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. ~ Jon Krakauer

All day, the colours had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths. Briefly visible above the vapour, Kanchenjunga was a far peak whittled out of ice, gathering the last of the night, a plume of snow blown high by the storms at its summit.
Sai, sitting on the veranda, was reading an article about giant squid in an old National Geographic. Every now and then she looked up at Kanchenjunga, observed its wizard phosphorescence with a shiver. The judge sat at the far corner with his chessboard, playing against himself. Stuffed under his chair where she felt safe was Mutt the dog, snoring gently in her sleep. A single bald lightbulb dangled on a wire above. It was cold, but inside the house, it was still colder, the dark, the freeze, contained by stone walls several feet deep. ~ Kiran Desai

I like my first lines short and declarative. No complicated sentences. Of course, that's not really a Scott thing. It's pretty classic grab-the-reader technique. ~ Scott Westerfeld

From where I sit, the story of Arthur Less is not so bad. ~ Andrew Sean Greer

Entertainment has a bad name ... The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. ~ Michael Chabon

Jackie Brown at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns. ~ George V. Higgins

Carrying a small notebook with you always, in your pocket or purse, along with a reliable ballpoint pen will enable you to jot down spot observations and quick character sketches before the first sharp impressions fade away. You'll need all kinds of story actors, because even picture books can include a wide range of ages, relationships, occupations, and nationalities. Learn to observe and analyze swiftly, wherever you are. ~ Lee Wyndham

It is not from the tall crowded workhouse of prosperity that men first or clearest see the eternal stars of heaven. ~ Theodore Parker

It's a really interesting and diverse business. You're a farmer first, then a winemaker, then you're onto marketing and distribution. So it's multi-faceted and really engaging. I've learned more in the last couple years than in the ten prior to that, so it's been pretty interesting. ~ Drew Bledsoe

My first time ever on the Tony Awards was in 1984, the year of 'The Rink.' ~ Scott Ellis

One of them spotted the halo in Daniel's hand and gasped. "They have stolen the first relic."
"And they were working together! Angels and demons and"-narrowed eyes fell on Luce-"those who do not know their place, all working together for an impure cause. The Throne does not endorse this. You will never find the desideratum! ~ Lauren Kate

My last point about getting started as a writer: do something first, good or bad, successful or not, and write it up before approaching an editor. The best introduction to an editor is your own written work, published or not. I traveled across Siberia on my own money before ever approaching an editor; I wrote my first book, Siberian Dawn, without knowing a single editor, with no idea of how to get it published. I had to risk my life on the Congo before selling my first magazine story. If the rebel spirit dwells within you, you won't wait for an invitation, you'll invade and take no hostages. ~ Jeffery Taylor

On the 25th March, at 14:57GMT, the world stopped for 27 minutes and 54 seconds. No-one noticed at first. Those that eventually did were ordered to keep quiet. ~ Anonymous

Music was the first thing I did where I was naturally talented. ~ Miranda Lambert

Revealed religion first informed thy sight, and reason saw not till faith sprung to light. ~ John Dryden

The notion that the press was used in the [first Iraq] war is incorrect. The press wanted to be used. It saw itself as part of the war effort. ~ Chris Hedges

I'm fine. I'm not even all that hungry. I'd much rather explore the book shop."
"Food first, books after," he said sternly, not liking the dark shadows of fatigue beneath her eyes. Who knew when she'd last slept? "And then we should rest early. ~ Brooklyn Ann

I don't consider myself a feminist, but I'm down for my first opportunity to say something to the world to be so meaningful. If you asked me, 'What do you want to say?' it would be, 'Love yourself more.' ~ Meghan Trainor

The first time I passed through the country (Switzerland) I had the impression it was swept down with a broom from one end to the other every morning by housewives who dumped all the dirt in Italy. ~ Ernesto Sabato