First Paragraph Quotes

“Gordon Edgley's sudden death came as a shock to everyone - not least himself. One moment he was in his study, seven words into the twenty-fifth sentence of the final chapter of his new book, And the Darkness Rained upon Them, and the next he was dead. A tragic loss, his mind echoed numbly as he slipped away.”
― Derek Landy, Skulduggery Pleasant

“Truth be told, I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted. And, of course, my idea of entertaining might not be yours. I'm in complete agreement with all those people who say, regarding movies, 'I just want to be entertained.' This populist position is much derided by my academic colleagues as simpleminded and unsophisticated, evidence of questionable analytical and critical acuity. But I agree with the premise, and I too just want to be entertained. That I am almost never entertained by what entertains other people who just want to be entertained doesn't make us philosophically incompatible. It just means that we shouldn't go to movies together.”
― Richard Russo, Straight Man

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time, Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, Габриел Гарсија Маркез, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“You know the feeling when you're falling? When you take a step onto what used to be sold ground and suddenly it just falls out from under you? You start to spiral slowly, gathering speed until you know that you are within seconds from hitting the ground, and you're praying that you'll hit, that everything will just disappear, that everything you've been fighting to escape will just consume you and everything will be over. But then the ground doesn't come and you just keep falling and falling and falling, trapped in a nightmare that will never end.”
― B.C. Hedlund, Consigned to Oblivion

“If Lana Walters had given any thought to dying, she’d have assumed it would hurt more. Instead, when the bus hit her, the lights simply went out. One moment of inattention and then, nothing. Next she knew, she was weightless, flying above Boston.”
― Mae Archer, Return to Me