Opening Lines Fiction Quotes

“I was not there, yet I was there. No, I did not go to the trial, I did not hear the verdict, because I knew all the time what it would be. Still, I was there. I was there as much as anyone else was there.”
― Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying

“Jack stepped through the crack into the night. Outside the yard was quiet and thick dark clouds hid the moon from view.”
― Peter Bunzl, Moonlocket

“In her short life Lily Hartman had come back from the dead not once, but twice. Neither time had been particularly pleasant. The first she didn’t like
to recall; the second she wished every day she could forget.”
― Peter Bunzl, Moonlocket

“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, Elizabeth Costello

“Let me tell you who occupies this prison cell. Perfidious, his name is Perfidity. His name is Liar, Blasphemer, Defiler of Truth, Black-Tongued. He lies down with all members of the congregation equally, tells them each in turn they are his beloved, while he is already attending to the next assignation in his relentless rendezvous with the consumption of souls.
He will inhale you, devour you, eat the pulp of your soul and spit out the husk. Behind his eyes lies nothing save the fevered light of unholy candles. He is black magic without redemption, without even the nethermost quality that could be termed human, or rather, he is not that at all; he is all that is estimated human, the sum total of those values that achieve the color that is the presence of all colors: black. He lacks a center—each of you is his center—and he has sucked the marrow dry of each of those he has visited. Beware of the son of Moloch that paces to and fro in that barred room.
This unholy creature is none other than the author of this narrative, Truman Ferris Pinter”
― Les Edgerton, The Rapist

“It's true what the folktale says: I did choose to live with the beast. But not for the reason you think. Not to save my father. Not even to save myself.

In truth, I was hoping I'd be eaten.”
― Elizabeth Lowham, Beauty Reborn