Opening Sentences Quotes

“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn’s for an oyster supper.”
― Michael Cox, The Meaning of Night

“They murdered him.”
― Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“I am damned,' thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who are soon to die.”
― Nick Cave, The Death of Bunny Munro

“I never really wanted to die. But I followed through anyway. The pain in my heart was excruciating, and death was beautiful.”
― Rae Hachton, Pretty In Black

“Not to every young girl is it given to enter the harem of the Sultan of Turkey and return to her homeland a virgin.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, The Ringed Castle

“Awakened by a thousand dogs, a passing truck, the tailspin of a poisoned mosquito (or, perhaps, merely the silence of my dreams), I had, before remembering who and where I was, seen only that green sun suspended in the firmament of my room (her uterus bottled in preserving fluids) and, through seconds that became millennia, millennia aeons, felt the steadfastness of my orbit around that cold glow of love, a marvelous fatal steadfastness, before my pupils dilated and shadows and unease once more defined reality, the steel box naked but for a mattress and insomnious bugs where I had lived, in a coma of heartbreak and drunkenness, the six months since Primavera's death.”
― Richard Calder, Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things

“They have said that we owe allegiance to Safety, that he is our Red Cross who will provide us with ointment and bandages for our wounds and remove the foreign ideas the glass beads of fantasy the bent hairpins of unreason embedded in our minds.”
― Janet Frame, Faces in the Water

“It's a weirdly subtle conversation, I almost don't notice I'm being blackmailed.”
― Becky Albertalli, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda

“All Persians are liars and lying is a sin.
That's what the kids in Mrs. Miller's class think, but I'm the only Persian they've ever met, so I don't know where they got that idea.
My mom says it's true, but only because everyone has sinned and needs God to save them. My dad says it isn't. Persians aren't liars. They're poets, which is worse.
Poets don't even know when they're lying. They're just trying to remember their dreams. They're trying to remember six thousand years of history and all the versions of all the stories ever told.
In one version, maybe I'm not the refugee kid in the back of Mrs. Miller's class. I'm a prince in disguise.
If you catch me, I will say what they say in the 1,001 Nights. "Let me go, and I will tell you a tale passing strange."
That's how they all begin.
With a promise. If you listen, I'll tell you a story. We can know and be known to each other, and then we're not enemies anymore.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“Dorothy Parker once said: I require three things in a man. He must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid.” Upon delivering this Dot bon mot, with much waving of sparkly rings and jingly bracelets, Constance Langtry comments that she’d add a fourth: “Deft tongue. And I don’t mean a good talker.”
― Marie Wilson

“There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl.”
― Julio Cortázar, Blow-Up and Other Stories

“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, The House with a Thousand Stories

“Like a horseman who reins in a wild stallion that has borne him, will he, nill he, across several counties; or a ship's captain who, after scudding before a gale through a bad night, hoists sail, and gets underway once more, navigating through unfamiliar seas- thus Dr. Daniel Waterhouse, anno domini 1685, watching King Charles II die at Whitehall Palace.”
― Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver

“I never thought I'd have a story worth telling, at least not one about me.”
― Perry Moore , Hero

“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! Naturally there's
a gun. He comes up behind me and sticks it into the base of my skull. It’s cold, and it actually feels sort of good, in an acupressure
kind of way. “Take it easy, Doc,” he says.”
― Josh Bazell, Beat the Reaper

“Ernst was still in the Eastern Zone, about ninety kilometres from Berlin, when the truck emerged so inexplicably out of nowhere that it seemed to have been created by the rain itself.”
― Mordecai Richler, A Choice of Enemies

“Your Grandfather," said Vanyel's brawny 15 year-old cousin Radevel, "was Crazy.”
― Mercedes Lackey, Magic's Pawn

“Damned Elmer's Glue! Just let me finish emasculating this eye and I'll be right with you.”
― Harvey Fierstein, Torch Song Trilogy

“I was in the closet... with Tamera Muncie.”
― Bill Konigsberg, Out of the Pocket

“At 9:15 on Thursday morning, June 4, while Jordan Delreese was bludgeoning his two young children to death, I was sitting in Dr. Hamburger's consulting room at the Sunny Isles Geriatric Clinic with my father, who was just then at a loss for words.”
― John Dufresne

“Small, inquisitive and solitary, the only child of an only son, growing up in rented lodgings or hotel rooms, constantly on the move as a boy, Anthony Powell needed an energetic imagination to people a sadly under-populated world from a child's point of view. His mother and his nurse were for long periods the only people he saw, in general the one unchanging element in a peripatetic existence.”
― Hilary Spurling, Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time

“It started in mud, as many things do.”
― Tad Williams

“I was deep behind enemy lines, in the very heart of the enemy camp.”
― Brent Hartinger, Geography Club

“کشتن در رویا یه هویی اتفاق نمی افته، هر چقدر هم که ناگهانی به نظر برسه ولی به تدریج و گام به گام اتفاق نمی افته، باید چیزی تو زندگیت یا بهتره بگم تو زندگی مون باشه که باعث شده چنین خوابایی ببینی. ( جمله آغازین رمان)”
― Bachtyar Ali, هەوەرەکانی دانیال

“No one understands men better than the women they don't marry, and my own opinion--beknown only to God--is that the difference between one man and another doesn't amount to much.”
― Gavin McCrea, Mrs. Engels