First Sentence First Lines Quotes

#1. The most difficult thing about writing; is writing the first line.

Amit Kalantri

#2. It was shaping up as a beautiful morning. The last thing I wanted to hear about was murder.

Jonathan Kellerman

#3. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. It was the future, and everything sucked.

Greg Nagan

#4. Indian summer is like a woman.

Grace Metalious

#5. They murdered him.

Robert Cormier

#6. 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

#7. This morning, my mother didn't get out of bed.

Melina Marchetta

#8. Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood.

Rick Riordan

#9. In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#10. On a mountain above the clouds once lived a man who had been the gardener of the emperor of Japan.

Tan Twan Eng

#11. First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.

Richard Ford

#12. I am damned,' thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who are soon to die.

Nick Cave

#13. It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened.

Lois Lowry

#14. There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.

Neil Gaiman

#15. No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.

Shirley Jackson

#16. It was Wang Lung's marriage day.

Pearl S. Buck

#17. There were crimson roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#18. 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

#19. Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.

Ernest Hemingway,

#20. The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.

William Golding

#21. Call me Ishmael.

Herman Melville

#22. 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

#23. The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.

George Orwell

#24. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.

Rafael Sabatini

#25. When a naked man shows up on your doorstep with a bear trap clamped around his ankle, it's best just to do what he asks

Molly Harper

#26. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Charles Dickens

#27. Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

J.K. Rowling

#28. There are gods in Alabama: Jack Daniel's, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus.

Joshilyn Jackson

#29. There is a delicate-looking plant native to North America called bleeding heart.

Josh Aterovis

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

Jay Kristoff