Opening Sentences Quotes

#1. On opening sentences: "If in the first chapter a hurricane is going to blow down an oak tree which falls through the kitchen roof, there's no need to first describe the kitchen."

James Thayer

#2. ludic: cigarette

Garth Greenwell

#3. There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.

Charlotte Bronte

#4. 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

#5. If you're going to read this, don't bother.

Chuck Palahniuk

#6. I want people to feel the hope that comes through Christmastime.

Danny Gokey

#7. 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

#8. He loved more than anything to fly. His sole conflict was with gravity.

Mark Z. Danielewski

#9. 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

#10. After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn's for an oyster supper.

Michael Cox

#11. What you permit becomes your weapon

Sunday Adelaja

#12. 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

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

Nick Cave

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

Rae Hachton

#15. I've always had a problem within myself of feeling that people didn't really see me as a musician and I'm out to get a bit of musical credibility.

Phil Spector

#16. 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

#17. They murdered him.

Robert Cormier

#18. 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 Cortazar

#19. For years, I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions in the South, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire system, a revolution of values.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#20. Effective listening is more than simply avoiding the bad habit of interrupting others while they are speaking or finishing their sentences. It's being content to listen to the entire thought of someone rather than waiting impatiently for your chance to respond.

Richard Carlson

#21. 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