Top 100 Quotes About Opening Lines
#1. Writing the opening lines of a story is a bit like starting to ski at the steepest part of a hill. You must have all your skills under control from the first instant.
Marion Dane Bauer
#2. I really want readers to put themselves into the shoes of each character. So the opening lines are an orienting technique: this is where you are, this is who you are. Go.
Alissa Nutting
#3. One burst after another as my wife turned in her sleep. I was a single monkey trying to type the opening lines of my Hamlet,
Billy Collins
#4. Since we possess its hymn, engraved on our hearts in its entirety, there is no need of any woman to repeat the opening lines, potent with the admiration which her beauty inspires, for us to remember all that follows.
Marcel Proust
#5. From the opening lines of the play Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise
All you need,
To find poetry,
Is to look for it with a lantern.
Wallace Stevens
#6. The opening lines of a book are so important. You really need to somehow charm your reader. If you can't get her attention in the first pages, you may have lost her. There has to be an ambience.
Tatiana De Rosnay
#7. < ... > this Revolutionary ideology, epitomized by the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence, showed that the very idea of slavery is a fiction or fraud, since liberty and equality are fundamental rights that no one can legitimately lose.
David Brion Davis
#8. Everything funny in a not-funny-at-all kind of way. Sarcasm as something you practiced like karate. Later concealing your mute fury when nobody fed you the opening lines.
Jonathan Lethem
#9. The main thing is to think strategically about what will engage your readers. Trust me when I tell you that few people are eager to read a story whose opening lines sound like a dissertation on giant bugs.
Darin Strauss
#10. Simon presses his lips against mine. This dance we share is as natural as breathing. But this isn't just a kiss. Our tongues mesh together, silently writing the opening lines of a novel and I feel it...I feel him on a completely different level.
B.L. Berry
#11. If gardens are created to tell stories, which I believe they are, then garden gates are the crucial opening lines that can make or break a tale.
Vivian Swift
#12. Lexicon grabbed me with the opening lines, and never let go. An absolutely thrilling story, featuring an array of compelling characters in an eerily credible parallel society, punctuated by bouts of laugh-out-loud humor.
Chris Pavone
#13. From the opening lines, Sleeping with Schubert is a hilarious, whimsical romp through the looking glass of a great musical mystery. The writing snaps, crackles, and pops with humor as Bonnie Marson makes Schubert a sexy, happening kind of guy who gives new meaning to our dreaming the impossible.
Jonis Agee
#14. To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.
Kurt Vonnegut
#15. 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
#16. It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.
Philip Reeve
#17. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
William Faulkner
#18. Thoroughly understand what it is to understand, and not only will you understand the broad lines of all there is to be understood but also you will possess a fixed base, an invariant pattern, opening upon all further developments of understanding,
Bernard Lonergan
#19. The great fish moved silently through the night water.
Peter Benchley
#20. You think you know how this story is going to end, but you don't.
Christopher Moore
#22. Lok was running as fast as he could. His head was down and he carried his thorn bush horizontally for balance and smacked the drifts of vivid buds aside with his free hand.
William Golding
#23. The heavy blade hung high above the prisoners, glinting against the stars, and then the Razor came down, a wedge of falling darkness cutting through the torchlight. One solid thump, and four more heads had been shaved from their bodies.
Sharon Cameron
#24. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. It was the future, and everything sucked.
Greg Nagan
#25. Like almost every truly horrible thing that has ever happened in the history of our world, the end also began with a kiss.
Dennis Sharpe
#26. I was looking for a quiet place to die.
Paul Auster
#27. I did it! I stopped time.
[Hampton Green]
Tim Tharp
#28. At three o'clock this afternoon Evelyn Wastneys died. I am Evelyn Wastneys, and I died, standing at the door of an old country home in Ireland...
Mrs. George De Horne Vaizey
#29. There was something wonderful about a blank sheet of notepaper. The lines were there, just waiting to be filled, and the page could turn into anything from a grocery list to the opening of The Great American Novel. The possibilities were endless.
Joanne Fluke
#31. There were no more heroes. Kennedy was dead, shot by an assassin in Dallas. Batman and Robin were dead... Superman was missing...
Robert Mayer
#32. We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody threw the girl off the bridge.
John D. MacDonald
#33. To say the least, it was inconsiderate of Diana's almost-dead husband to show up at her engagement party.
Robin Lee Hatcher
#34. The baloney weighed the raven down, and the shopkeeper almost caught him as he whisked out the delicatessen door.
Peter S. Beagle
#37. The first time I read the ad, I choked and cursed and spat and threw the paper to the floor.
Daniel Quinn
#39. Implications of treason are fed like cubes of sugar to the twelve-headed animal which is justice. In ... opening remarks. In the way questions are asked. In support of lines of questioning where cases of treason are cited and the Judge endorses the relevance of the citation.
E.L. Doctorow
#40. On a pitch black, starless night, a solitary man was trudging along the main road from Marchiennes to Montsou, ten kilometres of cobblestones running straight as a die across the bare plain between fields of beet.
Emile Zola
#41. I am sixteen when my mother steps out of her skin one frozen January afternoon- pure self, atoms twinkling like microscopic diamond chips around her, perhaps the chiming of a clock, or a few bright flute notes in the distance- and disappears. No one sees her leave, but she is gone.
Laura Kasischke
#42. Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was not used to feeling intimidated. It was rather his job in life to intimidate others.
Mark Ellis
#45. The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.
Blaise Pascal
#46. Seated opposite me in the railway carriage, the elderly lady in the fox-fur shawl was recalling some of the murders that she had committed over the years.
John Boyne
#47. I died on a bitter cold night. Beneath a black sky and a bruised winter moon, I tried to fly, hoping my arms might act as wings.
Jennifer Archer
#48. She turned into a tree. It was a Mystery. It must have been. Nothing else made sense, because I didn't understand it.
Jo Walton
#49. I never really wanted to die. But I followed through anyway. The pain in my heart was excruciating, and death was beautiful.
Rae Hachton
#50. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
Samuel Beckett
#51. If a lioness spends her hours pacing back and forth in a cage of gold with the finest meats at her disposal, does that make her any less of a prisoner? If that same feline's fangs are filed down to blunt, un-tearing teeth and her roar is silenced, can she still be called a lioness?
Kristen Reed
#52. You're surprised at all the blood.
He looks over at you, eyes wide, mouth dropping open, his face almost as white as his shirt.
He's surprised, too.
Charles Benoit
#53. First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.
Richard Ford
#54. She'd be lucky if she got out of this alive . . . and she'd never been lucky in her life.
Dorian Paul
#55. I am damned,' thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who are soon to die.
Nick Cave
#56. Six crows sit in our greengage tree. Half awake, I hear them speak to me in Haisla.
Eden Robinson
#57. It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened.
Lois Lowry
#58. There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.
Neil Gaiman
#59. If you want to find Cherry-Tree Lane all you have to do is ask the Policeman at the cross-roads.
P.L. Travers
#61. No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.
Shirley Jackson
#63. The small boys came early to the hanging.
Ken Follett
#64. If I'd known how the week was going to turn out I would have sent it back first thing Monday and asked for a refund.
Susan Wittig Albert
#65. There were crimson roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#66. The Summer had died peacefully in its sleep, and Autumn, as soft-spoken executrix, was locking life up safely until Spring came to claim it.
Kurt Vonnegut
#67. When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man.
Richard Stark
#68. Listen. The Sanctuary of the Redeemers on Shotover Scarp is named after a damned lie for there is no redemption that goes on there and less sanctuary
Paul Hoffman
#69. Had I not played the Sicilian with Black I could have saved myself the trouble of studying for more than 20 years all the more popular lines of this opening, which comprise probably more than 25 percent of all published opening theory!
Bent Larsen
#70. In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.
Carson McCullers
#71. It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears's house.
Mark Haddon
#72. Mister hit Josephine with the palm of his hand across her left cheek and it was then she knew she would run.
Tara Conklin
#73. Late one evening towards the end of March, a teenager picked up a double-barrelled shotgun, walked into the forest, put the gun to someone else's forehead and pulled the trigger.
This is the story of how we got there.
Fredrik Backman
#75. Show me three lines of the opening theory moves and I will prove to you that two of them are incorrect.
Emanuel Lasker
#76. After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn's for an oyster supper.
Michael Cox
#77. Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.
Ernest Hemingway,
#78. I am Tersa the Weaver, Tersa the Liar, Tersa the Fool.
Anne Bishop
#80. 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
#81. The boy shot Wild Bill's horse at dusk, while Bill was off in the bushes to relieve himself
Pete Dexter
#83. Grandfather recently died. He died alone on a trip away from home in a town where no one expected him to be
Tea Obreht
#84. In the beginning we were a group of nine.
Three are gone, dead.
There are six of us left.
They are hunting us, and they won't stop until they've killed us all.
I am Number Four.
I know that I am next.
Pittacus Lore
#85. The preparation for active rook play entails what is called the opening of lines, which largely depends on pawn play, especially on the proper use of levers.
Hans Kmoch
#86. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
Franz Kafka
#87. Congratulations. The fact that you're reading this means you've taken one giant step closer to surviving until your next birthday.
James Patterson
#88. 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
#89. That you should not be here when something we've both wanted happens is no new thing for me. Today too, as always, you're not here.
Sachin Kundalkar
#90. The opening line from a journal can be the beginning of a song.
Judy Collins
#91. The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.
George Orwell
#92. The chances of anyone colonizing Mars are a million to one!" Or so the newspapers said. But still we came.
G.H. Finn
#93. I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to Congress.
Norman Mailer
#94. It was a hot sticky night in Barcelona and all the good whores had the summer flu.
Dan Jenkins
#95. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
Rafael Sabatini
#96. Twenty-three stories up and all I could see out the windows was grey smog. They could call it the City of the Angels if they wanted to, but if there were angels out there, they had to be flying blind.
Laurell K. Hamilton
#97. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
James Joyce
#98. 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
#100. 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
