107 Notable First Sentence Quotes

In literature, first impressions matter immensely, and nothing sets the tone like a powerful opening sentence. The first line of a book not only entices readers but also establishes the mood, piques curiosity, and introduces the narrative's unique voice. Whether it's an iconic phrase that has stood the test of time or a deceptively simple statement with profound resonance, these opening lines can shape our reading experience profoundly. In this collection, we delve into 107 notable first sentence quotes that have captured the imaginations of readers and have become pivotal in their own right. These lines beckon us into worlds unknown, offering a glimpse of the literary treasures that lie beyond.

1. “There are gods in Alabama: Jack Daniel's, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus.” - Joshilyn Jackson

2. “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” - Rafael Sabatini

3. “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” - George Orwell

4. “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” - C.S. Lewis

5. “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” - Franz Kafka

6. “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” - J.D. Salinger

7. “As the ordinary violence of dawn sweeps across the lower Coromandel coast, a sprawling village comes into view.” - David Davidar

8. “Baby," groaned the guy-Ted? Tad?-something like that-and crushed his lips against the side of her neck, shoving her face against the wall of the toilet stall.” - Jennifer Weiner

9. “This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market.” - Barbara Kingsolver

10. “From above, start with the privileged view. ” - Maureen Howard

11. “Stavia saw herself as in a picture, from the outside, a darkly cloaked figure moving along a cobbled street, the stones sheened with a soft, early spring rain.” - Sheri S. Tepper

12. “Toward the end of February 1954, James Beard was at work in his Greenwich Village kitchen doing what he most loved to do: cooking delicious meals.” - Laura Shapiro

13. “Jerrie Cobb reached down and pulled the heavy layers of arctic clothing over her navy blue linen dress. ” - Martha Ackmann

14. “We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.” - Margaret Atwood

15. “The first I heard of the beach was in Bangkok, on the Ko Sanh Road.” - Alex Garland

16. “My lifelong involvement with Mrs Dempster began at 5:58 o'clock p.m. on 27 December 1908, at which time I was ten years and seven months old.” - Robertson Davies

17. “Hapscomb's Texaco sat on Number 93 just north of Arnette, a pissant four-street burg about 110 miles from Houston.” - Stephen King

18. “I know what you want to hear, doctor, but I'm sorry, you're not going to pry some sordid confession out of me.” - Barbara Mujica

19. “All right, don't scoff, mock or disbelieve: we live in mortal fear of not-quite-twins.” - Kamila Shamsie

20. “They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.” - Jean Rhys

21. “Lord Peter Wimsey stretched himself luxuriously between the sheets provided by the Hotel Meurice.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

22. “When my nose finally stops bleeding and I've disposed of the bloody paper towels, Teddy Barnes insists on driving me home in his ancient Honda Civic, a car that refuses to die and that Teddy, cheap as he is, refuses to trade in.” - Richard Russo

23. “The Rue du Coq d'Or, Paris, seven in the morning.” - George Orwell

24. “Quite like old times,' the room says.” - Jean Rhys

25. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” - Charles Dickens

26. “The truly revolutionary promise of our nation's founding document is the freedom to pursue happiness-with-a-capital-H. ” - dan savage

27. “I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one.” - Orson Scott Card

28. “A squat gray building of only thirty-four stories.” - Aldous Huxley

29. “All this happened, more or less.” - Kurt Vonnegut

30. “We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.” - M. T. Anderson

31. “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

32. “He- for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it- was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. ” - Virginia Woolf

33. “There is no man so unsuited for the task of speaking about memory as I am, for I find scarcely a trace of it in myself, and I do not believe there is another man in the world so hideously lacking in it.” - Geoff Ryman

34. “We are both busy people, so let's cut the small talk.” - David Mitchell

35. “I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria.” - John Fowles

36. “Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. ” - Isabel Allende

37. “Call me Ishmael.” - Herman Melville

38. “On a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in bowl.” - Jhumpa Lahiri

39. “A lone fisherman up early looking for sea trout found the first body.” - Kate Atkinson

40. “At the age of three my grand aunt proclaimed her independence by categorically refusing to have her feet bound, resolutely tearing off the bandages as fast as they were applied.” - Adeline Yen Mah

41. “At sixty miles per hour, you could pass our farm in a minute, on County Road 686, which ran due north into the T intersection at Cabot Street Road.” - Jane Smiley

42. “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.” - Italo Calvino

43. “Although I'm afraid I don't get too many clients these days!” - Patrick McCabe

44. “Her first name was India-she was never able to get used to it.” - Evan S. Connell

45. “Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days.” - P.D. James

46. “Ilium, New York, is divided into three parts.” - Kurt Vonnegut

47. “First snow: it came this year late in November.” - John Updike

48. “We were on our way to the colmado for an errand.” - Junot Diaz

49. “The sky is white.” - Diana Abu-Jaber

50. “When Matussem Ramoud opened his eyes each morning, his wife would still not be there. ” - Diana Abu-Jaber

51. “I often dream about the Dolphin Hotel.” - Haruki Murakami

52. “In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life.” - Haruki Murakami

53. “I was thirty-seven then, strapped in my seat as the huge 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach to the Hamburg airport.” - Haruki Murakami

54. “All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths.” - kiran desai

55. “The house in which the fourteen sisters of Emilio Montez O'brien lived, radiated femininity.” - Oscar Hijuelos

56. “At last, the luminous match was struck and the day was lit.” - Dorit Rabinyan

57. “It' her life, and she' in the middle of it.” - Esmeralda Santiago

58. “We came to Macun when I was four, to a rectangle of rippled metal sheets on stilts hovering in the middle of a circle of red dirt.” - Esmeralda Santiago

59. “In the twenty-one years I lived with my mother, we moved at least twenty times.” - Esmeralda Santiago

60. “The night before I left my mother, I wrote a letter. ” - Esmeralda Santiago

61. “The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

62. “Jose Palacios, his oldest servant, found him floating naked with his eyes open in the purifying waters of his bath and thought he had drowned.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

63. “An ash-gray dog with a white blaze on its forehead burst onto the rough terrain of the market on the first Sunday in December, knocked down tables of fried food, overturned Indians' stalls and lottery kiosks, and bit four people who happened to cross its path.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

64. “Granted: I AM an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peep-hole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.” - Gunther Grass

65. “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.” - Jeffrey Eugenides

66. “Feast or famine. My plate is suddenly full.” - David Wong Louie

67. “All through that winter and into the spring, when our Tuesday and Thursday-night dinner shifts were done, Matt and I would sit at the long table near the salad bar and plan his end-of-the-year party, our voices echoing importantly in the cavernous wood-panelled dining hall.” - Tom Perrotta

68. “Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?” - Bertrand Russell

69. “On the first day of Human Sexuality, Ruth Ramsey wore a short lime green skirt, a clingy black top, and strappy high-heeled sandals, the kind of attention-getting outfit she normally wouldn't have worn on a date---not that she was going on a lot of dates these days---let alone to work. ” - Tom Perrotta

70. “The sun appears in one of the upper corners of the rectangle, on the left of anyone looking at the picture.” - José Saramago

71. “In the time it takes for her to walk from the bathhouse at the seawall of Fortune's Rocks, where she has left her boots and has discreetly pulled off her stockings, to the waterline along which the sea continually licks the pink and silver sand, she learns about desire. ” - Anita Shreve

72. “Too many!' James shouted, and slammed the door behind him.” - Susan Cooper

73. “Harry Potter was a highly unusual boy in many ways.” - J.K. Rowling

74. “Six people were thinking of Rosemary Barton who had died nearly a year ago...” - Agatha Christie

75. “I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.” - Edwin Abbott Abbott

76. “Die Welt ist wie Wasser, scharlachrot und sanft gefärbt mit hellem Himmel. Und manchmal sind die Träume, die sich tief in den vergessenen Liedern unserer Kindheit verbergen, wie die Pfade in den Tiefen Wäldern, von jenem schweren Dunkel, das allein zu betreten man sich scheut, weil was dort schlummert, nur selten ist, was man zu finden erhofft.” - Christoph Marzi

77. “It was hot, the night we burned Chrome.” - William Gibson

78. “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

79. “It's not that I was an outright nitwit of a child.” - Augusten Burroughs

80. “It was morning, and the new sun sparkled gold across the ripples of a gentle sea.” - Richard Bach

81. “Die Stunde, in der das Mädchen ohne Namen seine Geschichte verlor, war die letzte des Tages.” - Christoph Marzi

82. “There were crimson roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

83. “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

84. “They murdered him.” - Robert Cormier

85. “Ray Bannister started to build the guillotine the day Jerry Renault returned to Monument.” - Robert Cormier

86. “Simon Glass was easy to hate. I never knew exactly why, there was just too much to pick from. I guess, really, we each hated him for a different reason, but we didn't realize it until the day we killed him.” - Gail Giles

87. “On top of everything else, Boobie's got the clap.” - Adam Rapp

88. “I was about thirteen when I started letting boys feel me up.” - Rebbecca Ray

89. “The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.” - George Orwell

90. “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. It was the future, and everything sucked.” - Greg Nagan

91. “Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood.” - Rick Riordan

92. “I should probably start with the blood.” - Robin Wasserman

93. “I bear a deep red stain that runs from my left shoulder down to my right hip, a trail left by the herbwitch's poison that my mother used to try to expel me from her womb.” - Robin LaFevers

94. “They say that just before you die your whole life flashes before your eyes, but that's not how it happened for me.” - Lauren Oliver

95. “Thanatos, der alles wusste, stieg in Erwartung des Kommenden die Niederenslinger Hügel hinauf zum Plateau, suchte einen Baumstrunk, setzte sich und wartete. Er trug einen schwarzen Aktenkoffer bei sich, der alle Geduld der Welt enthielt.” - Helmut Krausser

96. “This morning, my mother didn't get out of bed.” - Melina Marchetta

97. “Unfortunately, I am only myself.” - Lisa Burstein

98. “I AM A COWARD.” - Elizabeth Wein

99. “3 years, 1 month, 1 week, and 6 days since I'd seen daylight.” - Susanne Winnacker

100. “When you've been struck by lightning as many times as I have, you start to expect the worst pretty much all the time.” - Jennifer Bosworth

101. “Jett Gallatin expected trouble in Alsop, Texas—but not zombies.” - Mercedes Lackey

102. “There once was a woman named Story Easton who couldn't decide if she should kill herself, or eat a double cheeseburger.” - Elizabeth Leiknes

103. “Deep down, Story Easton knew what would happen if she attempted to off herself—she would fail It was a matter of probability. This was not a new thing, failure. She was, had always been, a failure of fairy-tale proportion. Quitting wasn’t Story’s problem. She had tried, really tried, lots of things during different stages of her life—Girl Scours, the viola, gardening, Tommy Andres from senior year American Lit—but zero cookie sales, four broken strings, two withered azalea bushes, and one uniquely humiliating breakup later, Story still had not tasted success, and with a shriveled-up writing career as her latest disappointment, she realized no magic slippers or fairy dust was going to rescue her from her Anti-Midas Touch. No Happily Ever After was coming. So she had learned to find a certain comfort in failure. In addition to her own screw-ups, others’ mistakes became cozy blankets to cuddle, and she snuggled up to famous failures like most people embrace triumph. The Battle of Little Bighorn—a thing of beauty. The Bay of Pigs—delicious debacle. The Y2K Bug—gorgeously disappointing fuck-up. Geraldo’s anti-climactic Al Capone exhumation—oops! Jaws III—heaven on film. Tattooed eyeliner—eyelids everywhere, revolting. Really revolting. Fat-free potato chips—good Lord, makes anyone feel successful.” - Elizabeth Leiknes

104. “I might be the villain of this story.” - Rebecca Makkai

105. “It was shaping up as a beautiful morning. The last thing I wanted to hear about was murder.” - Jonathan Kellerman

106. “Legends are born to every generation.” - Michael Jay

107. “The greatest tragedy that can befall a man is never to know who he really is.” - James Carlos Blake