In the vast world of literature, the first sentence of a book has the power to captivate, intrigue, and set the tone for the journey that lies ahead. These opening lines invite readers into new worlds, introduce unforgettable characters, and spark curiosity. With this curated collection of the top 108 first sentence quotes, we celebrate those compelling beginnings that continue to inspire and resonate. From classic novels to modern masterpieces, each of these first sentences holds a unique allure, reminding us of the timeless magic of storytelling. Dive in, and let these opening lines awaken your imagination and inspire your own narrative adventures.
1. “There are gods in Alabama: Jack Daniel's, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus.” - Joshilyn Jackson
2. “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” - George Orwell
3. “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” - C.S. Lewis
4. “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” - Franz Kafka
5. “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” - Daphne du Maurier
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. “At school I was careful not to look like I watched everything, but I did.” - Amanda Davis
8. “As the ordinary violence of dawn sweeps across the lower Coromandel coast, a sprawling village comes into view.” - David Davidar
9. “Marley was dead: to begin with.” - Charles Dickens
10. “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
11. “This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market.” - Barbara Kingsolver
12. “In the midst of a thick forest, there was a castle that gave shelter to all travelers overtaken by night on their journey: lords and ladies, royalty and their retinue, humble wayfarers.” - Italo Calvino
13. “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
14. “Jerrie Cobb reached down and pulled the heavy layers of arctic clothing over her navy blue linen dress. ” - Martha Ackmann
15. “We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.” - Margaret Atwood
16. “Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.” - Chuck Palahniuk
17. “The first I heard of the beach was in Bangkok, on the Ko Sanh Road.” - Alex Garland
18. “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.” - Harper Lee
19. “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
20. “The answer is that we don't choose our freaks, they choose us.” - Steve Almond
21. “Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.” - George Eliot
22. “All right, don't scoff, mock or disbelieve: we live in mortal fear of not-quite-twins.” - Kamila Shamsie
23. “Happy endings aren't for cowards.” - Jill A. Davis
24. “They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.” - Jean Rhys
25. “That night Flora wanted to eat watermelon.” - Dorit Rabinyan
26. “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
27. “The Rue du Coq d'Or, Paris, seven in the morning.” - George Orwell
28. “Sometimes when you work in advertising you'll get a product that's really garbage and you have to make it seem fantastic, something that is essential to the continued quality of life.” - Augusten Burroughs
29. “Amy called the whale punkin.” - Christopher Moore
30. “Christmas crept into Pine Cove like a creeping Christmas thing: dragging garland, ribbon, and sleigh bells, oozing eggnog, reeking of pine, and threatening festive doom like a cold sore under the mistletoe.” - Christopher Moore
31. “The truly revolutionary promise of our nation's founding document is the freedom to pursue happiness-with-a-capital-H. ” - dan savage
32. “On December 7, 2059, Emilio Sandoz was released from the isolation ward of Salvator Mundi Hospital in the middle of the night and transported in a bread van to the Jesuit residence at Number 5 Borgo Santo Spirito, a few minutes' walk across St. Peter's Square from the Vatican.” - Mary Doria Russell
33. “Celestina Giuliani learned the word "slander" at her cousin's baptism.” - Mary Doria Russell
34. “I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one.” - Orson Scott Card
35. “All this happened, more or less.” - Kurt Vonnegut
36. “The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.” - H. G. Wells
37. “No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.” - H.G. Wells
38. “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
39. “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
40. “I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well. ” - Orhan Pamuk
41. “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
42. “I remember hating having to cross over the Broadway Bridge again, having to leave the peninsula neighborhood and go back to my apartment in downtown Boston.” - Michael Patrick MacDonald
43. “One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.” - Dylan Thomas
44. “Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?” - Donna Tartt
45. “On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.” - Jeffrey Eugenides
46. “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
47. “Thunder sounded, very near, and the child woke.” - Donna Woolfolk Cross
48. “All the June Saturday afternoon Sam Pollit's children were on the lookout for him as they skated round the dirt sidewalks and seamed old asphalt of R Street and Reservoir Road that bounded the deep-grassed acres of Tohoga House, their home.” - Christina Stead
49. “Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway.” - zadie smith
50. “Her first name was India-she was never able to get used to it.” - Evan S. Connell
51. “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
52. “Snowman wakes before dawn.” - Margaret Atwood
53. “We were on our way to the colmado for an errand.” - Junot Diaz
54. “The sky is white.” - Diana Abu-Jaber
55. “When Matussem Ramoud opened his eyes each morning, his wife would still not be there. ” - Diana Abu-Jaber
56. “It was a short one-paragraph item in the morning edition.” - Haruki Murakami
57. “In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life.” - Haruki Murakami
58. “The house in which the fourteen sisters of Emilio Montez O'brien lived, radiated femininity.” - Oscar Hijuelos
59. “At last, the luminous match was struck and the day was lit.” - Dorit Rabinyan
60. “My sister Kwan believes she has yin eyes. ” - Amy Tan
61. “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
62. “My suffering left me sad and gloomy.” - Yann Martel
63. “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
64. “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
65. “I never believed in dharma. karma, reincarnation, or any of that spiritual crap, which caused sort of a problem growing up because my parents are devout Hindus.” - Sonia Singh
66. “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
67. “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
68. “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.” - Dodie Smith
69. “Feast or famine. My plate is suddenly full.” - David Wong Louie
70. “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
71. “Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?” - Bertrand Russell
72. “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
73. “The sun appears in one of the upper corners of the rectangle, on the left of anyone looking at the picture.” - José Saramago
74. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” - J.R.R. Tolkien
75. “Too many!' James shouted, and slammed the door behind him.” - Susan Cooper
76. “When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.” - James Crumley
77. “Norman Bates heard the noise and a shock went through him.” - Robert Bloch
78. “Harry Potter was a highly unusual boy in many ways.” - J.K. Rowling
79. “Six people were thinking of Rosemary Barton who had died nearly a year ago...” - Agatha Christie
80. “There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.” - Neil Gaiman
81. “Die meisten Lügen sind wahr und spinnen sich von ganz allein, kaum jemand kannte diese Wahrheit besser als Colin Darcy. Wenn man erst einmal der Melodie der Worte zu lauschen beginnt, dann pfeift man sie bald selbst. Und wenn Lügen wie kunstvolle Lieder sind, dann gehörte Helen Darcy, Colins Mutter, zu jenem seltenen Menschenschlag, der allzeit eine beschwingte Melodie auf den Lippen trägt.” - Christoph Marzi
82. “Tonight we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.” - Joe Haldeman
83. “It's not that I was an outright nitwit of a child.” - Augusten Burroughs
84. “It was morning, and the new sun sparkled gold across the ripples of a gentle sea.” - Richard Bach
85. “There were crimson roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood.” - Dorothy L. Sayers
86. “Indian summer is like a woman.” - Grace Metalious
87. “Ray Bannister started to build the guillotine the day Jerry Renault returned to Monument.” - Robert Cormier
88. “On top of everything else, Boobie's got the clap.” - Adam Rapp
89. “So now get up.'Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned toward the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out. One blow, properly placed, could kill him now.” - Hilary Mantel
90. “I was about thirteen when I started letting boys feel me up.” - Rebbecca Ray
91. “The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.” - George Orwell
92. “Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood.” - Rick Riordan
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. “It's strange how a plan can unfold sometimes—an umbrella shooting up at the touch of a button and extending out in all directions quickly, effortlessly.” - Elissa Janine Hoole
95. “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
96. “Mickey Cray had been out of work ever since a dead iguana fell from a palm tree and hit him on the head.” - Carl Hiaasen
97. “Midnight was closing in, the one-legged woman was grievously burned, and the Mumbai police were coming for Abdul and his father.” - Katherine Boo
98. “Unfortunately, I am only myself.” - Lisa Burstein
99. “On the same day, two murders.” - Jean Zimmerman
100. “I AM A COWARD.” - Elizabeth Wein
101. “My story ended where so many stories have ended since the Rising: with a man—in this case, my adoptive brother and best friend, Shaun—holding a gun to the base of my skull as the virus in my blood betrayed me, transforming me from a thinking human being into something better suited to a horror movie.” - Mira Grant
102. “Goldenrod Moram had a first name that sounded like it belonged in the middle of a fairy tale, where she would be the dazzling princess in need of rescuing.” - Sarvenaz Tash
103. “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
104. “Jett Gallatin expected trouble in Alsop, Texas—but not zombies.” - Mercedes Lackey
105. “There once was a woman named Story Easton who couldn't decide if she should kill herself, or eat a double cheeseburger.” - Elizabeth Leiknes
106. “This is how it feels to die: It starts from outside and works its way in.” - Sarah Wylie
107. “It was shaping up as a beautiful morning. The last thing I wanted to hear about was murder.” - Jonathan Kellerman
108. “The family landed in the Western Hemisphere in the person of Roger Blake Wolfe, who arrived with a price on his head.” - James Carlos Blake
