90 Inspiring First Sentence Quotes

There's something exceptionally magical about the first sentence of a story. It's the gateway that draws us into another world, a single line carrying the weight of endless possibilities. The power of an inspiring first sentence is unmatched—it has the ability to ignite curiosity, spark imagination, and set the tone for an entire narrative. In this curated collection, we've gathered 90 of the most remarkable first sentence quotes, each one a testament to the art of storytelling and the profound impact a single line can have. Whether you’re in search of inspiration for your own writing or simply wish to explore the diverse voices that have captured readers’ hearts, these opening lines promise to enchant and motivate. Dive in and let the muse of great literature spark your own creative journey.

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

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

3. “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

4. “When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.” - Katherine Dunn

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

6. “Marley was dead: to begin with.” - Charles Dickens

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

8. “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

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

10. “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

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

12. “I held her feet in my hands.” - Geoff Nicholson

13. “At first, the new owner pretends he never looked at the living room floor.” - Chuck Palahniuk

14. “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

15. “On my first evening in the back country, I skipped down the porch steps of the farmhouse-leaving my father inside and the radio playing and my small suitcase decorated with neon flower stickers unpacked-and wandered towards the upside-down school bus I'd spied from an upstairs window.” - Mitch Cullin

16. “Early spring, yes. It's one of those cautiously hopeful days at the beginning of April, after the clocks have made their great leap forward but before the weather or the more suspicious trees have quite had the courage to follow them, and Kate and I are traveling north in a car crammed with food and books and old saucepans and spare pieces of furniture.” - Michael Frayn

17. “The answer is that we don't choose our freaks, they choose us.” - Steve Almond

18. “Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.” - George Eliot

19. “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

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

21. “I was very young and lived with my grandparents in a villa with white walls in the Calle Ocharan, in Miraflores.” - Mario Vargas Llosa

22. “Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.” - Margaret Atwood

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

24. “A screaming comes across the sky.” - Thomas Pynchon

25. “Amy called the whale punkin.” - Christopher Moore

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. “The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.” - H. G. Wells

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

31. “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

32. “Call me Ishmael.” - Herman Melville

33. “I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well. ” - Orhan Pamuk

34. “Constantine, eight years old, was working in his father's garden and thinking about his own garden, a square of powdered granite he had staked out and combed into rows at the top of his family's land.” - Michael Cunningham

35. “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

36. “Twelve years after Robin's death, no one knew any more about how he had ended up hanged from a tree in his own yard than they had on the day it happened.” - Donna Tartt

37. “Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?” - Donna Tartt

38. “Thunder sounded, very near, and the child woke.” - Donna Woolfolk Cross

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

40. “At the first gesture of morning, flies began stirring.” - Charles Frazier

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

42. “Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the kitchen of his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over the back lot where the sun was just coming up.” - Kent Haruf

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

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

45. “Snowman wakes before dawn.” - Margaret Atwood

46. “An hour and forty-five minutes before Nazneen's life began-began as it would proceed for quite some time, that is to say uncertainly-her mother, Rupban, felt an iron fist squeeze her belly.” - Monica Ali

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

48. “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

49. “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

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

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

52. “My sister Kwan believes she has yin eyes. ” - Amy Tan

53. “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

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

55. “My suffering left me sad and gloomy.” - Yann Martel

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

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

60. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

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

62. “Norman Bates heard the noise and a shock went through him.” - Robert Bloch

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

64. “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

65. “There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.” - Neil Gaiman

66. “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

67. “Tonight we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.” - Joe Haldeman

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

69. “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

70. “It was a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small northern part of a Midwest state. There wasn't so much wilderness around you couldn't see the town. But on the other hand there wasn't so much town you couldn't see and feel and touch and smell the wilderness. The town was full of trees. And dry grass and dead flowers now that autumn was here. And full of fences to walk on and sidewalks to skate on and a large ravine to tumble in and yell across. And the town was full of...Boys.And it was the afternoon of Halloween.And all the houses shut against a cool wind.And the town was full of cold sunlight.But suddenly, the day was gone.Night came out from under each tree and spread.” - Ray Bradbury

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

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

73. “Indian summer is like a woman.” - Grace Metalious

74. “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

75. “They murdered him.” - Robert Cormier

76. “Dear Anyone Who Finds This, Do not blame the drugs.” - Lynda Barry

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

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

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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “His first memory is an execution.” - Blaine Harden

83. “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

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

85. “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

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

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

88. “This is how it feels to die: It starts from outside and works its way in.” - Sarah Wylie

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

90. “Harry was bleeding.” - J.K. Rowling