First Sentence Quotes

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Leo Tolstoy , Anna Karenina

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
― Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”
― Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“All this happened, more or less.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

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

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

“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, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“Women have always been spies.”
― Harriet Rubin, Princessa

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“Harry Potter was a highly unusual boy in many ways.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

“Call me Ishmael.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“If every life is a river, then it's little wonder that we do not even notice the changes that occur until we are far out in the darkest sea. One day you look around and nothing is familiar, not even your own face.
My name once meant daughter, grandaughter, friend, sister, beloved. Now those words mean only what their letters spell out; Star in the night sky. Truth in the darkness.
I have crossed over to a place where I never thought I'd be. I am someone I would have never imagined. A secret. A dream. I am this, body and soul. Burn me. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am.”
― Alice Hoffman, Incantation

“Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“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, The Catcher in the Rye

“A screaming comes across the sky.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

“Is today a good day to die?”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“Maybe I'd always been broken and dark inside.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury

“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, The War of the Worlds

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

“One minute the teacher was talking about the Civil War. And the next minute he was gone. There. Gone. No 'poof.' No flash of light. No explosion.”
― Michael Grant, Gone

“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, The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror

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

“There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

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

“Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief