First Sentences Quotes

“If you're going to read this, don't bother.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt.”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

“Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversation?”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“It's a weirdly subtle conversation, I almost don't notice I'm being blackmailed.”
― Becky Albertalli, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda

“Seated each afternoon in the darkened screening room, Halliday came to recognise the targeted numerals of the Academy leader as sigils preceding the dream state of a film. ”
― William Gibson

“I never thought I'd have a story worth telling, at least not one about me.”
― Perry Moore , Hero

“Your Grandfather," said Vanyel's brawny 15 year-old cousin Radevel, "was Crazy.”
― Mercedes Lackey, Magic's Pawn

“Damned Elmer's Glue! Just let me finish emasculating this eye and I'll be right with you.”
― Harvey Fierstein, Torch Song Trilogy

“I was in the closet... with Tamera Muncie.”
― Bill Konigsberg, Out of the Pocket

“Thirty years ago, I lay in the womb of a woman, conceived in a sexual act of rape, being carried during the prenatal period by an unwilling and rebellious mother, finally bursting from the womb only to be tormented in a family whose members I despised or pitied, and brought into association with people whom I should never have chosen.

Sometimes I wish that, as I lay in the womb, a soft pink embryo, I had somehow thought, breathed or moved and wrought destruction to the woman who bore me, and her eight miserable children who preceded me, and the four round-faced mediocrities who came after me, and her husband, a monstrously cruel, Christ-like, and handsome man with an animal’s appetite for begetting children.”
― Gertrude Beasley, My First Thirty Years

“The first line of a novel is the pinhead upon which the great structure will stand or fall.”
― Stewart Stafford

“I was deep behind enemy lines, in the very heart of the enemy camp.”
― Brent Hartinger, Geography Club

“Our teacher, Professor Adam, doesn’t know we’re just going through the motions. He doesn’t understand that nothing he’s saying really matters anymore. This classroom, and everything that happens inside it, once seemed big and important. Now it all seems silly and insignificant. I try to pay attention, because we’re supposed to, but my mind can’t focus on the present. It’s too busy thinking about the future. A future where every life in this room is in jeopardy.”
― J.W. Lynne, Above the Sky

“Screams. Screams. Everywhere. Everyone is scared. But I don’t know who “everyone” is. Their voices sound young, so I guess they’re kids, like me. I don’t hear any older voices. So either the grownups aren’t scared, or there aren’t any grownups with us anymore.”
― J.W. Lynne, The Unknown

“My eyes are wide open, but I see nothing but darkness. My heart races and my breaths come fast as I try to understand what just happened. But I am trying to make sense of something incomprehensible. All I know is that this is no accident. Someone has trapped me here. They have locked me in a place where no one can hear me scream. It will be a miracle if I make it out of here alive.

I am now at the mercy of a serial killer.”
― Jenny Lynne, If I Tell: A Mystery Thriller About a Girl and a Serial Killer

“Jake. There is so much I want to tell you, but we've always found it hard to talk to each other, haven't we?”
― Alex North, The Whisper Man