A Dozen Favorite First Sentences

(This is my 700th list. I post it by request and very tentatively, because there are a lot of books out there. I’ve restricted myself to single sentences, from novels or at least novel-like books, arranged in alphabetical order by the author’s last name. You can find a companion list of my favorite final sentences here.)

 

  • We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child. — from A Death in the Family by James Agee

  • We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck. — from Feed by M. T. Anderson

  • She delivered echo. — from The Naming Song by Jedediah Berry

  • Her first name was India—she was never able to get used to it. — from Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell

  • Marley was dead: to begin with. — from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens *

  • No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. — from The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

  • One day Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could create anything starting with n. — from The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem, trans. by Michael Kandel

  • So I dedicate this thing here to old Schumann and his sweet Clara who today alas are bones. — from The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector, trans. by Benjamin Moser

  • Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. — from One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, trans. by Gregory Rabassa **

  • I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles. — from The Inverted World by Christopher Priest

  • Mister Valéry was very short, but he used to jump a lot. — from The Neighborhood by Gonçalo M. Tavares, trans. by Roopanjali Roy

  • When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere. — from The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

* Interestingly, for such a famous opening sentence, this one exists in two different forms. The later editions replace the colon with a comma: “Marley was dead, to begin with.”

** The best of J. G. Ballard’s opening sentences comes from his novel High-Rise, and seems to be patterned after the Márquez sentence: “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.”

— June 28, 2024


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