The Most Elegant Opening Sentences In All Of Literature

“They shoot the white girl first.”

— Toni Morrison, amazon.com

“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”

— Charlotte Brontë, amazon.com

“Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.”

— Jack London, amazon.com

“Midnight fell at the First Bank of Cleveland with the lonely clang of the great clock in the lobby.”

— D.M. Pulley, amazon.com

“Towards the close of the Middle Ages, in 1285, there lived three men whose lives would intersect and forever change history.”

— Jon M. Sweeney, amazon.com

“Languid, Lovely, Lonely; the swans arched their beautiful necks and turned to gaze at him as he stood rooted to the shore, his feet encased in mud.”

— Melanie Benjamin, amazon.com

“We are at rest five miles behind the front.”

— Erich Maria Remarque, amazon.com

“Lise has been driven to distraction by working in the same accountants' office for sixteen years.”

— Muriel Spark, amazon.com

“Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?”

— Donna Tartt, amazon.com

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

— Gabriel Garcia Marquez, amazon.com

“I flipped through the CT scan images, the diagnosis obvious: the lungs were matted with innumerable tumors, the spine deformed, a full lobe of the liver obliterated.”

— Paul Kalanithi, amazon.com

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

— George Eliot, amazon.com

“Who is John Galt?”

— Ayn Rand, amazon.com

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

— L.P Hartley, amazon.com

“She’s buried beneath a silver birch tree, down towards the old train tracks, her grave marked with a cairn.”

— Paula Hawkins, amazon.com

“The old ram stands looking down over rockslides, stupidly triumphant.”

— John Gardner, amazon.com

“There was, for a while, a very large and very famous city.”

— Choire Sicha, amazon.com

“They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.”

— Jean Rhys, amazon.com

“If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.”

— Kristin Hannah, amazon.com

“The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods.”

— Sinclair Lewis, amazon.com

“Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.”

— David Foster Wallace, amazon.com

“All the dying that summer began with the death of a child, a boy with golden hair and thick glasses, killed on the railroad tracks outside New Bremen, Minnesota, sliced into pieces by a thousand tons of steel speeding across the prairie toward South Dakota.”

— William Kent Krueger, amazon.com

“Is it ever too late to start again?”

— Rachel Elliott, amazon.com

“I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”

— Saul Bellow, amazon.com

“The boys, as they talked to the girls from Marcia Blaine School, stood on the far side of their bicycles holding the handlebars, which established a protective fence of bicycle between the sexes, and the impression that at any moment the boys were likely to be away.”

— Muriel Spark, amazon.com

“This book is not a suicide note.”

— Simon Critchley, amazon.com

“riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”

— James Joyce, amazon.com

“Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.”

— Zora Neale Hurston, amazon.com

“A dictionary is both a book of words and a cosmos.”

— Lohren Green, amazon.com

“Sometimes the sordidness of his present existence, not to mention the stifling, clammy heat of the apartment his finances had forced him to take, on the third floor of an ugly old house on Binghamton’s West Side—‘ the nice part of town,’ everybody said (God have mercy on those who had to live in the…”

— John Gardner, amazon.com