“I don’t need to make a dime off of this book.”— James Altucher, Choose Yourself!Tagged: first lines of books, Making Money, Do Book Make Money?
“In dealing with fools you must adopt the following philosophy: they are simply a part of life, like rocks or furniture.”— Robert Greene, MasteryTagged: Fools, How To Deal With Fools, Fools Are Like Rocks
“The elevator continued its impossibly slow ascent.”— Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: A Novel (Vintage International)Tagged: Elevators, first lines of books, Slow Elevators
“When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans.”— Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (Penguin Classics)Tagged: first lines of books, World War I, WWI, Amazing Lines, Tragedy
“Here, and also south of us, the beaches have a yellow tint, but along the Keys of Florida the sand is like shattered ivory.”— Denis Johnson, FiskadoroTagged: Sand, first lines of books, Florida, Florida Keys, Ivory
“The Nellie, a crushing yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails and was at rest.”— Joseph Conrad, Heart of DarknessTagged: first lines of books
“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. DallowayTagged: first lines of books, Flowers
“During the predawn hours of the twenty-third, the Tokyo Police began to arrest those vagrants trying to avoid the cold of the approaching winter by camping in and around the underground passage of the Keisei Line, Ueno Railway Station, Ueno Park, Daito Ward, in the hopes of preventing further shooti…”— Kobo Abe, The Box Man: A NovelTagged: first lines of books, Box man
“It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known.”— Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (Norton Paperback Fiction)Tagged: Things Change, Hidden, Curtains, lost, first lines of books
“Sometimes you're walking through the woods when a stick leaps into the air and strikes you across the back and shoulders several times, then flies away lost in the underbrush.”— Peter Rock, My AbandonmentTagged: first lines of books, Woods, Leaves
“The two boys walked the high ridge at the center of the wood road, avoiding the muddy ruts along the sides.”— Phil LaMarche, American Youth: A NovelTagged: First Line of Books
“My job title is medical actor, which means I play sick.”— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: EssaysTagged: first lines of books
“While still a young man, John Courtney Boot had, as his publisher proclaimed, 'achieved an assured and enviable position in contemporary letters.”— Evelyn Waugh, ScoopTagged: first lines of books
“My mother grabbed the iron poker from the fireplace and said, 'Get in the car.'”— Domenica Ruta, With or Without You: A MemoirTagged: First Line of Books, Iron Pokers, Fireplace, Cars, Escape
“Because of the nature of my illness, and its effect on my brain, I remember only flashes of actual events, and brief but vivid hallucinations, from the months in which this story takes place.”— Susannah Cahalan, Brain on Fire: My Month of MadnessTagged: first lines of books
“According to the St. George Register, on a clear night last June, at some time between eleven and half-past, my mom — who isn't anything like this — tiptoed down to the basement of the house I grew up in with a Big Boy .44 Magnum in her hands.”— David Ebershoff, The 19th Wife: A NovelTagged: first lines of books, Guns, St. George Register
“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, Norwegian WoodTagged: first lines of books, Planes, Hamburg
“Summer fattened everybody up.”— Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and PlentyTagged: Summer, first lines of books
“Okay, here’s one: If you could know the answer to any one single question, what would it be?”— Alice Adams, Invincible SummerTagged: first lines of books