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