First Sentence Quotes

If every life is a river, then it's little wonder that we do not even notice the changes that occur until we are far out in the darkest sea. One day you look around and nothing is familiar, not even your own face. My name once meant daughter, grandaughter, friend, sister, beloved. Now those words mean only what their letters spell out; Star in the night sky. Truth in the darkness.I have crossed over to a place where I never thought I'd be. I am someone I would have never imagined. A secret. A dream. I am this, body and soul. Burn me. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am.

~ Alice Hoffman

Christmas crept into Pine Cove like a creeping Christmas thing: dragging garland, ribbon, and sleigh bells, oozing eggnog, reeking of pine, and threatening festive doom like a cold sore under the mistletoe.

~ Christopher Moore

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?

~ Bertrand Russell

The truly revolutionary promise of our nation's founding document is the freedom to pursue happiness-with-a-capital-H.

~ Dan Savage

They say that just before you die your whole life flashes before your eyes, but that's not how it happened for me.

~ Lauren Oliver

Women have always been spies.

~ Harriet Rubin

In Santiago, the capital of the kingdom of Chile, at the moment of the great earthquake of 1647 in which many thousands lost their lives, a young Spaniard called Jeronimo Rugera was standing beside one of the pillars in the prison to which he had been committed on a criminal charge, and he was about to hang himself.

~ Heinrich Von Kleist

One minute the teacher was talking about the Civil War. And the next minute he was gone. There. Gone. No 'poof.' No flash of light. No explosion.

~ Michael Grant

All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

~ Leo Tolstoy

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.

~ Shirley Jackson

I was about thirteen when I started letting boys feel me up.

~ Rebbecca Ray

On top of everything else, Boobie's got the clap.

~ Adam Rapp

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

~ Daphne Du Maurier

Dear Anyone Who Finds This, Do not blame the drugs.

~ Lynda Barry

On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

There once was a woman named Story Easton who couldn't decide if she should kill herself, or eat a double cheeseburger.

~ Elizabeth Leiknes

Deep down, Story Easton knew what would happen if she attempted to off herself—she would fail It was a matter of probability. This was not a new thing, failure. She was, had always been, a failure of fairy-tale proportion. Quitting wasn’t Story’s problem. She had tried, really tried, lots of things during different stages of her life—Girl Scours, the viola, gardening, Tommy Andres from senior year American Lit—but zero cookie sales, four broken strings, two withered azalea bushes, and one uniquely humiliating breakup later, Story still had not tasted success, and with a shriveled-up writing career as her latest disappointment, she realized no magic slippers or fairy dust was going to rescue her from her Anti-Midas Touch. No Happily Ever After was coming. So she had learned to find a certain comfort in failure. In addition to her own screw-ups, others’ mistakes became cozy blankets to cuddle, and she snuggled up to famous failures like most people embrace triumph. The Battle of Little Bighorn—a thing of beauty. The Bay of Pigs—delicious debacle. The Y2K Bug—gorgeously disappointing fuck-up. Geraldo’s anti-climactic Al Capone exhumation—oops! Jaws III—heaven on film. Tattooed eyeliner—eyelids everywhere, revolting. Really revolting. Fat-free potato chips—good Lord, makes anyone feel successful.

~ Elizabeth Leiknes

The most difficult thing about writing, is writing the first line.

~ Amit Kalantri

If you want vampires and werewolves, faeries, fallen angels or zombies, you won't find them here. I know a real-life monster.

~ Stephanie Lawton

All I was trying to do when they caught me was bury my mother in an unmarked grave.

~ S. L. Viehl

I don't like killing, but I'm good at it. Murder isn't so bad from a distance, just shapes popping up in my scope. Close-up work though - a garrotte around a target's neck or a knife in their heart - it's not for me. Too much empathy, that's my problem. Usually. But not today. Today is different . . .

~ Graeme Shimmin

Simon Glass was easy to hate. I never knew exactly why, there was just too much to pick from. I guess, really, we each hated him for a different reason, but we didn't realize it until the day we killed him.

~ Gail Giles

On a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in bowl.

~ Jhumpa Lahiri

This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Toward the end of February 1954, James Beard was at work in his Greenwich Village kitchen doing what he most loved to do: cooking delicious meals.

~ Laura Shapiro

Feast or famine. My plate is suddenly full.

~ David Wong Louie

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

~ J.k. Rowling

I am girl of definitions, of logic, of black and white.Remember this.

~ Cecelia Ahern

Fifteen years ago I killed my sister.

~ Adam Rapp

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

~ Franz Kafka

This is how it feels to die: It starts from outside and works its way in.

~ Sarah Wylie

The greatest tragedy that can befall a man is never to know who he really is.

~ James Carlos Blake

If the devil ever raised a garden, the Everglades was it.

~ James Carlos Blake

He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.

~ Rafael Sabatini

There were crimson roses on the bench, they looked like splashes of blood.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

I should probably start with the blood.

~ Robin Wasserman

Goldenrod Moram had a first name that sounded like it belonged in the middle of a fairy tale, where she would be the dazzling princess in need of rescuing.

~ Sarvenaz Tash

Our story opens where countless stories have ended in the last twenty-seven years: with an idiot—in this case, Rebecca Atherton, head of the After the End Times Irwins, winner of the Golden Steve-o Award for valor in the face of the undead—deciding it would be a good idea to go out and poke a zombie with a stick to see what happens.

~ Mira Grant

My story ended where so many stories have ended since the Rising: with a man—in this case, my adoptive brother and best friend, Shaun—holding a gun to the base of my skull as the virus in my blood betrayed me, transforming me from a thinking human being into something better suited to a horror movie.

~ Mira Grant

Jett Gallatin expected trouble in Alsop, Texas—but not zombies.

~ Mercedes Lackey