openingsentences

[openingsentences]

"'But I put it to you, my lord, that prize-money is of essential importance to the Navy.'"

H.M.S Surprise, Patrick O'Brian (1973)

[openingsentences]

The welcome wagon lady, sixty if she was a day but working at youth and vivacity (ginger hair, red lips, a sunshine-yellow dress), twinkled her eyes and teeth at Joanna and said, "You're really going to like it here! It's a nice town with nice people! You couldn't have made a better choice!"

The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin (1972)

[openingsentences]

"On the 15th of September, 1840, about six o'clock in the morning, the Ville de Montereau, just about to sail, was sending forth great whirlwinds of smoke, in front of the Quai St. Bernard."

Sentimental Education, Gustave Flaubert (1869)

[openingsentences]

"Towards the end of November, during a thaw, at nine o'clock one morning, a train on the Warsaw and Petersburg railway was approaching the latter city at full speed."

The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1869)

[openingsentences]

"The Purpose of this book is to convey to the reader some feeling for what is surely one of the most important and exciting voyages of discovery that humanity has embarked on."

The Road to Reality - A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, Roger Penrose (2004)

[openingsentences]

"The contents of this book need little introduction; they stand on their own as helpful instructions and enjoyable reading."

The Foxfire Book: Hog dressing, log cabin building, mountain craft and foods, planting by signs, snake lore, hunting tales, faith healing, moonshining, and other affairs of plain living, ed. Eliot Wigginton (1972)

[openingsentences]

"There is a dragon in each of us."

American Dragons: Twenty-five Asian American Voices ed. Laurence Yep (1993)

[openingsentences]

"I was in Amsterdam one snowy Christmas when the weather had turned the canals into oblongs of ice."

Art Objects - Essays on Ecstacy and Effrontery, Jeanette Winterson (1995)

[openingsentences]

"One day in the middle of the twentieth century I sat in an old graveyard which had not yet been demolished, in the Kensington area of London, when a young policeman stepped off the path and came over to me."

Loitering with Intent, Muriel Spark (1981)

[openingsentences]

"Oratory is always a declining art."

The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century Speeches, ed. Brian MacArthur (1999)

[openingsentences]

"My parents, Lord and Lady Amberley, were considered shocking in their day on account of their advanced opinions in politics, theology and morals."

The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, Bertrand Russell ed. Robert E.Egner & Lester E. Dennon (1961)

[openingsentences]

"The Cold War and how it played out in the Middle East have fascinated me for many years.".

Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in The Middle East, Rashid Khalidi (2009)

[openingsentences]

A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.

The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)

[openingsentences]

In the shade of the house, in the sunshine of the riverbank near the boats, in the shade of the Sal-wood forest, in the shade of the fig tree is where Siddhartha grew up, the handsome son of the Brahman, the young falcon, together with his friend Govinda, son of a Brahman.

Siddhartha, Herman Hesse (1922) [*eng trans 1955]

[openingsentences]

Hopping a freight out of Los Angeles at high noon one day in late September 1955 I got on a gondola and lay down with my duffel bag under my head and my knees crossed and contemplated the clouds as we rolled north to Santa Barbara.

The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac (1958)

[openingsentences]

I venture to call this Essay 'Lombard Street,' and not the 'Money Market,' or any such phrase, because I wish to deal, and to show that I mean to deal, with concrete realities.

Lombard Street: a description of the money market, Walter Bagehot (1873)

[openingsentences]

The first ray of light which illumines the gloom, and converts into a dazzling brilliancy the obscurity in which the earlier history of the public career of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved, is derived from the perusal of the following entry in the Transactions of the Pickwick Club, which the editor of these papers feels the highest pleasure in laying before his readers, as a proof of the careful attention, indefatigable assiduity, and nice discrimination, with which his search among the multifarious documents confided to him has been conducted.

The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club or The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens (1836)