Favorite first sentences

MissReepicheep

MissReepicheep

Pandawan
Staff member
Knight of the Noble Order
Every good book has to have a first sentence. Some beginnings rouse your curiousity and draw you into the story, while others turn you off with lengthy descriptions or cultural lectures. This is the thread to post good story beginnings that a writer can learn from.

Here's my all-time favorite: "There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."
 
"In the Beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth." That's pretty profound.

Tolstoy started Anna Karenina with, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." So true, so chilling.
 
"Marley was dead to begin with." from a Christmas Carol. Well as Rizzo the Rat said in the Muppet Christmas Carol " Good opening! It's kinda creepy and spooky!" While being a yearly Christmas favorite, that opening line also sets up the story like a traditional ghost story.


"In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was God and the Word was with God"" from the Gospel of John. Of the oepnings for the four gospels, the first chapter of the Book of John is my favorite. It ahs teh feeling of being a big, epic story and sets up that this is something that is truly alrger then life. It is God coming down in the flesh.

"The name is Huck Finn. You don't know me, with out you have read a book by Mr .Mark Twain called "Teh Adventures of Tom Sawyer." That whole first chapter sets up that this is a sequal to Tom Sawyer but it's also it's own story. It also tells readers to forget what we may know about Huck Finn as we reallyd on't know him from his adventures with Mr. Sawyer.
 
From Chitty Chitty Bang Bang:

"Most automobiles are conglomorations (this is a long word for bundles) of steel and wire and rubber and plastic, and electricity and oil and gasline and water, and the toffee papers you pushed down the crack in the backseat last Sunday."
 
First sentance in Chapter 6 of Wind in the Willows. I hope chapters are allowed.

"It was a bright spring morning in the early part of summer, the river had resumed its wonted banks and its accustomed pace, and a hot sun seemed to be pulling everything green and bushy and spiky up out of the earth by strings."
I love the way Kenneth Grahame writes.
 
MissReepicheep said:
Here's my all-time favorite: "There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."
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^^ That's definitely one of my favorites too. :p

I've also always really loved this opening sentence: "There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Iluvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made." lol, I've just always loved that. It starts off so grand and majestic. It's from the Ainulindale (Music of the Ainur) at the beginning of the Silmarillion. :)
 
One of my favorite first sentences is from Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden. It goes: It's only half an hour since someone - Robyn, I think - said we should write everything down, and it's only twenty-nine minutes since I got chosen, and for those twenty-nine minutes I've had everyone crowded around me gazing at the blank page and yelling ideas and advice. I dunno why I like it so much. :rolleyes:
 
My favorite is from Island: Survival by Gordon Korman. I can't remember exactly how it goes but it's something like, "They had survived a shipwreck, an explosion, and a week adrift at sea, and now they faced their greatest challenge of all. A coconut."
 
Zella said:
My favorite is from Island: Survival by Gordon Korman. I can't remember exactly how it goes but it's something like, "They had survived a shipwreck, an explosion, and a week adrift at sea, and now they faced their greatest challenge of all. A coconut."
Click to expand...

oh my gosh that is hilarious!!! xD
 
From John J. Dwyer's Robert E. Lee:

"As in the beginning, so in the end Agnes’s thoughts ran to Arlington. Always Arlington, her home. The remembrances were at once jumbled together and immortally painted across the valleys and ascents of her memory as separate, self-sufficient worlds of color and sweetness and love."

The book's prologue begins at its ending: sad, but beautiful.
 
From Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton:

"The only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer to a challenge."
 
From L.M. Montgomery's The Story Girl:

"I do like a road, because you can be always wondering what is at the end of it."
 
This from G. K. Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill:

"The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up."
 
"When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton."

-The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R Tolkien
 
From The Hobbit, one of my all-time favorite beginnings:

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."
 
"Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of Number 4, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much"
-Harry Potter 1

"Once there were four children named Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy"
-LWW and PC.
 
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