“Winter’s first kiss tingled Twig’s cheeks as the fine, dry snow dusted down from the grey afternoon sky.”
Happy Holiday Historicals, edited by Lyn Worthen (Note that this is a short story collection; the above sentence is from the first, “Green Girl” by Brenda Carre.)
“Check Eugene Wyatt’s calendar on any given year and you’ll find a giant X on the first Monday in March.”
Vanishing Fleece: Adventures in American Wool, by Clara Parkes
On a cloudy October night, a motorcar with one passenger in the rear seat was proceeding along the road which skirts the coastal lands on the western side of the island of Tahiti.
NO MORE GAS - Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
“I’m sure I can tell this story.”
– Fairy Tale, by Stephen King
“It had been raining in the valley of the Sacramento.”
American Christmas Stories, edited by Connie Willis (Note: The above sentence is from the first story, “How Santa Claus Came to Simpson’s Bar”, by Bret Harte.)
“Nobody climbed the mountain beyond the war-shrine.”
Elder Race, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
“I am a cat, but I have not yet been given a name.”
I Am a Cat by Soseki Natsume
Lucy wrote “Fucking animals!” on a piece of notebook paper, and around those words she drew arrows pointing in every direction.
The Loop, by Jeremy Robert Johnson
There is a prologue of sorts in the form of a transcript of a podcast commenting on an incident relevant to the plot, but this is the start of chapter one.
When I post in this thread I usually skip forewords and prologues.
I only skip them if they mention right off the bat that there are spoilers in the intro. But then I go back and read them after I finish the book. I’m a completist. I even read the author’s thanks.
“This is Ares Launch Control, Jacqueline B. Kennedy Space Center.”
Voyage, by Stephen Baxter
First paragraph (not sentence) but too irresistible not to quote:
“Anna Halsey was about two hundred and forty pounds of middle-aged putty-faced woman in a black tailor-made suit. Here eyes were shiny black shoe buttons, her cheeks were as soft as suet and about the same color. She was sitting behind a black glass desk that looked like Napoleon’s tomb and she was smoking a cigarette in a black holder that was not quite as long as a rolled umbrella. She said “I need a man.””
I do read them; I generally just don’t quote them in this thread unless their first sentence is particularly interesting. I quote the first sentence from chapter one.
Author’s Note: I switched off the radio, made my way slowly up the stairs, shut the bathroom door and shed a tear.
Introduction: The Cold War, deep under the North Atlantic.
Chapter 1: HMS Raleigh is a naval establishment on the banks of the River Tamar in Cornwall, where all new recruits commence their Part 1* training.
* Naval training is split into three parts: Part 1 is basic training; Part 2 is shore-side specialist training; Part 3 is at-sea training.
Under Pressure: Living Life and Avoiding Death on a Nuclear Submarine, by Richard Humphreys
“An hour after dawn on Christmas morning in 1941, a lone PB2Y-2 Coronado flying boat circled slowly over the fleet anchorage at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, at the end of a seventeen-hour flight from San Diego.”
The Battle of Midway by Craig L. Symonds
“In [the] true spirit of the widespread Soviet economic practice of counter-planning, my first encounter with the USSR took place a little earlier than expected.”
Soviet Visuals by Varia Bortsova
“What makes summer and winter?”
Science in a Nanosecond: Illustrated Answers to 100 Basic Science Questions, by James A. Haught.
“Every Swiss-village calendar instructs as to how stone gathers the landscape around it, how glacier-scattered thousand-ton monuments to randomness become fixed points in finding home.”
The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, by Kay Ryan (Note that this is from the poem “Odd Blocks”.)
A barefoot padre wearing the gray robe of the Franciscan order arrived one day in May, 1539, at the summit of a hill overlooking a valley in what is now Western New Mexico.
On Desert Trails, Randall Henderson, 1961.
“The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness.”
Our Wives Under the Sea, by Julia Armfield
“She was aware first of the scent of the hotel shampoo, a Middle Eastern aroma reminiscent of anise, and then–when she opened her eyes–the way the light from the window was different from the light in the rooms of the hotel where the crew usually stayed.”
The Flight Attendant by Chris Bohjalian
“I thought it was the neighbor’s cat, back
to clean the clock of the fledgling robins low
in their nest stuck in the dense hedge by the house,
but what came was much stranger, a liquidity
moving, all muscle and bristle: a groundhog
slippery and waddle-thieving my tomatoes, still
green in the morning’s shade.”
The Hurting Kind: Poems, by Ada Limon. (This is from “Give Me This”.)