“From two thousand feet, where Claudette Sanders was taking a flying lesson, the town of Chester’s Mill gleamed in the morning light like something freshly made and just set down.”
– Under the Dome, by Stephen King
I’ll have to quote the first 3, since the first 2 are sentence fragments, and this is the first sentence of the book proper, not the prologue:
“Hmm. No. I’m telling this wrong.”
– The Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemisin
“Curdie was the son of Peter the miner.”
The Princess and Curdie, by George MacDonald
Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.
Spin by Robert Charles Wilson
Whenever I woke up, night or day, I’d shuffle through the bright marble foyer of my building and go up the block and around the corner where there was a bodega that never closed.
*My Year of Rest and Relaxation *by Ottessa Moshfegh
“All good things must end”, said Frances Price.
- French Exit, by Patrick DeWitt
“Where are those two lunkheads?”
Menage a 3, Round 9
Gisele Lagace
David Lumsdon
“The old orchard stood besieged.”
The Bees, by Laline Paull
“A lot of romance is associated with Prohibition—this was the Roaring Twenties of flappers in speakeasies, of Fitzgerald in New York and Hemingway in Paris, of bootleggers.”
The Essential Cocktail: The Art of Mixing Perfect Drinks by Dale Degroff
“Call me Bathsheba.”
- And The Ocean Was Our Sky, Patrick Ness
“I first heard Personville called Poisonville in 1920, in the Big Ship in Butte, by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey.”
The Cleansing of Poisonville" by Dashiell Hammett, first published in Black Mask, November 1927.
“Maureen Swanson was known among the other children in her neighborhood as a hard slapper, a shouter, a loud laugher,a liar, a trickster, and a stay-after-schooler.”
- The Wicked, Wicked Ladies in the Haunted House, by Mary Chase
“Mercedes had particularly preserved her chastity, as her adenoids, out of intellectual conviction.”
A Handful of Time, by Rosel George Brown.
One of the least known facts about Louis XIV is that he had a railway in his backyard.
Fire & Steam: How the Railways Transformed Britain by Christian Wolmar
*I was driving south from Las Vegas through hot flat desert in my new secondhand car, a 1993 Dodge Dynasty with 90,000 miles on the clock. *
–The Call Of The Weird by Louis Theroux
“Even now that it is all over it is hard to grasp the enormity of what has happened: in the last quarter of the twentieth century, Great Britain has been to war and has fought on a scale and in a manner not seen by this country since the Second World War.”
The Falklands War by Paul Eddy et al. (1982)
Kris sat in the basement, hunched over her guitar, trying to play the beginning of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man.”
We Sold Our Souls by Grady Hendrix
“First the colors.”
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
The sentence is the first in the prologue, but the prologue is part of the book.
“Ever since Jack Aubrey had been dismissed from the service, ever since his name, with its now meaningless seniority, had been struck off the list of post-captains, it had seemed to him that he was living in a radically different world; everything was perfectly familiar, from the smell of seawater and tarred rigging to the gentle heave of the deck under his feet, but the essence was gone and he was a stranger.”
Patrick O’Brian- The Letter of Marque
“I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites.”
- All Systems Red, Martha Wells