Great first lines
You can tell a lot about a book by reading the first line. Check out some of these boss beginnings.
Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
"It's the first morning of high school. I have seven new notebooks, a skirt I hate, and a stomachache." M.T. Anderson, Feed "We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck." Robert Cormier, Chocolate War "They murdered him." Lois Duncan, Killing Mr. Griffin "It was a wild, windy southwestern spring when the idea of killing first occurred to them." Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book "There was a hand in the darkness and it held a knife." Anthony Horowitz, Stormbreaker "When the doorbell rings at three in the morning, its' never good news." Lauren Wolk, Wolf Hollow "The year I turned 12 I learned how to lie." Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me "I've been locked up for 264 days." Lisa McMann, The Unwanteds “There’s a hint of wind coming over the top of the stone walls and through the barbed-wire sky on the day Alexander Stowe was to be Purged.” Veronica Roth, Divergent “There is one mirror in my house. It is behind a sliding panel in the hallway upstairs. Our faction allows me to stand in front of it on the second day of every third month, the day my mother cuts my hair.” Michael Grant, Gone “One minute the teacher was talking about the Civil War. And the next minute he was gone.” John Corey Whaley, Where Things Come Back "I was seventeen years old when I saw my first dead body." Jesse Andrews, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl "I have no idea how to write this stupid book." |
Gordon Korman, Son of the Mob
"The best and worst night of my life? My first and last date with Angela O'Bannon." Ingrid Law, Savvy "When my brother Fish turned 13, we moved to the deepest part of inland because of the hurricane, and, of course, the fact that he'd caused it." E. Lockhart, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks "I, Frankie Landau-Banks, hereby confess that I was the sole mastermind behind the mal-doings of the Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds." Jonathan Maberry, Rot and Ruin "Benny Imura couldn't hold down a job, so he took to killing." L.A. Meyer, Bloody Jack "My name is Jacky Faber and in London I was born, but no, I wasn't born with that name." Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go "The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got nothing much to say." Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children "I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen." Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief "Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood. If you're reading this because you think you might be one, my advice is: close this book right now. Believe whatever lie your mom or dad told you about your birth, and try to live a normal life." Brandon Sanderson, Alcatraz vs. The Evil Librarians "So there I was, tied to an altar made from outdated encyclopedias, about to get sacrificed to the dark powers by a cult of evil librarians." J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit "In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit." Scott Westerfeld, Uglies "The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit. Of course, Tally thought, you'd have to feed the cat salmon-flavored cat food for awhile, to get the pinks right." |