Captivating First Sentences of the 21st Century

“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.”

“The play—for which Briony had designed the posters, programs, and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crêpe paper—was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch.”

“Beyond the Indian hamlet, upon a forlorn, strand, I happened on a trail of recent footprints.”

“I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.”

“They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles.”

“I’d been waiting for the vampire for years when he walked into the bar.”

“One September evening when Walter Lasher returned from the city after a hard day’s work and was walking to his car in the station parking lot, a man stepped out from between two cars, walked up to him, and slapped him hard in the face.”

“Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest.”

“Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.”

“This book was born on a cold, drizzly, late spring day when I clambered over the spit-rail cedar fence that surrounds my pasture and made my way through wet woods to the modest frame house where Joe Rantz lay dying.”

“I’m told that the day I was born, Uncle Paolo held me against his white lab coat and whispered, ‘She is perfect.'”

“We shot dogs.”

“Jeevan’s understanding of disaster preparedness was based entirely on action movies, but on the other hand, he’d seen a lot of action movies.”

“I’m pretty much fucked.”