The first sentence. |
"One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work" Gloria Naylor |
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notes"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
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"A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head."
John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
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5
notes"In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini."Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
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notes"Although his father had imagined for him a brilliant future in the army, Hervé Joncour ended up earning his living in an unusual profession that, with singular irony, had a feature so sweet as to betray a vaguely feminine intonation."Alessandro Baricco, Silk
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"All this happened, more or less."
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5
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2
notes"‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’"Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
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2
notes"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since."F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
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"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun."
Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
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1
notes"My name is Kathy H."Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
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"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."
J R R Tolkien, The Hobbit; or, There and Back Again
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"‘And don’t forget,’ my father would say, as if he expected me at any moment to up and leave to seek my fortune in the wide world, ‘whatever you learn about people, however bad they turn out, each one of them was once a tiny baby sucking his mother’s milk…’"
Graham Swift, Waterland
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"The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us."
H G Wells, The Time Machine
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"We slept in what had once been the gymnasium."
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
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1
notes"Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy."C S Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
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"You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings."
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
