"Thank you for informing me. Much appreciated. Best of skill on the test!"
— Hackworth
Collecting the first lines of every story.
A project by Veronica K and Abigail Katindig.
Index Inquiries Submit first lines.
A project by Veronica K and Abigail Katindig.
Index Inquiries Submit first lines.
May 13, 2012
March 26, 2012
"Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: “Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.” That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday."
— Albert Camus, from The Stranger
December 25, 2011
"We were in study hall when the headmaster walked in, followed by a new boy not wearing a school uniform, and by a janitor carrying a large desk."
— Gustave Flaubert, from Madame Bovary
December 25, 2011
"Sam Spade’ s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v."
— Dashiell Hammett, from The Maltese Falcon
December 25, 2011
"The passersby had their eyes half-closed."
— Jonathan Safran Foer, from Tree of Codes
November 8, 2011
"The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide."
— Joseph Conrad, from Heart of Darkness
November 8, 2011
"On my right hand there were lines of fishing stakes resembling a mysterious system of half-submerged bamboo fences, incomprehensible in its division of the domain of tropical fishes, and crazy of aspect as if abandoned forever by some nomad tribe of fishermen now gone to the other end of the ocean; for there was no sign of human habitation as far as the eye could reach."
— Joseph Conrad, from The Secret Sharer
October 17, 2011
"Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were."
— Margaret Mitchell, from Gone with the Wind
October 17, 2011
"
When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
When the hurlyburly’s done,
When the battle’s lost and won.
— William Shakespeare, from Macbeth
October 16, 2011
"In the beginning was the word. The word proselytized the sea with its message, copying itself unceasingly and forever. The word discovered how to rearrange chemicals so as to capture little eddies in the stream of entropy and make them live. The word transformed the land surface of the planet fro a dusty hell to a verdant paradise. The word eventually blossomed and became sufficiently ingenious to build a porridgy contraption called a human brain that could discover and be aware of the word itself."
—
Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, from Matt Ridley
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