First Lines

As a writer you hear about the importance of the first sentence. As a reader I’ve never really judged a book by that one criterion. Admittedly I decided to take a book home based on the first sentence but I tend to go for more than that.

Anyway today I met someone who chose their books that way. If the first sentence or two didn’t have enough description like he wanted (you know the building as opposed to the character, that sort of thing) then he didn’t want to bother with the book.

I can’t imagine reading that way, there is so very much you would miss out on.

Some first sentences – decide for yourself.

The storm had broken. Pug danced along the edge of the rocks, his feet finding scant purchase as he made his way among the tide pools.

When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem’s fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury.

The nation had watched Shaiana cry so many times. Heard her voice crack as she struggled to complete her sentence.

My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

She wanted only to sleep. The plane touched down two hours late and there’d been a marathon wait for the luggage.

There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart’s desire. And while that is, as beginnings go, not entirely novel (for every tale about every young man there ever was or will be could start in a similar manner) there was much about this young man and what happened to him that was unusual, although he never knew the whole of it.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate. The hour, some little time before sunset, and the place, the West Barricade, at the very spot where, a decade later, a proud tyrant raised an undying monument to the nations glory and his own vanity.

The race was barely nine minutes old when Jason Chaser lost his steering rudder, At 690 kilometres an hour.

1801-I have just returned from a visit to my landlord-the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country!

This inscription could be seen on the glass door of a small shop, but naturally the was only the way it looked if you were inside the dimly lit shop, looking out at the street through the plate glass door. Outside, it was a gray, cold, rainy November morning.

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and having nothing to do; one or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “Without picture or conversations?”

This is the story of an adventure that happened in Narnia and Calormen and the lands between, in the Golden Age when Peter was High King in Narnia and his brother and two sisters were King and Queens under him. In those days, far south in Calormen on a little creek of the sea, there lived a poor fisherman called Arsheesh, and with him there lived a boy who called him Father.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.

In fairy-tales, witches always wear silly black hats and black cloaks, and they ride on broomsticks. But this is not a fairy-tale. This is about REAL WITCHES.