100 First Sentences
The first sentence of 100 different books
I wrote down the first sentence from 100 different books. I did this so I could learn about writing. Writing a good first sentence is both important and deceptively hard.
It’s sometimes said that a book lives and dies by its first sentence. The first sentence should pull the reader in. It’s how the reader determines whether a book is worth their attention. If a book can grab you in the first chapter, it’s a good sign. If a book can grab you in its first sentence, it’s a great sign.
I thought it would be useful to make a list of a ton of first sentences, so I could better understand what works and what doesn’t. And I want to share that list with you.
I grabbed whatever books I could find. I didn’t only write down first sentences from “great” books. After all, if a first sentence doesn’t work, it’s useful to learn why it doesn’t work. I read a lot of non-fiction, so a lot of these sentences come from non-fiction. That’s just my personal bias. I highly encourage you to try this exercise yourself with the books you have lying around.
Next week I’ll post what I learned from reading these 100 sentences. But for now, here’s the list of sentences I gathered.
100 First Sentences
1 - Several Short Sentences on Writing - Verlyn Klinkenborg
This is a book of first steps.
2 - Bird by Bird - Anne Lamott
I grew up around a father and a mother who read every chance they got, who took us to the library every Thursday night to load up on books for the coming week.
3 - Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.
4 - Battle Cry of Freedom - James McPherson
Both sides in the American Civil War professed to be fighting for freedom.
5 - Endzone - John Bacon
The jet cut through the clouds and eased onto the airstrip at Detroit Metro airport, just a few miles from where Charles Lindbergh once tested World War II bombers.
6 - Levels of the Game - John McPhee
Arthur Ashe, his feet apart, his knees slightly bent, lifts a tennis ball into the air.
7 - Moneyball - Michael Lewis
The first thing they always did was run you.
8 - Who Are You? - Alex Custudio
I’m holding a Game Boy Advance (GBA).
9 - Rejection Proof - Jia Jiang
It was an unusually hot afternoon in Austin, Texas-- but that’s not why I was sweating.
10 - Grant - Ron Chernow
Even as other Civil War generals rushed to publish their memoirs, flaunting their conquests and cashing in on their celebrity, Ulysses S. Grant refused to trumpet his accomplishments in print.
11 - One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - Ken Kesey
They’re out there.
12 - Moonwalking with Einstein - Joshua Foer
Dom Deluise, celebrity fat man (and five of clubs), has been implicated in the following unseemly acts in my mind’s eye: He has hocked a fat globule of spittle (nine of clubs) on Albert Einstein’s thick white mane (three of diamonds) and delivered a devastating karate kick (five of spades) to the groin of Pope Benedict XVI (six of diamonds).
13 - North Korea - Bruce Cumings
Judging from our media, North Korea is the country every American loves to hate- beginning with President George W. Bush, who made it a charter member of his “axis of evil” and hoped to “topple” it.
14 - Pachinko - Min Jin Lee
History has failed us, but no matter.
15 - Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates
Son,
Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body.
16 - Less - Andrew Sean Greer
From where I sit, the story of Arthur Less is not so bad.
17 - Flow - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Twenty-three hundred years ago Aristotle concluded that, more than anything else, men and women seek happiness.
18 - Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng
Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down.
19 - Crazy Rich Asians - Kevin Kwan
Nicholas Young slumped into the nearest seat in the hotel lobby, drained from the sixteen-hour flight from Singapore, the train ride from Heathrow Airport, and trudging through the rain-soaked streets.
20 - The Sellout - Paul Beatty
This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything.
21 - Debt - David Graeber
Two years ago, by a series of strange coincidences, I found myself attending a garden party at Westminster Abbey.
22 - The Depths - Jonathan Rottenberg
More than thirty million adults in the United states suffer from depression.
23 - Love Wins - Rob Bell
Several years ago we had an art show at our church.
24 - The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month.
25 - Being Mortal - Atul Gawande
I learned a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them.
26 - The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad
Mr. Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brother-in-law.
27 - In Order to Live - Yeonmi Park
On the cold, black night of March 31, 2007, my mother and I scrambled down the steep, rocky bank of the frozen Yalu River that divides North Korea and China.
28 - Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson
When Paul Jobs was mustered out of the Coast Guard after World War II, he made a wager with his crewmates.
29 - Einstein - Walter Isaacson
“I promise you four papers,” the young patent examiner wrote his friend.
30 - Man’s Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl
This book does not claim to be an account of facts and events but of personal experiences, experiences which millions of prisoners have suffered time and again.
31 - Cannery Row - John Steinbeck
Lee Chong’s grocery, while not a model of neatness, was a miracle of supply.
32 - The Lost Painting - Jonathan Harr
The Englishman moves in a slow but deliberate shuffle, knees slightly bent and feet splayed, as he crosses the piazza, heading in the direction of a restaurant named Da Fortunato.
33 - The Honor’s Class - Ben Yandell
At the Second International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris in 1900, David Hilbert delivered a talk, “Mathematical Problems.”
34 - The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge - Calvin Coolidge
The town of Plymouth lies on the easterly slope of the Green Mountains, about twenty miles west of the Connecticut River and somewhat south of the central part of Vermont.
35 - Outliers - Malcolm Gladwell
Roseto Valfortore lies one hundred miles southeast of Rome in the Apennine foothills of the Italian province of Foggia.
36 - The Wisdom of Insecurity - Alan Watts
I have always been fascinated by the law of reversed effort.
37 - Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories.
38 - How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia - Mohsin Hamid
Look, unless you’re writing one, a self-help book is an oxymoron.
39 - Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
It was love at first sight.
40 - White Teeth - Zadie Smith
Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway.
41 - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of my cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning.
42 - Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain
Don’t get me wrong: I love the restaurant business.
43 - What it Takes - Richard Ben Cramer
This is about as good as it gets, as close as American politics offers to a mortal lock.
44 - Salt - Mark Kurlansky
I bought the rock in Spanish Catalonia, in the rundown hillside mining town of Cardona.
45 - The Obstacle is the Way - Ryan Holiday
In the year 170, at night in his tent on the front lines of the war in Germania, Marcus Aurelius, the emperor of the Roman Empire, sat down to write.
46 - Fryderyk Chopin - Alan Walker
I would like to make an assertion that I cannot prove but am certain is true.
47 - Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
This book is about luck disguised and perceived as nonluck (that is, skills) and, more generally, randomness disguised and perceived as non-randomness (that is, determinism).
48 - Dune - Frank Herbert
In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.
49 - The Visual Display of Quantitative Information - Edward Tufte
Data graphics visually display measured quantities by means of the combined use of points, lines, a coordinate system, numbers, symbols, words, shading, and color.
50 - There is Life After College - Jeffrey Selingo
Not so long ago a newly minted college degree was the ticket to a solid first job after graduation, followed by a successful career.
51 - The Promise of Bitcoin - Bobby C. Lee
My name is Bobby Christopher Lee.
52 - Seven Ages of Paris - Alistair Horne
Mythomanes of Paris (of which there are many), seeking to imbue the city’s past with even more glamour than is already its due, claim that its progenitor was that Paris of legend, son of Priam, who so upset three competitive goddesses and whose passion for Helen launched one of the longest wars in history.
52 - Life in Code - Ellen Ullman
People imagine that programming is logical, a process like fixing a clock.
53 - Your Money or Your Life - Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez
“Your money or your life.”
54 - The Making of Asian America - Erika Lee
The 19.5 million Asian Americans in the United States today make up almost 6 percent of the total U.S. population.
55 - The Undoing Project - Michael Lewis
You never knew what a kid in the interview room might say to jolt you out of your slumber and back to your senses and force you to pay attention.
56 - Maximum Canada - Doug Saunders
Around midnight on an early winter evening one hundred and eighty years ago, my grandmother’s great-grandmother stood in fury as a crowd of armed rebels forced their way inside her Brantford house, demanding the rifles and pistols that she and her Welsh-born barrister husband, William, had spent the day hiding.
57 - A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way– in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
58 - Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
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.
59 - A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Marley was dead: to begin with.
60 - Hard Times - Charles Dickens
“Now, what I want is, Facts.”
61 - Three-Body Problem - Cixin Liu
The Red Union had been attacking the headquarters of the April Twenty-eighth Brigade for two days.
62 - The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Before the discovery of Australia, people in the Old World were convinced that all swans were white, an unassailable belief as it seemed completely confirmed by empirical evidence.
63 - Mistborn - Brandon Sanderson
Sometimes, I worry that I’m not the hero everyone thinks I am.
64 - Walden - Henry David Thoreau
When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only.
65 - Between Two Kingdoms - Suleika Jaouad
It began with an itch.
66 - Into Thin Air - Jon Krakauer
Straddling the top of the world, one foot in China and the other in Nepal, I cleared the ice from my oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind, and stared absently down at the vastness of Tibet.
67 - The Alice Network - Kate Quinn
The first person I met in England was a hallucination.
68 - Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
I am an invisible man.
69 - Zero to One - Peter Thiel
Whenever I interview someone for a job, I like to ask this question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
70 - The Sympathizer - Viet Thanh Nguyen
I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.
71 - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon
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.
72 - The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.
73 - Confessions of a Recovering Engineer - Charles L. Marohn, Jr.
I was feeling nervous about going out to speak with her, though I had no reason to believe that this would go poorly.
74 - The Art of Learning - Josh Waitzkin
I remember the cold late winter afternoon in downtown New York City, my mother and I holding hands while walking to the playground in Washington Square Park.
75 - The Fish that Ate the Whale - Rich Cohen
Sam Zemurray spoke with no accent, except when he swore, which was all the time.
76 - The Nineties - Chuck Klosterman
The nineties began on January 1 of 1990, except for the fact that of course they did not.
77 - All About Love - bell hooks
When I was a child, it was clear to me that life was not worth living if we did not know love.
78 - The Fight for English - David Crystal
Who was the first person ever to worry about English usage?
79 - The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
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.
80 - The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
81 - Blink - Malcolm Gladwell
In September of 1983, an art dealer by the name of Gianfranco Becchina approached the J. Paul Getty Museum in California.
82 - Infinite Powers - Steven Strogatz
Without calculus, we wouldn’t have cell phones, computers, or microwave ovens.
83 - Drinking: A Love Story - Caroline Knapp
It happened this way: I fell in love and then, because the love was ruining everything I cared about, I had to fall out.
84 - Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Call me Ishmael.
85 - The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane - Lisa See
“No coincidence, no story,” my a-ma recites, and that seems to settle everything, as it usually does, after First Brother finishes telling us about the dream he had last night.
86 - Ultralearning - Scott H. Young
Only a few hours left.
87 - A Guide to the Good Life - William Irvine
What do you want out of life?
88 - Gravity and Grace - Simone Weil
All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity.
89 - The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down - Anne Fadiman
If Lia Lee had been born in the highlands of northwest Laos, where her parents and twelve of her brothers and sisters were born, her mother would have squatted on the floor of the house that her father had built from ax-hewn planks thatched with bamboo and grass.
90 - What Technology Wants - Kevin Kelly
For most of my life I owned very little.
91 - Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
92 - First They Killed My Father - Loung Ung
Phnom Penh city wakes early to take advantage of the cool morning breeze before the sun breaks through the haze and invades the country with sweltering heat.
93 - The Grieving Brain - Mary-Frances o’Connor
When I am explaining the neurobiology of grief, I usually start with a metaphor that is based on a familiar experience.
94 - Daring Greatly - Brene Brown
I looked right at her and said, “I frickin’ hate vulnerability.”
95 - The Great Influenza - John M. Barry
The Great War had brought Paul Lewis into the navy in 1918 as a lieutenant commander, but he never seemed quite at ease when in his uniform.
96 - The Dawn of Eurasia - Bruno Maçães
We live in one of those rare moments in history when the political and economic axis of the world is shifting.
97 - Backflash - Richard Stark
When the car stopped rolling, Parker kicked out the windshield and crawled through onto the wrinkled hood, Glock first.
98 - In Our Image - Stanley Karnow
By September 1986, after four years as secretary of state, George Shultz had grown accustomed to presiding over official dinners for foreign dignitaries visiting Washington: the rigorous protocol, the solemn oratory, the contrived cordiality.
99 - Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green.
100 - Ulysses - James Joyce
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.