Posted on by rjonakait

First Sentences

“In 1976, even boxes of fried chicken celebrated the American Revolution.” Sarah M.S. Pearsall, Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution (2026).

“In all of Ray Carney’s years as a fence—he had been a reluctant fence and a ruthless fence, at times imperiled by his choices and at others the embodiment of crooked intelligence—there was only one occasion when he participated in the theft itself, and that was in the summer of 1981 when Uncle Rich came back to town.” Colson Whitehead, Cool Machine (2026).

“I have lived for twenty years in the county of Lancaster, where my neighbors on all sides are ‘Pennsylvania Dutch.’” Phebe Earle Gibbons, “Pennsylvania Dutch” and Other Essays (1882).

“On 20 May 2119 I took the overnight ferry from Port Marlborough and arrived in the late afternoon at the small quay near Maentwrog-under-Sea that serves the Bodleian Snowdonia Library.” Ian McEwan, What We Can Know (2025).

“When I was six, my father took me to Grand Central Terminal in New York to see the imposing bronze statue of my great-great-great-grandfather ‘Commodore’ Cornelius Vanderbilt.” Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty (2021).

“Fran sat with her eyes closed.” Ann Cleeves, Blue Lightning (2010).

“I take my kids to church every week—well, usually.” JD Vance, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith (2026).

“Twenty past one in the morning on New Year’s Day.” Ann Cleeves, Raven Black (2006).

“As Lord Randolph Churchill lay dying in the final stages of syphilis, his mind slowly but inexorably slipping into madness, his wife Jennie wrote letters from the Bay of Bengal to her sisters.” Elisabeth Kehoe, The Titled Americans: Three American Sisters and the British Aristocratic World into Which They Married (2006).

“Ann opened her eyes and saw a pair of hands, streaked and shiny with blood.” Ann Cleeves, Red Bones (2009).

“William Cody was not always an icon of historical memory.” Joy S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (2000).

“The Logia de Cerchi stood in the heart of old Florence, within a labyrinth of narrow streets behind the Badia, now rarely threaded by the stranger, unless in a dubious search for a certain severe doorplate bearing this inscription, QUI NACQUE IL DIVINO POETA.” George Eliot, Romola (1863).

“On the morning of September 26, 1792, several days of cold English rain came to an end, a light wind picked up from the north, and the HMS Lion, a sixty-four-gun ship of the line unfurled its sails and weighed anchor, to depart the harbor in Spithead.” Stephen R. Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age.

Posted on by rjonakait

First Sentences

“In my defense, it was not my intent to write this book.” Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.

“Before Mazer invented himself as Mazer, he was Samson Mazer, and before he was Samson Mazer, he was Samson Masur—a change of two letters that transformed him from a nice, ostensibly Jewish boy to a Professional Builder of Worlds—and for most of his youth, he was Sam, S.A.M. on the hall of fame of his grandfather’s Donkey Kong machine, but mostly Sam.” Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.

“Millions of people have formulated the wish, often unexpressed, that the lessons learnt from the philosophy of Gamesmanship should be extended to include the simple problems of everyday life.” Stephen Potter, Lifemanship: Some Notes on Lifemanship with a Summary of Recent Research in Gamesmanship.

“Some years ago, there was a boomlet of books about how the Greeks or the Jews or the Scots ‘saved’ or ‘invented’ the world.” Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present.

“My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) and almost forty years ago I was sent on a secret mission for the British Security Service.” Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth.

“It was the start of a very important year—1776—and James Cook had become a very important figure, a celebrity, a champion, a hero.” Hampton Sides, The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain Cook.

“On our wedding day I was forty-six, she was eighteen.” George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo.

“The first weekend of my 80 per cent [ultra-processed food] diet was one of those freakish autumn days when summer briefly returns.” Chris v. Tulleken, Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food that Isn’t Food.

“There were children, and then there were the children of Indians, because the merciless savage inhabitants of these American lands did not make children but nits, and nits make lice, or so it was said by the man who meant to make a massacre feel like killing bugs at Sand Creek, when 700 drunken men came at dawn with cannons, and then again four years later almost to the day the same way at the Washita River, where afterward, seven hundred Indian horses were rounded up and shot in the head.” Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars

“The reedy and excitable twenty-six-year-old recent Harvard Graduate, full of anticipation, was motoring out to an open field in Potsdam, Germany, to attend a Nazi youth rally.” Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism.

“Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians.” Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

“When writing about the deep ocean, the first question that arises is: What is it? At what point does the ocean become the deep ocean?” Susan Casey, The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean.