Posted on by rjonakait

First Sentences

“This was me when I was 10 years old. This was in 1980.” Marjane Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis.

“This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.” William Goldman, The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure.

“’Is this the home of Tony Horwitz?’” Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days.

“The year that Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette.” S. Morgenstern, The Princess Bride.

“Even now, nearly a century after her death, Marie Curie remains the only female scientist whom most people can name.” Dava Sobel, The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science.

“Fezzik chased the madman up the mountain, the madman who carried the most precious thing, for Fezzik, ever to be on earth, the kid herself, Buttercup’s Baby.” S. Morgenstern, Buttercup’s Baby: S. Morgenstern’s Glorious Examination of Courage Matched Against the Death of the Heart.

“I was performing since I was just a little boy.” Al Pacino, Sonny Boy.

“I must have died, the woman thought.” Dan Brown, The Secret of Secrets.

“On July 27, 1791, some four months after Alexander Hamilton and Federalist-dominated Congress passed ‘the Whiskey Tax,’ the frontier offered an organized response for the first time.” Brady J. Crytzer, The Whiskey Rebellion: A Distilled History of an American Crisis.

“Lucrezia is taking her seat at the long dining table, which is polished to a watery gleam and spread with dishes, inverted cups, a woven circlet of fir.” Margaret O’Farrell, The Marriage Portrait.

“The story begins with sheep.” John Butman & Simon Targett, New World, Inc.: The Making of America by England’s Merchant Adventurers.

“Lilacs, rain, a hint of bitter chocolate: Stella sniffed the air as she entered the small shop, enjoying the soft golden light that enfolded her.” Ruth Reichl, The Paris Novel.

“It looked like war.” Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.

“The day Ruthie went missing, the blackflies seemed to be especially hungry.” Amanda Peters, The Berry Pickers.

“On January 21, 1989, the day after George H. W. Bush’s inauguration, David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, a neo-Nazi, and the head of an organization called the National Association for the Advancement of White People, finished first in an open primary for Louisiana’s eighty-first legislative district.” John Ganz, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.

Posted on by rjonakait

First Sentences

“Jean McConville was thirty-eight when she disappeared, and she had spent nearly half her life either pregnant or recovering from childbirth.” Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.

“I didn’t believe them. They had said that it was going to be easy and, like the fool I am, I believed them.” Craig Johnson, Kindness Goes Unpunished.

“Two Pennsylvania State Police troopers sat inside an unmarked car waiting for the go-ahead to do something they had never done before, arrest a Catholic priest for lying to a grand jury.” Matt Birkbeck, Quiet Don: The Untold Story of Mafia Kingpin Russell Bufalino.

“Name almost any job: dental hygienist, rodeo clown, dog walker, mall Santa, chicken-sexer—they all demand some kind of definable skill set. The one exception is a member of Congress.” Bill Maher, What This Comedian Said Will Shock You.

“In the basement of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, below the Arms and Armor wing and outside the guards’ Dispatch Office, there are stacks of empty art crates.” Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me.

“In 1560, fifteen-year-old Lucrezia di Cosimo de’ Medici left Florence to begin her married life with Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara.” Margaret O’Farrell, The Marriage Portrait.

“As dawn broke over New York City on Friday morning, April 6, 1917, newsboys hawked the city’s paper from street corners up and down Manhattan.” Christopher C. Gorham, The Confidante: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Helped Win WWII and Shape Modern America.

“I approached Texas Monthly’s cover story on ‘The Top 50 BBQ Joints in Texas’ this summer the way a regular of People might approach that magazine’s annual ‘Sexiest Man Alive’ feature—with the expectation of seeing some familiar names.” Calvin Trillin, Trillin on Texas.

“With the world’s sea level rising fast, the assumption that land is the only thing that can’t fly away, or the only thing that lasts, is for the first time now shown to be demonstrably false.” Simon Winchester, Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World.

“Her majesty disliked what she considered to be overheated homes.” Tim Mason, The Darwin Affair.

“In the spring of 1994, I first traveled though China’s Xinjiang Province, a region inhabited by 11 million Turkic Uighur Muslims who, as learned from interview after interview, were even then trapped in a grip of surveillance and brutal repression by the Chinese authorities.” Robert D. Kaplan, The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy from the Mediterranean to China.