Search for Quotes

---

First Line Quotes

"To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman."

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle the First Line of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

"It was love at first sight."

Joseph Heller the First Line of Catch-22

"On the 24th of May, 1863, my uncle, Professor Liedenbrock, rushed into his little house, No. 19 Königstrasse, one of the oldest streets in the oldest portion of the city of Hamburg."

Jules Verne the First Line of A Journey to the Interior of the Earth

"The sun was going down by the time they decided to hang me."

David Tallerman the First Line of Giant Thief

"IT WAS YEARS before Christopher told anyone about his dreams."

Diana Wynne Jones the First Line of The Lives of Christopher Chant

"The feather lay in my palm."

Lian Hearn the First Line of Brilliance of the Moon

"He drifted off, and when he opened his eyes the woman was still there."

Natsume Soseki the First Line of Sanshirō

"IT WAS Mrs. May who first told me about them."

Mary Norton the First Line of The Borrowers

"Finn had been flung on his face and chained to the stone slabs of the transitway."

Catherine Fisher the First Line of Incarceron

"Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls."

Mervyn Peake the First Line of Titus Groan

"For a week Mr. R. Childan had been anxiously watching the mail."

Philip K. Dick the First Line of The Man in the High Castle

"SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17_ and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof."

Robert Louis Stevenson the First Line of Treasure Island

"Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice's Lenten fast in the desert."

Walter Miller, Jr. the First Line of A Canticle for Leibowitz

"Ash fell from the sky."

Brandon Sanderson the First Line of Mistborn: The Final Empire

"Titus is seven."

Mervyn Peake the First Line of Gormenghast

"Awhile ago there was a young man dwelling in a great and goodly city by the sea which had to name Langton on Holm."

William Morris the First Line of Wood Beyond the World

"In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army."

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle the First Line of A Study in Scarlet

"'No! I don’t want the mangosteen.'"

Paolo Bacigalupi the First Line of The Windup Girl

"The woman bore a scorch mark from her chin to her brow."

Shannon Hale the First Line of Enna Burning

"Even when he reached Kamakura and the Engakuji Temple, Kikuji did not know whether or not he would go to the tea ceremony."

Yasunari Kawabata the First Line of Thousand Cranes

"Call me Ishmael."

Herman Melville the First Line of Moby-Dick

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

J.R.R. Tolkien the First Line of The Hobbit

"Marley was dead: to begin with."

Charles Dickens the First Line of A Christmas Carol

"The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats."

Jeff Vandermeer the First Line of Annihilation

"Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she'd been told that she would kill her true love."

Maggie Stiefvater the First Line of The Raven Boys