Novel First Sentences
Just as the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, every story ever written began with just one sentence.
Novel Last Sentences
“‘Thanks be, I’m done with geometry, learning or teaching it,’ said Anne Shirley, a trifle vindictively, as she thumped a somewhat battered volume of Euclid into a big chest of books, banged the lid in triumph, and sat down upon it, looking at Diana Wright across the Green Gables garret, with gray eyes that were like a morning sky.”
—
Anne’s House of Dreams by Lucy Maud Montgomery
“A tall, slim girl, ‘half-past sixteen,’ with serious gray eyes and hair which her friends called auburn, had sat down on the broad red sandstone doorstep of a Prince Edward Island farmhouse one ripe afternoon in August, firmly resolved to construe so many lines of Virgil.”
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Anne of Avonlea by Lucy Maud Montgomery
“If only he would change…If only I could change him…”
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The Secret Ingredient by Jane Heller
“They sat facing one another across a table in the upper room of a drinking den known as the Barbary Shark.”
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Castaways of the Flying Dutchman by Brian Jacques
“On a clear day, Emma Hutch, thirty-three, could see forever – give or take a few yards.”
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Hex and the Single Girl by Valerie Frankel
“The walls screamed at her.”
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Light in Shadow by Jayne Ann Krentz
“The night sky brightened faintly in the east with the approach of dawn as the Chosen entered the Gardens of Life.”
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The Elfstones of Shannara by Terry Brooks
“They buried the great King as twilight streaked the west crimson.”
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Artifact by Gregory Benford
“Once upon a time we had a love affair with fire, the president of the United States thought as the match that he’d just struck to light his pipe flared beneath his fingers.”
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Swan Song by Robert McCammon
“Even now, it seems strange to me that I should be writing this memoir at all.”
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The Matrix by Jonathan Aycliffe
“She had everything ready for him, everything but herself.”
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Silk and Stone by Deborah Smith
“High above Earth the old Norse gods sit on their thrones in Asgard.”
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Runa by J. Alison James
