“Albania is a country where no one ever dies.”

- from The Country Where No One Ever Dies, Ornela Vorpsi

“If I had urinated immediately after breakfast, the mob would never have burnt down the orphanage.”

- “The Orphan and the Mob,” Julian Gough

“A cousin of mine had an aquarium built on her terrace, a rather imposing tank where strange, exotic sea creatures amused themselves in the company of all sorts of local specimen, destined to be eaten.”

- from While Sleeping, Antonio Fian

“Castor P. was going out to die.”

- “And All Turned Moon,” Georgi Gospodinov

“After a certain length of time–or would it be better to say: uncertain?–I began wasting hours and hours on questions such as: ‘Budapester,’ ‘Budian,’ or ‘Pester?’”

- “Veres,” Neven Usumovic

“In the ninety-ninth year of his life, approaching his one hundredth birthday, Jeremiah Kadron returned, after a long journey, to his native Budapest, to his own house on Leander Street, where he had been brought as a two-year-old straight from the maternity ward, and which remained his permanent residence, excepting his trips around the world, some of which were brief, others quite lengthy.”

- “Jeremiah’s Terrible Tale,” George Konrad

“Didi had scars on her wrists and came from Bratislava:”

- “Didi,” Michal Witkowski

“The slaughter hasn’t started yet.”

- Lee K. Abbott, “One of Star Wars, One of Doom”

“That was the year Hunca Bubba changed his name.”

- Toni Cade Bambara, “Gorilla, My Love”

“What he first noticed about Detroit and therefore America was the smell.”

- Charles Baxter, “The Disappeared”

“Alberto Perera, librarian, granted no credibility to police profiles of dangerous persons.”

- Gina Berriault, “Who Is It Can Tell Me Who I Am?”

“A man stood upon a railroad bridge in Northern Alabama, looking down into swift waters twenty feet below.”

- Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge”

“The visible work left by this novelist is easily and briefly enumerated.”

- Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote“

“This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night.”

- Raymond Carver, “Cathedral”

“I received one morning a letter, written in pale ink on glassy, blue-lined notebook paper, and bearing the postmark of a little Nebraska village.”

- Willa Cather, “A Wagner Matinee”

“I seem sixty and married, but these efforts are due to my condition and sufferings, for I am a bachelor, and only forty-one.”

- Mark Twain, “The Invalid’s Story”

“None of them knew the color of the sky.”

- Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat”

“The Governor’s wife thought the Governor was looking especially well this evening.”

- Susan Dodd, “Public Appearances”

“We didn’t in the light; we didn’t in the darkness.”

- Stuart Dybek, “We Didn’t”

“He was an orphan, and, to himself, he seemed like one, looked like one.”

- Stanley Elkin, “I Look Out for Ed Wolfe”

“The woman in front of him was eating roasted peanuts that smelled so good that he could barely contain his hunger.”

- Ralph Ellison, “King of the Bingo Game”

“We started dying before the snow, and, like the snow, we continued to fall.”

- Louise Erdrich, “Matchimanito”

“When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant–a combined gardener and cook–had seen in at least ten years.”

- William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily”

“This is not a happy story. I warn you.”

- Richard Ford, “Great Falls”

“The first children who saw the dark and slinky bulge approaching through the sea let themselves think it was an empty ship.”

- Gabriel García Márquez, “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World”

“When the time came at last and they removed the wealth of bandages from his head and face, all with the greatest of care as if they were unwinding a precious mummy, the Doctor–he of the waxed, theatrical, upswept mustache and the wet sad eyes of a beagle hound–turned away.”

- George Garrett, “Wounded Soldier”

“The day the cease-fire was signed she was caught up in a crowd.”

- Nadine Gordimer, “A Soldier’s Embrace”

The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses.

- Goodbye, Columbus

Dear Gabe, The drugs help me bend my fingers around a pen.

- Letting Go

Not to be rich, not to be famous, not to be mighty, not even to be happy, but to be civilized–that was the dream of his life.

- When She Was Good

She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.

- Portnoy’s Complaint

Sir, I want to congratulate you for coming out on April 3 for the sanctity of human life, including the life of the yet unborn.

- Our Gang

It began oddly.

- The Breast

Call me Smitty.

- The Great American Novel

Far from being the classic period of explosion and tempestuous growth, my adolescence was more or less a period of suspended animation.

- Reading Myself and Others

Temptation comes to me first in the conspicuous personage of Herbie Bratasky, social director, bandleader, crooner, comic, and m.c. of my family’s mountainside resort hotel.

- The Professor of Desire

First, foremost, the puppyish, protected upbringing above his father’s shoe store in Camden.

- My Life as a Man

It was the last daylight hour of a December afternoon more than twenty years ago – I was twenty-three, writing and publishing my first short stories, and like many a Bildungsroman hero before me, already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman – when I arrived at his hideaway to meet the great man.

- The Ghost Writer

“What the hell are you doing on a bus, with your dough?”

- Zuckerman Unbound

When he is sick, every man wants his mother; if she’s not around, other women must do.

- The Anatomy Lesson

“Your novel,” he says, “is absolutely one of the five or six books of my life.”

- The Prague Orgy

Ever since the family doctor, during a routine checkup, discovered an abnormality on his EKG and he went in overnight for the coronary catheterization that revealed the dimensions of the disease, Henry’s condition had been successfully treated with drugs, enabling him to work and carry on his life at home exactly as before.

- The Counterlife

Dear Zuckerman, In the past, as you know, the facts have always been notebook jottings, my way of springing into fiction.

- The Facts

“I’ll write them down. You begin.”

- Deception

My father had lost most of the sight in his right eye by the time he’d reached eighty-six, but otherwise he seemed in phenomenal health for a man his age when he came down with what the Florida doctor diagnosed, incorrectly, as Bell’s palsy, a viral infection that causes paralysis, usually temporary, to one side of the face.

- Patrimony

For legal reasons, I have had to alter a number of facts in this book.

- Operation Shylock

Either foreswear fucking others or the affair is over.

- Sabbath’s Theater

The Swede.

- American Pastoral

Ira Ringold’s older brother, Murray, was my first high school English teacher, and it was through him that I hooked up with Ira.

- I Married A Communist

I knew her eight years ago.

- The Dying Animal

It was the summer of 1998 that my neighbor Coleman Silk–who, before retiring two years earlier, had been a classics professor at nearby Athena College for some twenty-odd years as well as serving for sixteen more as the dean of faculty– confided to me that, at the age of seventy-one, he was having an affair with a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman who worked down at the college.

- The Human Stain

On the Friday in September 1986 that I arrived in Turin to renew a conversation with Primo Levi that we had begun one afternoon in London the spring before, I asked to be shown around the paint factory where he’d been employed as a research chemist, and, afterward, until retirement, as manager.

- Shop Talk

Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.

- The Plot Against America

Around the grave in the rundown cemetery were a few of his former advertising colleagues from New York, who recalled his energy and originality and told his daughter, Nancy, what a pleasure it had been to work with him.

- Everyman

I hadn’t been in New York in eleven years.

- Exit Ghost

About two and a half months after the well-trained divisions of North Korea, armed by the Soviets and Chinese Communists, crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea on June 25, 1950, and the agonies of the Korean War began, I entered Robert Treat, a small college in downtown Newark named for the city’s seventeenth-century founder.

- Indignation

He’d lost his magic.

- The Humbling

The first case of polio that summer came early in June, right after Memorial Day, in a poor Italian neighborhood crosstown from where we lived.

- Nemesis

“Our God surpasses the Gypsy god; He is more avuncular and noble, though some of us begrudgingly admit their god is more assertive than our God, whom we haven’t seen or heard from since He rose from His own corpse and promised to rescue us from peril, and He has, though in secret, and if you could witness His wondrous methods you surely would fizzle in awe, so decent and grand is He, our Savior, who speaks in a voice that is no voice, not the song of any bird, not the snap of burning logs or crunch of shoes on sand.”

- The Avian Gospels, Adam Novy

“This book is largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history.”

- The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien

“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.”

- The Secret History, Donna Tartt

“I am the recording angel, doomed to watch.”

- The Children’s Hospital, Chris Adrian

“So. You don’t believe in a future life.
“Then do we have the place for you!”

- The Quick and the Dead, Joy Williams

“See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are  for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.”

- Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

“He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.”

- Underworld, Don DeLillo

“Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the signs of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.”

- The Violent Bear It Away, Flannery O’Connor

“Christmas again in Yucatan.”

- Gringos, Charles Portis

“–Money . . . ?  in a voice that rustled.”

- JR, William Gaddis

“When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.”

- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

“A screaming comes across the sky.”

- Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.”

- Beloved, Toni Morrison

“Garp’s mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theater.”

- The World According to Garp, John Irving

[series note: This post is the first of five, in a week-long series examining first sentences or paragraphs. It's not my intention to be prescriptive about what kinds of first sentences writers ought to be writing. Instead, I hope to simply take a look at five sets of first sentences for the purpose of thinking about how they introduce the reader to the story or novel to which they belong. I plan to post them without commentary, as one might post a photograph or painting, and open up the comment threads to your observations as readers. Some questions that interest me and might interest you include: 1. How is the first sentence (or paragraph -- I'll include some of those, too, since some first sentences require the next few sentences to even be available for this kind of analysis) interesting or not interesting on grounds of language? 2. Does the first sentence introduce any particular (or general feeling of) trouble or conflict or dissonance or tension into the story that makes the reader want to keep reading? 3. Does the first sentence do anything to immerse the reader in the donnee, the ground rules, the world of the story, those orienting questions such as who speaks, when and where are we in space and time, etc.? 4. Since the first sentence, in the wild, doesn't exist in the contextless manner in which I've presented these, in what kinds of ways does examining them like this create false ideas about the uses and functions of first sentences? What kinds of things ought first sentences be doing? What kinds of things do first sentences not do often enough? (It seems likely to me that you will have competing ideas about first sentences. Please offer them here. Every idea or observation gets our good attention.) The sentence/paragraph sets we'll be observing: 1. first sentences from Mary Miller's Big World; 2. first sentences from physically large novels; 3. the first sentences from every book written by Philip Roth; 4. first sentences from the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction; 5. first sentences from Best European Fiction 2010.]

There’s a leak, I told him, it’s right over my bed. He didn’t believe me. I was a girl.

- “Leak”

My sister is inside watching a movie and bleeding. I don’t bleed anymore. It’s not something I thought I’d miss.

- “Even the Interstate is Pretty”

He had an air gun, a beer box set up to shoot. We were in a hotel room in Pigeon Forge.

- “Fast Trains”

At the breakfast table my mother said the world was my oyster.

“While I’m still young and pretty,” I said.

- “Pearl”

At lunch I sit in the ditch with the thin popular girls and pretend to be one of them.

- “Aunt Jemima’s Old Fashioned Pancakes”

“You’re wearing Coco Chanel,” he says to the girl at the bar. She was watching him. They all watch him. The pills he takes makes this pleasant, like he’s a scuba diver and they’re a school of fish.

- “My Brother in Christ”

My father did not like my sister’s orange hair.

- “Big World”

I sat across from a crumpled woman who seemed to be miscarrying.

- “Animal Bite”

The first thing Norbert tells me is he’s been to all seven continents, including Antarctica.

- “Not All Who Wander Are Lost”

2. I once saw a man hook a walking stick around a woman’s neck.

3. She was out of practice, and he wanted practice, so they started kissing each other, and they called it practicing, this kissing that occused him.

4. I date an old man, a man so old, I am afraid to see what he is like under his clothes.

5. We woke in the parked car aslant in the field Cory’s grandma had found for us to sleep in, turned earth in front of us, almost houses behind, frames and unpoured sidewalks, abandoned machines and wheelbarrows left anywhere in the thin light that was the afternoon light we knew for spring in the country.

6. There is a man on top of her up on the top of the bed, and there is a man under her down under the bed, but the man down there is dead.

7. We enter the attic at the same time, which makes it all the more some awful heaven here, cottony hot and burnished and oddly bare except for her appliances, the parts our mother used to raise herself from the bed.

8. My son is coughing in his sleep next to me in my bed, where he has come to spend what is left of this night.

9. Someone else was in the room, I think–the second wife.

10. The things my son may see living with me–the way the windows darken suddenly in our apartment, the night tipping shut, a lid, such things as have happened with me and men–shame me.

11. I have accidents in the Fifth Avenue kitchen–cuts, falls, scaldings.

12. She wanted to touch the sister’s back as she saw it in the light beyond the door where she stood, breathing through her mouth, a spy on the sister in the sister’s house–yet waited for, welcome.

13. I walk around to the other side of the bed we are sharing, and I put my face up close to hers and say, “Ann, please. Please,” I say, and her eyes open, and Ann sees me, I think, and she says, “Sorry,” in a loud, steady voice, and she knows.

14. She told her daughter as she might a love such things her lover said were best kept secret from a girl.

15. More than any other, you belong here, but what is there to say but what I meant to say and never did?

16. The girls had their own versions of course, which they told, calling her by his name for her, Margaret, saying, “Margaret, we knew your brother. He wasn’t bad.”

17. Oh, that these fervent thoughts we have of our dead would sift into their spirit world and warm them with the truth of how they matter to us still, how they are missed.

Alright.  All this Lish talk has me thinking about first sentences: the pleasure derived from them, the importance, the world-containing, etc.

My favorite first sentence is from Blood Meridian, which is weird to me because I’ve tried to read the book three times and have put it down halfway each time, but it is still a powerful book, maybe too powerful for me at the moment.  Anyway, its first sentence:

See the child.

That, to me, is awesome; a plain evocation, and commandment, biblical as all hell which is what Cormac does so wonderfully.

And my other favorite opener, from The Stranger:

Maman died today.

Detached, even with the endearing colloquialism.  Prescient, full of doom.

Alright, now you go.