According to The Good Hook
(in no particular order)
1.“In the beginning, sometimes I
left messages in the street.”
(David Markson in Wittgenstein’s Mistress)
2. “I write this sitting in the
kitchen sink.”
(Dodie Smith in I
Capture the Castle)
3. "It was a pleasure to
burn."
(Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit
451)
4. "Lolita, light of my life,
fire of my loins."
(Vladimir Nabokov
in Lolita)
5. "It is a truth
universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune,
must be in want of a wife."
(Jane Austen in Pride
and Prejudice)
6. “It is the first day of November
and so, today, someone will die.”
(Maggie
Stiefvater in The Scorpio Races)
7. “If you really want to hear
about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and
what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all
before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t
feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
(J.D.
Salinger in The Catcher in the Rye)
8. “In the days when the spinning-wheels
hummed busily in the farmhouses—and even great ladies, clothed in silk and
thread lace, had their toy spinning-wheels of polished oak—there might be seen
in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills,
certain pallid undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny country-folk,
looked like the remnants of a disinherited race.
(George
Eliot in Silas Marner)
9. “My mother does not remember
being invited to my first wedding.”
(Ann
Beattie in The Rabbit Hole as Likely
Explanation)
10. “From time to time I show up in
myself just long enough for people to know they are not in the room alone.”
(Gary
Lutz in Devotions)
11. “Through the fence, between the
curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.”
(William
Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury)
12.”You do not believe me.”
(Gordon
Lish in The Foreigner as Apprentice)
13. “Tell me things I won’t mind
forgetting. Make it useless stuff or skip it.”
(Amy
Hempel in In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson
is Buried)
14. “In the fall the war was always
there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and
the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant
along the street looking in through the windows.”
(Earnest
Hemingway in In Another Country)
15. “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.”
(Cormac
McCarthy in Blood Meridian)
16. “A few light taps upon the pane
made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily
the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time
had come for him to set out on his journey westward.”
(James
Joyce in The Dead)
17. “Imagine a ruin so strange it
must never have happened.”
(Barbara
Kingsolver in The Poisonwood Bible)
18. “It was terribly hot that
summer Mr. Robertson left town, and for a long while the river seemed dead.
Just a dead brown snake of a thing lying flat through the center of town, dirty
yellow foam collecting at its edges.”
(Elizabeth
Strout in Amy and Isabelle)
19. “When summer comes to the North
Woods, time slows down. And some days it stops altogether. The sky, gray and
lowering for much of the year, becomes an ocean of blue, so vast and brilliant
you can’t help but stop what you’re doing—pinning wet sheets to the line maybe,
or shucking a bushel of con on the back steps—to stare up at it.”
(Jennifer
Donnelly in A Northern Light)
20. “The children were playing
while Holston climbed to his death; he could hear them squealing as only happy
children do. While they thundered about frantically above, Holston took his
time, each step methodical and ponderous, as he wound his way around and around
the spiral staircase, old boots ringing out on metal treads.”
(Hugh
Howey in Wool)
21. “I was sitting in a taxi,
wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window
and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster.”
(Jeannette
Walls in The Glass Castle)
22. “She was her father's daughter. It was said of her from the beginning.
For one thing, Alma Whittaker looked precisely like Henry: ginger of hair,
florid of skin, small of mouth, wide of brow, abundant of nose. This was a
rather unfortunate circumstance for Alma, although it would take her some years
to realize it. Henry's face was far better suited to a grown man than to a
little girl. Not that Henry himself objected to this state of affairs; Henry
Whittaker enjoyed looking at his image wherever he might encounter it (in a
mirror, in a portrait, in a child's face), so he always took satisfaction in
Alma's appearance.”
(Elizabeth Gilbert in The
Signature of All Things)
23. “It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a
silence of three parts.”
(Patrick Rothfuss in The
Name of the Wind)
24. “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking
thirteen.”
(George Orwell in 1984)
25. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in
its own way.”
(Leo Tolstoy in Anna
Karenina; 1877 trans. Constance Garnett)
26. “I am an invisible man.”
(Ralph Ellison in Invisible
Man)
27. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the
age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it
was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of
Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
(Charles Dickens in A
Tale of Two Cities)
28. “You better not never tell nobody but God.”
(Alice Walker in The
Color Purple)
29. “My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was
fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.”
(Alice Sebold in The
Lovely Bones)
30. “I live in the coldest town on earth.”
(Erika Krouse in The
Pole of Cold)
31. “There are many ways one can die in Sarajevo.”
(James Winter in A
Very Small Flame)
32. “I was in the kitchen watching The Weather Channel when the girl
from two floors down knocked on my door and asked if I wanted to fall in love.”
(Chuck Augello in Cool
City)
33. “My mother was thrilled to be dying of brain cancer after a
lifetime of smoking.”
(Susan Perabo in Indulgence)
34. “The chrome-topped vending machine in the Baltimore Travel Plaza
flashed Chips! Chips! Chips! but no one could have known it was broken
unless they’d been there for a long time, like Lynnea, having just escaped
lackluster Kentucky, waiting for a taxi, watching a pale, chain-smoking white
girl whose life seemed to be brought to a grinding halt by an inability to
obtain Fritos.”
(ZZ Packer in Our
Lady of Peace)
35. “Daniel stands in the funnel, a narrow path between two high brick
walls that join the playground to the estate proper. On windy days, the air is
forced through here then spun upward in a vortex above the square of so-called
grass between the four blocks of flats. Anything that isn’t nailed down becomes
airborne. Washing, litter, dust. Grown men have been knocked off their feet. A
while back there was a story going round about a flying cat.”
(Mark Haddon in The
Gun)
36. “A river loses strength, loses water.”
(Melinda Moustakis in They
Find the Drowned)
37. “When the camp director introduces God, he reminds us the man is
just an actor.”
(Jamie Quatro in Sinkhole)
38. “Andy Catlett was a child of two worlds.”
(Wendell Berry in Nothing
Living Lives Alone)
39. “We call ourselves Die Harschblödeln: the Frozen Idiots.”
(Jim Shepard in Your
Fate Hurtles Down at You)
40. “The boy who falls asleep to the story of the bear will grow old
and wordlessly die.”
(Ted Sanders in Obit)
41. “It’s not only about looking good. If you’re just looking good,
you’ll probably be able to get a cone or a soft pretzel, but definitely not an
Orange Julius.”
(Myla Goldberg in Going
for the Orange Julius)
42. “Chuey called me from jail. He said it was all a big mistake. I
said, Sure Chuey, like always, que no? What is it this time, weed or wine? He
said it was something different this time. I said, You mean like reds, angel
dust, what? Chuey says, No Dulcie, something worse.”
(Lou Mathews in Crazy
Life)
43. “The call comes in the middle of the night, three in the morning,
and it nearly scares us to death.”
(Raymond Carver in Whoever
Was Using This Bed)
44. “At dusk they pour from the sky. They blow across the ramparts,
turn cartwheels over rooftops, flutter into the ravines between houses. Entire
streets swirl with them, flashing white against the cobbles. Urgent message
to the inhabitants of this town, they say. Depart immediately to open
country.”
(Anthony Doerr in All
the Light We Cannot See)
45. “Pat and Clyde were murdered on pot roast night.”
(Hannah Tinti in Home
Sweet Home)
46. “I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work. I
read it, and I couldn’t believe it, and I read it again. Then perhaps I just
stared at it, at the newsprint spelling out his name, spelling out the story. I
stared at it in the swinging lights of the subway car, and in the faces and
bodies of the people, and in my own face, trapped in the darkness which roared
outside.”
(James Baldwin in Sonny’s
Blues)
47. “The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On
this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines
of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm
shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung
across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl
with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and
the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this
junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid.”
(Ernest Hemingway in Hills
Like White Elephants)
48. “The people who say the Holocaust didn’t happen asked me to speak
at their recent international conference. The invitation surprised me, for I am
a Jew who’s written about the Holocaust and (for chrissakes, I feel like
adding) certainly hasn’t denied it.”
(John Sack in Inside
the Bunker)
49. “Her name was Connie. She was fifteen and she had a quick nervous
giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors, or checking other
people’s faces to make sure her own was all right.”
(Joyce Carol Oates in Where
Are You Going, Where Have You Been?)
50. “The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle.”
(John Green in Paper
Towns)
51. “The best day of my life happened when I was five and almost died
at Disney World. I’m sixteen now, so you can imagine that’s left me with quite
a few days of major suckage.”
(Libba Bray in Going
Bovine)
52. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”
(J.R.R. Tolkien in The
Hobbit)
53. “Evil wears a mask, and I can finally see its face.”
(Travis Thrasher in Gravestone)
54. “The weight of their pity is like a stone tied about my neck.”
(C.J. Redwine in Defiance)
55. “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the
Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”
(Sylvia Plath in The
Bell Jar)
56. “Call me Ishmael.”
(Herman Melville in Moby
Dick)
57. “A screaming comes across the sky.”
(Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s
Rainbow)
58. “Many years later, as he face the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano
Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to
discover ice.”
(Gabriel Garcia
Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude)
59. “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether
that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”
(Charles Dickens in David
Copperfield)
60. “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a
dead channel.”
(William Gibson in Neuromancer)
61. “Sophie had waited all her life to be kidnapped.”
(Soman Chainani in The
School for Good and Evil)
62. “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.”
(Toni Morrison in Beloved)
63. “She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her
unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the
glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had
brought her to the point of going away without sight of him.”
(Henry James in The
Wings of the Dove)
64. “The captain never drank. Yet, toward nightfall in that
smoke-colored season between Indian summer and December’s first true snow, he
would sometimes feel half drunken.”
(Nelson Algren in The
Man With the Golden Arm)
65. “ ’Philadelphia and Jubilee!’ August said when Hattie told him what
she wanted to name their twins. ‘You cain’t give them babies no crazy names
like that!’ ”
(Ayana Mathis in The
Twelve Tribes of Hattie)
66. “I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid
overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching
behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That
was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned,
about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back
now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last
twenty-six years.”
(Khaled Hosseini in The
Kite Runner)
67. “umber whunnnn yerrrnnn umber whunnnn fayunnnn These sounds: even
in the haze. But sometimes the sounds—like the pain—faded, and then there was
only the haze. He remembered darkness: solid darkness had come before the
haze.”
(Stephen King in Misery)
68. “There was a time in Africa the people could fly. Mauma told me
this one night when I was ten years old. She said, “Handful, your granny-mauma
saw it for herself. She say they flew over trees and clouds. She say they flew
like blackbirds. When we came here, we left that magic behind.””
(Sue Monk Kidd in The
Invention of Wings)
69. “Her doctor had told Julian’s mother that she must lose twenty
pounds on account of her blood pressure, so on Wednesday nights Julian had to
take her downtown on the bus for a reducing class at the Y.”
(Flannery O’Connor in Everything
That Rises Must Converge)
70. “In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I’m in
the third checkout slot, with my back to the door, so I don’t see them until
they’re over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the
plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad
soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun
never seems to hit, at the top of the back of her legs. I stood there with my
hand on a box of HiHO crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I
ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell. She’s one of these
cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no
eyebrows, and I know it made her day to trip me up. She’d been watching cash
registers for fifty years and probably never seen a mistake before.”
(John Updike in A
& P)
71. “It was midsummer, the heat rippling above the macadam roads.
Cicadas screaming out of the trees and the sky like pewter, glaring.”
(Joyce Carol Oates in Heat)
72. “This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to
spend the night.”
(Raymond Carver in Cathedral)
73. “They both stood on the other side of the miracle. Their marriage
was bad, perhaps even rotting, but then it got better.”
(Rick Bass in The
Fireman)
74. “Our aim was this: Alaska. To abandon Mobile at dawn without
telling anybody, not even our girlfriends or our boss at the plant.”
(Tom Franklin in Alaska)
75. “The evening sun was a giant peach in the rearview mirror,
apocalyptic and gaseous as it burned toward the horizon. The daily paradox of
Los Angeles: toxic beauty.”
(Antonya Nelson in Dick)
76. “By our second day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop
had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909.
Troop 909 was doomed from the first day of camp; they were white girls, their
complexions a blend of ice cream: strawberry, vanilla. They turtled out from
their bus in pairs, their rolled-up sleeping bags chromatized with Disney
characters: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Mickey Mouse; or the generic ones
cheap parents bought: washed-out rainbows, unicorns, curly-eyelashed frogs.
Some clutched Igloo coolers and still others held on to stuffed toys like
pacifiers, looking all around them like tourists determined to be dazzled.”
(ZZ Packer in Brownies)
77. “Leo was from a long time ago, the first one I ever saw nude. In
the spring before the Hellmans filled their pool, we’d go down there in the
deep end, with baby oil, and like that. I met him the first month away at
boarding school. He had a halo from the campus light behind him. I flipped.”
(Susan Minot in Lust)
78. “Anders couldn’t get to the bank until just before it closed, so of
course the line was endless and he got stuck behind two women whose loud,
stupid conversation put him in a murderous temper. He was never in the best of
tempers anyway, Anders—a book critic known for the weary, elegant savagery with
which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed.”
(Tobias Wolff in Bullet
in the Brain)
79. “Used to be a doctor would wrap a woman up tight to hold body and
soul together, but when I fell last week trying to get to the kitchen to pour
myself a drink, they just untangled my tubes, picked me up like I was a child,
and put me back in this awful bed. Told me I’d had a stroke. Now I’m lying here
with a broken rib that aches.”
(Bonnie Jo Campbell in
Mothers, Tell Your Daughters)
80. “When Eddie B. dared me to walk the net bridge over the Elijah
Hatchett River where we’d seen an alligator and another kid got bit by a coral
snake, I wasn’t scared—I just didn’t feel like doing it right then. So that’s
how come I know just what he’s saying when I see him in church, flapping his
elbows like someone in here is chicken. When Momma’s not looking, I make my
evil face at him, but he just laughs and turns the right was in his pew.”
(Danette Haworth in Violet
Raines Almost Got Struck by Lightning)
81. “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless
Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an
emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”
(Jeffrey Eugenides in Middlesex)
82. “It was the day my grandmother exploded.”
(Iain M. Banks in The
Crow Road)
83. “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some
advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.”
(F. Scott Fitzgerald
in The Great Gatsby)
84. “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was
mad.”
(Raphael Sabatini in Scaramouche)
85. “It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened.
No. Wrong word, Jonas thought.”
(Lois Lowry in The
Giver)
86. “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to
say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”
(J.K. Rowling in Harry
Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone)
87. “First the colors. Then the humans. That’s usually how I see things.
Or at least, how I try… Here is a small fact… You are going to die.”
(Markus Zusak in The
Book Thief)
88. “All children, except one, grow up.”
(J.M. Barrie in Peter
Pan)
89. “It’s a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own
child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still
think that he or he is wonderful.”
(Roald Dahl in Matilda)
90. “My father took one hundred and thirty two minutes to die. I
counted.”
(Melina Marchetta in On
Jellicoe Road)
91. “The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it,
no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements
in local newspapers. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.”
(Erin Morgenstern in The
Night Circus)
92. “Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.”
(Margaret Atwood in Cat’s
Eye)
93. “All this happened, more or less.”
(Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five)
94. “You ask me if I can forgive myself? I can forgive myself for many
things. For where I left him. For what I did. But I will not forgive myself for
the year that I hated my daughter, when I believed her to run away, perhaps to
the city.”
(Neil Gaiman in The
Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountain
95. “None of them knew the color of the sky.”
(Stephen Crane in Open
Boat)
96. “You wouldn’t have known me a year ago.”
(Amy Bloom in The
Story)
97. “It was dark all the time, and so it was dark when the ship’s
captain crept into the corner where his young daughter was asleep. It was dark
when he carried her out onto the deck and raised her up in the moonlight to
better she him claim.”
(Ramona Ausubel in Do
Not Save the Ferocious, Save the Tender)
98. “Sadie’s lover, Marcus, called her every Thursday from Chicago as
he drove to and from marriage counseling. (His wife drove separately, it goes
without saying.) The end result of this was it felt as if the three of them
were in counseling together, but Sadie sort of liked that.”
(Szidónia Molnár in Andorra)
99. “Once, in the woods, a tree. Once in the wood there was a tree with
the power to tell the future. The children of the household yearned for its
verdicts on their lives, but their governess was wiser.”
(Rachel Kadish in The Governess
and the Tree)
100.
We
leave the 100th spot open as a dedication to all the writers across
time: to those who created the perfect opening line to a story, but lived in a
society that oppressed their voice, and to those who are courageous enough to
begin a story at all.
