Great Beginnings:

Inspired by an assignment in my Prose Forms class in which we discussed great endings, I submit to you great beginnings/opening sentences from literature. (I will also do an endings entry in the near future, don't worry.)

(Jove Decadent! Ramon Casas, 1899)

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, David Copperfield (1850)

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. - Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1873-7)

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. - Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. - Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women. - Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)

You better not never tell nobody but God. - Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)

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, The Great Gatsby (1925)

It was love at first sight. - Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. - Garbriel Garcia Marques, Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)

It was a pleasure to burn. - Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. - D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)

A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. - Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)

124 was spiteful. - Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

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And while picking some of my favorites, I came across this website. Novel idea, huh?

~~J