Explore First sentence
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First Sentence: Mary O’Donoghue
Mary O’Donoghue
‘It’s the small stuff – and here I mean the odd particulate matter of daily life – that lets me access the sprawl of a place that wasn’t mine but has incrementally become so.’
First Sentence: Eliza Griswold
Eliza Griswold
‘This, of course, was years before anyone knew or cared who Boko Haram was.’
First Sentence: Greg Jackson
Greg Jackson
‘I am being, I believe, about as forthright as I am being coy.’
First Sentence: Molly Brodak
Molly Brodak
‘A name is a single small token of selfhood issued at birth, upon which all the rest of one’s person must be built.’
First Sentence: Anjali Joseph
Anjali Joseph
‘I kept returning to the Beckett stories, a favourite since I came upon them in my late teens.’
First Sentence: Cynthia Ozick
Cynthia Ozick
‘Some stories begin with an incident, or a set of enigmatic circumstances, or a scene indelibly witnessed, or the relationship of unlike temperaments, or even something as gossamer as a mood. And then there is the kind of story that is rooted in an idea.’
First Sentence: Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich
‘We live in these places out of necessity, lucky to have them out of the terrible explosion of humanity.’
First Sentence: Mona Simpson
Mona Simpson
‘A year later, still in third person, I’d taken five days off my character’s long wait. I’d moved to present tense, though, for more immediacy.’
First Sentence: Melinda Moustakis
Melinda Moustakis
‘We all would like to think that with one line, one brush, we could make a reader fall madly in love, and there are writers that illicit such a response with the appropriately gorgeous.’
First Sentence: Toh EnJoe
Toh EnJoe
‘I think that the thing called thought can be viewed as rooted in the very real phenomenon of neurons firing.’