Say you write a book. Is its initial sentence important? It would seem so, since it contains the first words that your reader will encounter, if she dutifully starts on page 1 of your text (as opposed to dipping around). Sometimes the beginning sentence brands itself upon the brain; sometimes it’s simply the first bit of text to be forgotten.
Let’s conclude that the first sentence is either important or not — who cares. Now let’s consider some examples from well-known books.
FAMOUS EXAMPLES
The King James Bible’s first sentence is notorious:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Is that a good sentence? I don’t know. Would the Bible have become so popular if it started differently? Yes, it could have been improved by a couple more revisions.
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I hate when people make such a big deal about Franz Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis”, because I love many of his other works more, and I wish I could force new readers to begin elsewhere when newly approaching his scriptures — say, with “The Hunter Gracchus” or “The Cares of a Family Man” or “Josephine the Singer” (etc., etc.) — but “The Metamorphosis” is rightly famous for its first sentence, so, since that’s our topic, I’ll get it out of the way and copy it here, from the translation by Willa & Edwin Muir:
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
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Moving right along, we have Herman Melville’s brief first sentence from Moby-Dick:
Call me Ishmael.
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Walt Whitman begins his “Song of Myself” with these three lines, which form its first sentence:
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
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Homer’s Iliad starts like so, in Richmond Lattimore’s translation:
Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus
and its devastation, which put pains
thousandfold upon the Achaians,
hurled their multitudes to the house of Hades
strong souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the
delicate feasting
of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus
was accomplished
Since that time when first there stood
in division of conflict
Attreus’ son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus.
That’s a pretty good sentence, by my judgment. Seven lines long. Now I might as well give Homer’s Odyssey too, just to compare — this is Robert Fitzgerald’s rendition:
Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy.
Five lines, this time. I don’t wanna get too carried away with the ancient epics, but hearing Homer’s two initial sentences makes me want to review how his successor Virgil chose to begin his Aeneid — again, this version is Fitzgerald’s:
I sing of warfare and a man at war.
Nice. Now let me check out just a couple more and then turn to gaze upon my own reflection, because what I really want to do is look at all my first sentences — this journal is named “BRYAN RAY”, after all, not “Lesser Classic Authors” — I’m interested in what I’ll find at the start of all my own boox, because I’ve never really considered this aspect before. I don’t put much thought into my writings: they just sorta happen. Eternity speaks and the words appear.
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But first, here’s George Eliot’s opening sentence to Middlemarch:
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
I love Dorothea Brooke. I also love Isabel Archer, from The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James — so here’s her volume’s beginning:
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
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Now I can’t not give the start of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll:
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do.
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James Joyce’s first sentence of Finnegans Wake is scandalous because it starts in the middle of itself:
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
One must read all the way to the end of Joyce’s masterpiece in order to come to the beginning of the above sentence, which are the last words of the book:
A way a lone a last a loved a long the
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Dante begins his Divine Comedy like so (John D. Sinclair’s prose translation):
In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.
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& here’s the start of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:
You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” but that ain’t no matter.
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Alright, I think that’s enough. I’ll give Twain the last first-word. Now let’s drown in our own reflection:
MY OWN DAMN BOOKS’ OPENING SENTENCES
I’ll copy my bibliography here and then put the first sentence of each work after its title, without further comment. I’m only curious what the results will be; for I’ve written so many articles of virtu that I seriously don’t remember how each one begins…
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The first scripture I ever wrote is called “The Birth of Satan”. It’s the first of five scrolls in my Collected Religious Writings. Here’s it’s first sentence — which has the distinction of being the first sentence of all my first sentences:
And when the fire had subsided, behold, every living substance was destroyed from off the face of the earth.
My second scripture, which was my first book-length publication, is called Save the Lord. It begins like so:
I have been tempted by every sin, and I have succumbed to every temptation; I am thus qualified to advocate divine morality.
Next comes Perchance to Sleep No More, which starts by attempting to misname and misinterpret itself before it has even begun to mis-exist:
Deceased Angel purports to be the last word on Sweet Nothings of One Long Gone, which, in turn, is an interpretation of the splendid Creation of Destruction: Naughty Scripture for Holy Girls.
My next book was The Teller Chases Her Tale. In this book, I Bryan, the author of Perchance to Sleep No More, explain the secret meaning of that scripture. It starts like so:
Since my storybook Perchance to Sleep No More has stirred up a firestorm of interest from readers of the lithest aptitude, publications from scholars too numerous to count have attempted to cast light on the text’s meaning; and although I have yet to disagree with a single effort, it seemed good to supplement these accounts with a record of my own authorial intentions.
After this, I wrote a scripture called Aha! — it’s the last of the five scrolls that comprise my personal bible (the aforesaid Collected Religious Writings of Bryan Ray) — and it begins with this simple sentence:
We were shooting arrows in the wilderness.
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Now we must sail beyond my overtly religious-themed works. I don’t know why I always feel that I need to offer additional qualifications, provisos, and alarm bells, whenever I address all the above bible-based stuff. But, from here on, I’ll just list each book’s title and give its first sentence; that’s all…
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The first sentence of The Permanent Modes:
On the next morning, the Scientist emerged with his Bride held proudly in his arms.
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The first sentence of Why I Am Not a Surrealist:
Because I never battled the Spaniards.
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The first sentence of Rumors of Sarah:
Here is the story of Sarah.
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The first sentence of La Man:
La Man was awakened by something watering his mind.
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The first sentence of Even Silence Nods:
Yon spotlit squib afloat upon the calm
Outbursteth like an icy atom bomb—
Behold all galaxies like snowflakes spinning;
This meaneth our cold world is done beginning.
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The first sentence of The Floaty-thing’s Go-to Boy:
The flappers-back are bamming the bystanders.
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The first sentence of The Stickup Continuum:
X stands in front of the window on a dark night.
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The first sentence of Impatiens:
Supremo, who is known for being sad, flew to his avian officer, Mrs. Plenum, whose haunt was the lime green cape of the radiant lab.
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The first sentence of X Pages of Horn-face:
I thought we already read this story when it was published in magazine installments; it’s unclear why we’re reading it again.
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The first sentence of The Radiator Girls at Strapontin Lodge:
In a secret place of the canon lived a radiator.
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The first sentence of New America:
And he said goodnight and with muffled oar
took his place among the rabble,
An eroteme, and hung on the crossbred structure.
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The first sentence of A Terrible Misunderstanding:
A Bible-worshiper is holding Jesus captive.
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The first sentence of Gabella St:
Now I presume I’m addressing an audience which has seen the picture.
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The first sentence of The King & Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes:
As I was saying, dear Tabuphilus, the hole in the heavens was enlarged to facilitate the lowering of all created things into our dimension.
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The first sentence of Mediocre Mountain:
It began with an explosion.
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The first sentence of Truth and Other Fictions:
A solid gold machine speeds down the road.
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The first sentence of A Book about What:
I’ll tell you one of the things that I dislike about ponds, especially the opaque green kind.
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[Note: at this point, I began to write “fake novels” — you can see that my opening lines get noticeably blander.]
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The first sentence of Detective Bryan:
I wake to the ringing of the telephone.
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The first sentence of Cruisin for a Bruisin with the Giant Squid:
The Giant Squid appears over the horizon.
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The first sentence of Merry Christmas from Bryan Ray:
It is Christmastime.
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The first sentence of Quantity over Quality:
At the age of fourteen, I am playing the board game Monopoly with my friend Shaun.
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The first sentence of Astro Bryan:
I am wearing my astronaut suit.
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The first sentence of Vampyre Bryan:
A whaling vessel emerges from the fog.
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The first sentence of Bryan the Tyger:
Hi, I’m Bryan the Tyger.
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[Now, at this point, I tried to quit writing “fake novels” and began calling my publications “not novels” and depriving them of any further title.]
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The first sentence of Not Novel 8:
O reader,
You are the force that makes the wheat grow.
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The first sentence of Not Novel 9:
Let’s all get jobs at the same factory, so that we can chat with each other while laboring — that’ll make work more bearable.
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The first sentence of Not Novel 10:
I kinda wanna write a fake novel named Crimefighter Bryan, or Bryan the Cop; so I’ll just use this chapter to disabuse myself of this notion.
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The first sentence of Not Novel 11:
The novelist Bryan Ray awakes in his house, the Great Pyramid of Giza.
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The first sentence of Not Novel 12:
I’m offroading thru the forest in an ultramagnetic locomotive that is being chased by its own caboose.
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The first sentence of Not Novel 13:
And then there was a war in Eden.
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The first sentence of Not Novel 14:
After sleeping for millions and billions and quintillions and gazillions and thrillions of ages, I wake up in the farthest future.
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[Note: all the following titles are miscellaneous books that I haven’t bound into any collection yet.]
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The first sentence of The Something of the Something Something:
So Frank decides in favor of his fancy, but only the voice of fate will marry him up.
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The first sentence of My Improved Retelling of Genesis:
Think about how things were, back in the days, before any plant or herb grew in the field, and there was no water anywhere on the globe.
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The first sentence of Blog:
At the stroke of modernity, right on the central point of the Midwestern U.S., the author Bryan Ray was born.
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The first sentence of Cop Book:
I answered the front door in my grizzly bear costume.
P.S.
This entry is finished; but I left out my books Grayscale Rainbow; A Second Letter to the Same People; and Twelve Short Borings; as they are all collections of shorter texts which consist of multiple opening sentences. I also excluded my 14-volume diary for the same reason (it contains numerous entries, all with their own start) — but I pasted their initial sentences HERE for anyone who’s blank.
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