@books
A bookish Swellcast hosted by @bowie & @ramya covering all things #books 📚
A Collection of First Lines from Books 📚
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Hey everyone, I really wanted to A-A-A-A-A-A collection of first lines from that would be so fun to continue to add to and also listen to so I hope you'll join me. I am going to share one here after and I'll be adding some more and please add those that you love whenever you like
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 0:24
Princeton in the summer smelled of nothing, and although a semelu liked the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately overpriced shops, and the quiet, abiding air of earned Grace, it was this the lack of a smell that most appealed to her, perhaps because the other American cities she knew well had all smelled distinctly
Archana Sarat
@archanasarat · 0:47
Hi, I'm so happy that you started this. I always wanted to have a collection of my favorite first line, so now I can keep adding to this collection here. Going to start with the first one, probably one which everyone would have heard whenever they hear about first lines. This is from Ana Karenina by Leo Tolstoy and first line goes like this. Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Eight
So this is actually the opening paragraph from Shirley Jackson's book. We have always lived in the Castle. It's one of my favorite Gothic horror books, and I think I don't have to explain why I find this paragraph to be so wonderful and powerful, but I do know it either strikes you or it doesn't
Kelly Reed
@kellygreen · 1:49
The shepherd is singing in the Rilla mountains of my native Bulgaria, and each one of her sheep, every hair on Chance's Velveteen dog ears and Marianne Moore's red braid and the whiskers of Montana's cat, every translucent fingernail on my friend Amanda's newborn son, every stone with which Virginia Wolf filled her coat pockets before writing into the River Oose to drown every copper atom composing the disk that carried Arya's aboard the first humanmade object to enter interstellar space and every Oak splinter of the floorboards onto which Beethoven collapsed in the fit of Fury that costume his hearing, the wetness of every tear that has ever been wept over a grave and the yellow of the beak of every Raven that has ever watched the weepers, every cell in Galileo's fleshy finger and every molecule of gas and dust that made the moons of Jupiter to which it pointed, the Dipper of Freckles constellating, the olive firmament of a certain forearm I love and every axonal flutter of the tenderness with which I love her all the facts and figments by which we are perpetually figuring and reconfiguring reality
Kelly Reed
@kellygreen · 0:12
I guess there are two kinds of first lines of books. Those you can get out with one breath and those that you can't
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 0:14
He, for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise. It was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters
They have never found the body of the first and only boy who blocked my heart and they never will. This is the opening line of the books The Shadows Between US by Trisha Levin. I was obsessed by reading this 1st 1st line as well. I also like the opening line of the books we hunted. Claim the first line in chapter One is like people lived because she killed. And the first line in chapter two is, I like people died because he lived amazing
Charlie Olivieri
@Charlieri · 0:09
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 0:10
Seen from a distance a woman etched against the darkness. Whether it is a woman, in fact, is hard to tell were so far away
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 0:08
I spent that afternoon lying on the sofa, hugging a cushion, watching TV with the volume turned down
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