#sentence

Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days. ↗

— P.D. James

#age

Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel. ↗

— Bohumil Hrabal

#blood-vessels #dissolve #infusion #reading #sentences

I never really wanted to die. But I followed through anyway. The pain in my heart was excruciating, and death was beautiful. ↗

— Rae Hachton

#death-and-dying #first-lines #gothic-fantasy #gothic-romance #love

Midnight was closing in, the one-legged woman was grievously burned, and the Mumbai police were coming for Abdul and his father. ↗

— Katherine Boo

#beauty

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. ↗

— H.G. Wells

#first-sentence #opening-lines #business

Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die. ↗

— Chuck Palahniuk

#life

And now -- now it only remains for me to light a cigarette and go home. Dear God, only now am I remembering that people die. Does that include me? Don't forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes. ↗

— Clarice Lispector

#last-sentence #the-hour-of-the-star #death

If every life is a river, then it's little wonder that we do not even notice the changes that occur until we are far out in the darkest sea. One day you look around and nothing is familiar, not even your own face. My name once meant daughter, grandaughter, friend, sister, beloved. Now those words mean only what their letters spell out; Star in the night sky. Truth in the darkness. I have crossed over to a place where I never thought I'd be. I am someone I would have never imagined. A secret. A dream. I am this, body and soul. Burn me. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am. ↗

— Alice Hoffman

#inspirational #change

Jerrie Cobb reached down and pulled the heavy layers of arctic clothing over her navy blue linen dress. ↗

— Martha Ackmann

#dreams

Seated each afternoon in the darkened screening room, Halliday came to recognise the targeted numerals of the Academy leader as sigils preceding the dream state of a film. ↗

— William Gibson

#first-sentences #gibson #dreams