#sentence

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

Early spring, yes. It's one of those cautiously hopeful days at the beginning of April, after the clocks have made their great leap forward but before the weather or the more suspicious trees have quite had the courage to follow them, and Kate and I are traveling north in a car crammed with food and books and old saucepans and spare pieces of furniture. ↗

— Michael Frayn

#courage

My lifelong involvement with Mrs Dempster began at 5:58 o'clock p.m. on 27 December 1908, at which time I was ten years and seven months old. ↗

— Robertson Davies

#business

For my own part, I was much occupied in learning to ride the bicycle, and busy upon a series of papers discussing the probable developments of moral ideas as civilization progressed. ↗

— H.G. Wells

#the-war-of-the-worlds #business

My story ended where so many stories have ended since the Rising: with a man—in this case, my adoptive brother and best friend, Shaun—holding a gun to the base of my skull as the virus in my blood betrayed me, transforming me from a thinking human being into something better suited to a horror movie. ↗

— Mira Grant

#zombies #movies

They say that just before you die your whole life flashes before your eyes, but that's not how it happened for me. ↗

— Lauren Oliver

#first-sentence #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