#sentences

I am damned,' thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who are soon to die. ↗

— Nick Cave

#opening-lines #opening-sentences #death

Awakened by a thousand dogs, a passing truck, the tailspin of a poisoned mosquito (or, perhaps, merely the silence of my dreams), I had, before remembering who and where I was, seen only that green sun suspended in the firmament of my room (her uterus bottled in preserving fluids) and, through seconds that became millennia, millennia aeons, felt the steadfastness of my orbit around that cold glow of love, a marvelous fatal steadfastness, before my pupils dilated and shadows and unease once more defined reality, the steel box naked but for a mattress and insomnious bugs where I had lived, in a coma of heartbreak and drunkenness, the six months since Primavera's death. ↗

— Richard Calder

#death

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city. Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#music

I've been lucky. I've met a lot of baseball people, and I've learned to value people who talk - people who talk well and in long sentences and even long paragraphs. ↗

— Roger Angell

#been #even #i #learned #long

Something's going to happen that's going to make us all pay attention at the type of sentences some people are serving and the conditions in which they are served. ↗

— Christopher Darden

#conditions #going #happen #make #pay

Sometimes I think that I want to do something strictly basic, really simple. Just with a few chords. But I won't have anything more than two or three sentences in my head. That kind of evaporates once I start playing and then it goes off in whatever direction. ↗

— Tom Jenkinson

#basic #chords #direction #evaporates #few

I can't tell you exactly how I found it. It was just a process of writing a lot of stories and reading a lot of stories that I admired and just working and working until the sentences sounded right and I was satisfied with them. ↗

— Jhumoa Lahiri

#exactly #found #how #i #just

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

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