There are so many books that I’ve started to read and failed to even get past the first page. And on the other end of the scale, there are heaps of books that have captivated me from the very first sentence. So today we are asking you about the iconic books from throughout the years in which the opening line is a story in itself. Has there been an opening line that just grabbed you and sucked you right in?
Stylist.co.uk recently did a list of the 100 best opening lines from books; we’ve taken 30 of our favourites and included them in a gallery for your viewing pleasure. Flick, read and enjoy.
I will not drink more than fourteen alcohol units a week.- Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
What’s your favourite opening line of all time? Which book grabbed you because of its opening line?
Comments
229 Comments so far
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I admit, the line of Pride and Prejudice was my first thought, but I love that Harry Potter made the list.
There was one I was expecting to see and didn’t:
“Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderly again” from Daphne Du Maurier’s “Rebecca”.
So good!
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That one is mY ALL time favourite. Love that book. I too am surprised it was not on the list
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It’s such a good book and that first line is amazing! I fully expected to see that on the list!
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Excellent list.
Now have sudden urge to read Pride&Prejudice. It’s the only first line I was thinking of when I clicked on this article ;D
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“When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable child ever seen. It was true too.”
I absolutely adore this story. To this day I want a walled garden that only I have a key to.
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Eat Pray Love and Emma have to be two of the most awful, overrated books of all time.
A personal favourite opening line comes from The Message by Marcus Zusak.
“The gunman is useless. I know it. He knows it. Everyone in the bank knows it.”
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I must say I actually quite enjoy ‘Emma’, however totally agree with your assessment of ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ – HATE that book; completely over rated!!
The purpose of my comment, though, is because I, too, love Zusak’s ‘The Messenger’ – excellent novel!
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Although it is true that I have been considered lunatic on many occasions in the last five hundred years, it must be stated, at the very beginning of this sad and extraordinary tale, that I have been most grievously misunderstood.
The Discovery of Chocolate by James Runcie
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A fav fantasy series as a child, by an Australian author:
“Even from the time Bara was born she seemed particularly wide awake. It was nothing you could put your finger on; just a certain air of alertness about her.”
(The Land Behind the World by Anne Spencer Parry)
“Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little grey house made of logs.”
(Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder)
And some from a fav urban/mythic fantasy author of mine:
“I don’t know what makes me turn. Some sixth sense, prickling the hairs at the nape of my neck, I guess. I see the headlights. They fill my world and I feel like a deer, trapped in their glare. I can’t move. The car starts to swerve away from me, but it’s already too late.”
(The Onion Girl, by Charles de Lint)
“I envy the music lovers hear.
I see them walking hand in hand, standing close to each other in a queue at a theatre or subway station, heads touching while they sit on a park bench, and I ache to hear the song that plays between them: The stirring chords of romance’s first bloom, the stately airs that whisper between a couple long in love.”
“When her head is full of birds, anything is possible. She can understand the language of the trees, the song of running water, the whispering gossip of the wind. The conversation of the birds fills her until she doesn’t even think to remember what it was like before she could understand them.”
(Moonlight and Vines, by Charles de Lint)
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Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. – Vladimir Nabokov
Absolutely beautiful
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Black Tide (Peter Temple):
“In the late autumn, down windy streets raining yellow oak and elm leaves, I went to George Armit’s funeral. It was a small affair. Almost everyone George had known was dead. Many of them were dead because George had had them killed.”
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“Of course an erect penis is all well and good at the end of a party, rather to be desired generally, but it’s no the first thing you expect to see when you enter the room. Yes there it was, it all its concupiscent glory, on the head of a man with a small goatee beard.” – Maggie Alderton, Pants on Fire
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Love Maggie’s books! You have reminded me it’s time to re-read one, always so much fun
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What about Maggie’s – Mad About the Boy
‘I’ve got nothing against gay men – some of my best friends are homosexuals. I just didn’t expect my husband to be one too’.
That book made me laugh out loud
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“I am American, Chicago born…”
The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow.
Has to be the most apt first line from one of the greatest, most sprawling of all American novels from the beat generation.
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“Indian Summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay.”
Peyton Place – Grace Metalious.
I’m not going to pretend it’s a literary masterpiece but god I love that opening line
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“There are only three great puzzles in the world, the puzzle of love, the puzzle of death, and between each of these and part of both them, the puzzle of God. God is the greatest puzzle of all”
As It Is in Heaven – Niall Williams
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My favourites have already been mentioned below but another genre that always draws me in is the early sensation and crime fiction (around 1890′s). This is from the first detective novel, The Moonstone (Wilkie Collins),
“In the first part of Robinson Crusoe, at page one hundred and twenty-nine, you will find it thus written: ‘Now I saw, though too late, the Folly of beginning a Work before we count the Cost, and before we judge rightly of our own Strength to go through with it.’ Only Yesterday, I opened my Robinson Crusoe at that place. Only this morning…, came my lady’s nephew, Mr Franklin Blake, and held a short conversation with me as follows:- ‘Betteredge’, says Mr Franklin, ‘I have been to the lawyer’s about some family matters; and, among other things, we have been talking of the loss of the Indian Diamond, in my aunt’s house in Yorkshire, two years since. Mr Bruff thinks, as I think, that the whole story ought, in the interests of the truth, to be placed on a record in writing- and the sooner the better’…
Also, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime: A study of duty (Wilde). ‘It was Lady Windermere’s last reception before Easter, and Bentick House was even more crowded that usual. Six Cabinet Ministers had come…all the pretty women wore their smartest dresses, and at the end of the picture gallery stood the Princess Sophia of Carlsruhe…It was certainly a wonderful medley of people’. Wilde goes on to describe the host, Lady Windermere, ‘Early in life she had discovered the important truth that nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion; and by a series of reckless escapades, half of them quite harmless, she had acquired all the privileges of a personality’… The flow of humour in this short story is perfect.
Is there time for one more? Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Phillip K Dick). ‘A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard. Surprised- it always surprised him to find himself awake without prior notice- he rose from the bed, stood up in his multicoloured pajamas, and stretched…’ The beginnings of an excellent book.
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“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.” – I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
Who on earth put Elizabeth Gilbert in the list? Whether it’s about great books or great opening lines, “I wish Giovanni would kiss me” *and* Eat Pray Love are pretty weak.
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I was quite surprised by some of the top thirty too. The lines in the comments are much better than many of the ones in the top!
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It’s not the “top”, as such, just some of our favourites
Most of the comments that have been added are absolutely brilliant too!
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I disliked eat,pray,Love A LOT! lol
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“We came on the wind of the carnival. A warm wind for February, laden with the hot greasy scents of frying pancakes and sausages and powdery-sweet waffles cooked on the hotplate right there by the roadside, with the confetti sleeting down collars and cuffs and rolling in the gutters like an idiot antidote to winter” Chocolat by Joanne Harris.
“There were four of us – George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency. We were sitting in my room, smoking, and talking about how bad we were – bad from a medical point of view I mean, of course.” Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome
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“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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My favourite by far. why, why, why wasn’t it on the top 30? far superior book to “Cholera” I think.
thanks for including this, you saved me the trouble!!
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“Dr Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients had died or got any worse. He had attended a surprisingly easy calving, lanced one abscess, extracted a molar, dosed one lady of easy virtue, performed an unpleasant by spectacularly fruitful enema, and had produced a miracle by a feat of medical prestidigitation.
Which is of course two sentences ….. but surely had me me captivated for the rest of the book. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
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Looove this book but have recommended it to many people who have not been as enamoured.
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” When we were thirteen, the coolest things to do were the things your parents wouldn’t let you do. Things like have sex, smoke cigarettes, nick off from school, go to the drive-in, take drugs, and go to the beach”. Reading this at 14 or 15 how could you not be sucked right in!!….Puberty Blues by Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey
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I’m rather fond of Richard III
“Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious spring by this son of York”
I’ve been obsessed with this play since I saw the Ian McKellen movie version.
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“Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley” – Rebecca (Daphne Du Maurier) Loved that book. Have read is so many times.
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we had to read this for school! was a year 11 advanced english text, everyone else HATED it but i LOVED it. ate it right up. still read it in the holidays when i have time
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Macbeth- will shakespeare sure knew how to set the tone:
First Witch
When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
Second Witch
When the hurlyburly’s done,
When the battle’s lost and won.
And the prologue from Romeo & Juliet- we immediately know exactly what is going to happen in the “two hours traffic of our stage” and yet it is so beautiful, so tragic.
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If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me – The Catcher in the Rye. Love that book!
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It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.
- Shantaram
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As I write, highly civilised men are flying overhead, trying to kill me- The Lion and the Unicorn, George Orwell.
Also, “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”- Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C. S. Lewis.
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Okay, so it’s not an opening line but I can’t go past this passage from Breath by Tim Winton:
‘We went back and back that summer. We hitched and rode and walked, begging boards from the crew when they paddled in for lunch or at day’s end, and week by week we literally found our feet, wobbling in across the shoreline, howling and grinning like maniacs. Even now, forty years later, every time I see a kid pop to her feet, arms flailing, all milkteeth and shining skin, I’m there; I know her, and some spark of early promise returns to me like a moment of grace.’
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Fabouls post and comments below have added to my list of must read books!! I could quote many but will leave it to just a couple….
“I paddled out further, beyond the break, to where I could sit, unperturbed, mantled by the winter sun. The light on the ocean; clearly distilled, an unexpected clarity.” Something More Wonderful by Sonia Orchard. Beautiful beautiful book.
And although this isn’t an opening line I read it last night and thought it was brilliant: “Pashmarried- a friend who you used to go out with and is now married with children who likes having you around as a memory of an old life but makes you feel like mad barren pod womb imagining vicar is in love with self.” Bridget Jones The Edge of Reason.
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Oh Matilda! My favourite book as a child from my favourite author. Excellent!
And the opening lines of Pride and Prejudice . . . might go and read it (again!).
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Ok I’ve got this one wring slightly but the gist is;
ok so I’misquoting from unknown author!
‘barrabas came to us from the sea’ 100 years of solitude. Not sure why it’s stuck in my head. But I’d it Marquez or Allende?I know Marquez is a genius
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It’s Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits. There is not a storyteller like her.
You are right; wonderful opening line.
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“Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed.”
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver. My favourite novel
“Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.” Also by Barbara Kingsolver from the Poisonwood Bible – another book I really loved.
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You left out the rest of the Great Gatsby quote!
“….whenever you feel like criticizng any one, he said, just remember that not everyone in this world has had the advantages that you’ve had.
…..
In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgement, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and made me the victim of not a few veteran bores”
I seriously think about this quote about three times a week!
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Yes, I thought the same thing. I re-read Gatsby for book club recently and that line is my big take home lesson!
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Such a gorgeous quote, I’ll add the rest in, thanks Bo
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“I am beginning, once again, to have an urge to salute my Uncle Oswald.
I mean, of course, Oswald Hendryks Cornelius deceased, the connoisseur, the bon vivant, the collector of spiders, scorpions and walking-sticks, the lover of opera, the expert on chinese porcelain, the seducer of women and without doubt the greatest fornicator of all time.”
My Uncle Oswald Roald Dahl.
This is arguably the most fabulous of Roald Dahls book – and obviously not one to be read to your kids!
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Could not stand Eat,Pray,Love….I didn’t even finish it, anyone else???
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Me too. AND the wife. Neither of us could get through it. Or Twilight.
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Me too, Eat Pray Love – a major case study in narcissism………I threw it in the garbage, sorry I had wasted my money!
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Yep, couldn’t stand it. Talk about narcissistic.
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struggling to get through it for months now
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maybe I should give up
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Life’s too short to waste on books that you just don’t “click” with!
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Absolutely, there are so many other books out there that need to be read rather than drag yourself through something awful. I think EPL was a winner because it was featured on Oprah.
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hated it and couldnt finish it, what was all the hype about!
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‘My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born. Instead, they returned to Ireland when I was four, my brother, Malachy, three, the twins, Oliver and Eugene, barely one, and my sister, Margaret, dead and gone.
When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.’
- ‘Angela’s Ashes’ by Frank McCourt
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Love love love this book
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Oh, that’s so self-pitying. I definitely don’t want to read that!
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Nooo its not self-pitying at all, its Irish humour
Frank McCourt was one of the most amazingly resilient people given how horrendous his start in life was. Its a fantastic, humbling book.
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Humour? Well, that passage, granted, but I had stop reading Angela’s Ashes because I couldn’t stop crying and it wore me out.
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I know! Reading that book, its amazing he survived childhood at all.
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Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You’re off to Great Places!
You’re off and away!
~Dr. Seuss oh the places you will go!
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I love love love this book! I can never stop at just the first sentence though you need all of the poem.
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I had this as a reading at my wedding (more of it though of course)
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“There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I’d been treated by at least six of them” – Erica Jong: Fear of Flying.
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oh I how I LOVE this book – I’ve just finished reading it, it’s obviously been a much read book, my copy is so yellow and creased and I got it for $3.00. Every chapter had me smiling and chuckling and frowning and nodding and wanting to stop all my friends and say you HAVE to read this!
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It is a classic! My 70′s era feminist Mum had it and I read it as a teenager. Thought I was SO cool!
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The Odyssey:
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.
He saw the townlands
and learned the minds of many distant men,
and weathered many bitter nights and days
in his deep heart at sea, while he fought only
to save his life, to bring his shipmates home.
But not by will nor valor could he save them,
for their own recklessness destroyed them all —
children and fools, they killed and feasted on
the cattle of Lord Hêlios, the Sun,
and he who moves all day through the heaven
took from their eyes the dawn of their return. . . .
Translated by Robert Fitzgerald (1961)
Equal first:
An Unexpected Party
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
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“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany” – A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving – best….book…EVER!
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LOOOOOOOVE that book!
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Me too. Best book I’ve ever read, so far anyway ….
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the first from my FAV kids book:
” I wrote to the zoo to send me a pet” – Dear Zoo by Rod Campell
and now the adult books:
1. “In fairy tales, witches always wear silly black hats and black cloaks, and they ride on broomsticks. But this is not a fairy tale. This is about REAL WITCHES”- Roald Dahl’s The Witches
“Panic was my first reaction to the multiple-choice options that lay on my desk in front of me. I glanced around at the students next to be before turning back to question 3. I hated multiple-choice. Yet I did not want to get question 3 wrong. I did not want to get any of them wrong. The outcome would be to devastating for my sense of being”. – Looking for Alibrandi By Melina Marchetta
“The lady at the pharmacy on the estate knew my mother, she also know I was only 16. She silently handed me the pregnancy test, in its little paper bag.” – Priceless by Charlie Daniels
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I also love Melina Marchetta’s novels!!! I don’t know whether they are classed as literary fiction, but her writing is so witty and funny and clever…I just love them!! and typically, I hate the dumbed-down language employed in young-adult fiction but her books are great!!!
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I too love the opening sentence to ‘Looking for Alibrandi’ – bril book!
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Great choice with ‘Looking for Alibrandi’ – I was hooked with that opening, too.
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“When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable child ever seen. It was true too.” The Secret Garden.
“Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde’s Hollow it was a quiet well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.”
Anne of Green Gables.
Favourites in my childhood, and still favourites now.
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I read this book for the first time a couple of years ago to my 7yr old daughter from start to finish, it took a while but it was worth every word. My daughter went to school this morning dressed at Mary for book week.
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I have every ‘Anne’ book and have read them all every year over Christmas since I was ten. I wanted to name my son Gilbert (Gil is so cute), but my husband told me it was bad enough that he has to lug the bloody things wherever we happen to be going to for Christmas, let alone a permanent reminder of them. They were a present from my nan, and the best reminder of have of her.
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Thanks so much for reminding me about Anne, I am reading Anne of Avonlea at the moment after finishing Anne Of Green Gables again. The difference is I am rereading them on my ipod.
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My copy of Anne of Green Gables was awarded to my great aunt as a prize at school in 1933. I have just recently completed the collection of books and re-read them again. Love them!
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Two of my favourites (opening paragraph because first line isn’t enough).
“The naked child ran out of the hide-covered lean-to toward the rocky beach at the bend in the small river. It didn’t occur to her to look back. Nothing in her experience ever gave her reason to doubt the shelter and those within it would be there when she returned.” – Clan of The Cave Bear, Jean M. Auel.
“Does such a thing as “the fatal flaw,” that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.” – The Secret History, Donna Tartt.
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so hard to go past Jeanette Winterson for cracking first lines:
My mother called me Silver. I was born part precious metal part pirate. (Lighthousekeeping)
This new world weighs a yatto-gram.
But everything is trial-size; tread-on-me tiny or blurred-out-of-focus huge. There are leaves that have grown as big as cities, and there are birds that nest in cockleshells. On the white sand there are long-toed clawprints deep as nightmares, and there are rock pools in hand-hollows finned by invisible fish.(The Stone Gods)
Why is the measure of love loss? (Written on the Body)
But actually, I think the first line that stopped me in my tracks was by Brisbane writer Venero Armanno in his book Firehead
“She used to sell her kisses for caramels; her lips went for long licks of licorice and her touch for tangerines and tutti frutti”
almost perfect I think.
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My heart is racing and I think I’m about to faint: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Anna Karenina, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Emma, Harry Potter, Little Women, Matilda, Peter Pan, Pride and Prejudice, The catcher in the rye!!!!, The great gatsby, The time-traveller’s wife, The voyage of the dawn treader!!!!
Mamamia – you have literally compiled a list of my all-time favourite novels!!!
However, you have missed a couple of pure opening-line gems:
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again” (Rebecca)
“The accused man, Kabuo Miyamoto, sat proudly upright with a rigid grace, his palms placed softly on the defendent’s table – the posture of a man who has detached himself insofar as this is possible at his own trial”
(Snow falling on Cedars)
“We come sweeping up the tree-lined boulevard with siren and lights and when the GPS urges us to make the next left we take it so fast that all the gear slams and sways inside the vehicle. I don’t say a thing. Down the dark suburban street I can see the house lit like a cruise ship”
(Tim Winton’s Breath)
“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it”
(Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne)
“In fairy tales, witches always wear silly black hats and black cloaks, and they ride on broomsticks. But this is not a fairy tale. This is about REAL WITCHES”
(Roald Dahl’s The Witches)
The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home” (Wind in the Willows)
“Jasper Jones has come to my window. I don’t know why, but he has. Maybe he’s in trouble. Maybe he doesn’t have anywhere else to go. Either way he’s just frightened the living shit out of me”
(Jasper Jones by Clive Silvey – LOVELOVELOVE)
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They are all brilliant! Thanks Ronnie xx
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The opening of If This Is A Man/Survival in Auschwitz in a poem by the author, the first sentence of which is:
“You who live safe
In your wam houses,
You who find, returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud
Who does not know peace
Who fights for a scrap of bread
Who dies because of a yes or a no.”
That grabbed me…didn’t let go until after I finished it and The Truce (which was coupled with it).
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“A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head.”
A Confederacy Of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole
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One of my absolute favourites!!
“I dust a bit, in addition I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to real from my literary labours, I make the occasional cheese dip”
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“124 was spiteful, full of baby’s venom” Beloved- Toni Morrison
“Jasper Jones has come to my window.” Jasper Jones- Craig Silvey
Both deceptively simple, both hook you in- like the Rebecca line, which is also a favourite.
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I was going to do Jasper Jones as well! How much did you love that book.
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I love Snoopie’s “It was a dark and stormy night….”
Unfortunately, that was as far as he got
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… the billy goat was blind
He walked into a barbed wire fence
And scratched his… never-you-mind.
Ho, ho, sorry, couldn’t resist
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ok it is the second paragraph, this book I read from start to finish hardly stopping to eat or sleep. I have had many an argument with my Irish Catholic parents who grow up at the same time and place as the aurthor.
‘When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable Irish childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable irish Catholic childhood” Angela’s Ashes Frank McCourt
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Whoops, I posted this too without realising you had already! I love this book so much.
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I was born in Limerick (30 years later) i loved this book my parents hated it, laughed and cried all the way through
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This was a fantastic book!
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Hilarious Brid! Can’t bring myself to read it but that is so funny!
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The only opening line I always remember, so it must be my fave:
‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possenssion of a large fortune must be in want of a wife.’
P & P Jane Austen
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First line in my book is; “so, have any of you girls seen a condom?”
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You gotta love Raymond Chandler for great opening paragraphs. From ‘The Big Sleep’:
It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool sock with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.
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My favourite by a mile:
“My mother did not tell me they were coming. Afterwards she said she did not want me to appear nervous. I was surprised, for I thought she knew me well. Strangers would think I was calm. I did not cry as a baby. Only my mother would note the tightness along my jaw, the widening of my already wide eyes.”
-Girl with a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier