10 favorite first lines
part 4 of ??? (an ongoing series)
1. “emma woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.”
— emma by jane austen
2. “cambridge, michaelmas term, october. the wind bit, the sun hid, and on the first day of class, when she ought to have been lecturing undergraduates about the dangers of using the cartesian severance spell to revise without pee breaks, alice law set out to rescue her advisor’s soul from the eight courts of hell.”
— katabasis by rf kuang
3. “in fifteen days, there will be no food in aymar castle.”
— the starving saints by caitlin starling
4. “there was once a cobbler who died for eleven days.”
— slammerkin by emma donaghue
5. “perhaps he’ll die this time.”
— the ministry of time by kaliane bradley
6. ”the girl was still alive when he returned with the tablecloth they’d use to dispose of her.”
— this monster of mine by shalini abeysekara
7. ”my father’s sword of cold black steel, the finest in all of kugara, hoered over the tender flesh of my left elbow.”
— house of the beast by michelle wong
8. ”looking through the small oval window of the twin-engine passenger shuttle which carried her over the moon’s gray and rubbled plains, veronica recalled a local myth, which held that the moon was the inhabited skull of a long-dead god who once trod the dark pathways of space like a king through his star-curtained palace.”
— crypt of the moon spider by nathan ballingrud
9. ”once, they made sacrifices here, to appease the eight.”
— the raven scholar by antonia hodgson
10. “tess matheson was one of the few people on campus who didn’t think that the jessop english library was haunted.”
— the devil makes three by tori bovalino