language is an art and these are its masters

Great Openers

“This is the story of a man named Eddie and it starts at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It may seem strange to start a story with an ending, but all endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time.” | The Five People You Meet in Heaven

"At dusk they pour from the sky. They blow across the ramparts, turn cartwheels over rooftops, flutter into the ravines between houses. Entire streets swirl with them, flashing white against the cobbles. Urgent message to the inhabitants of this town, they say. Depart immediately to open country." | All the Light We Cannot See

“The past is a foreign country.” | The Go-Between

The ocean is a lonely, perilous place. It is especially so when you are aboard a leak-prone wooden vessel laden with a rich cargo of sugar, silks, and opium, like the traders sailing the Quedagh Merchant around India’s southern tip in 1698.

"If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle." | Lemony Snickett

"Here is a small fact: You are going to die." | The Book Thief

"Your house glows at night like everything inside is on fire." | The Push

“Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow. People are like that, too.” | Little Fires Everywhere

"All this happened, more or less." | Slaughterhouse Five

"You are a fingerprint. When you open your eyes on the last day of your life, you see your own thumb." | Notes on an Execution

"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." | One Hundred Years of Solitude