By skyforbes 
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Great Opening Paragraphs In Novels
“The journalists arrived before the coffin did. They gathered
at the gate overnight and by dawn they were a crowd. By nine o’clock they were
a swarm.”
“The morning burned so August-hot, the marsh’s moist breath
hung the oaks and pines with fog. The palmetto patches stood unusually quiet
except for the low, slow flap of a heron’s wings lifting from the lagoon. And
then, Kya, only six at the time, heard the screen door slap. Standing on the
stool, she stopped scrubbing grits from the pot and lowered it into the basin
of worn-out suds. No sounds now but her own breathing. Who had left the shack?
Not Ma. She never let the door slam.”
“They bring her out. Not blindfolded, but eyes widened to the
last sky, the last light. The last cold bites her fingers and her face, the
stones bruise her bare feet. There will be more stones, before the end.”
“The girls were never present for the entrance interviews.
Only their parents, their guardians, their confused siblings, who wanted to
help them but didn’t know how. It would have been too hard on the prospective
students to sit there and listen as the people they loved most in all the
world—all this world, at least—dismissed their memories as delusions, their
experiences as fantasies, their lives as some intractable illness.”
“Lucky Trimble crouched in a wedge of shade behind the
Dumpster. Her ear near a hole in the paint-chipped wall of Hard Pan’s Found
Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center, she listened as Short Sammy told
the story of how he hit rock bottom. How he quit drinking and found his Higher
Power. Short Sammy’s story, of all the rock-bottom stories Lucky had heard at
twelve-step anonymous meetings—alcoholics, gamblers, smokers, and
overeaters—was still her favorite.”
“Here we go again. We were all standing in line waiting for
breakfast when one of the caseworkers came in and tap-tap-tapped down the line. Uh-oh, this meant bad news, either
they’d found a foster home for somebody or somebody was about to get paddled.
All the kids watched the woman as she moved along the line, her high-heeled
shoes sounding like little firecrackers going off on the wooden floor.”
“Wayne Blake was born at the beginning of March, during the
first signs of the spring breakup of the ice—a time of great importance to the
Labradorians who hunted ducks for food—and he was born, like most children in
that place in 1968, surrounded by women his mother had known all her married
life: Joan Martin, Eliza Goudie, and Thomasina Baikie. Women who knew how to
ice-fish and sew caribou hide moccasins and stack wood in a pile that would not
fall down in the months when their husbands walked the traplines. Women who
would know, during any normal birth, exactly what was required.”
“Walking to school over the snow-muffled cobbles, Karou had
no sinister premonitions about the day. It seemed like just another Monday,
innocent but for its essential Mondayness, not to mention its Januaryness. It
was cold, and it was dark—in the dead of winter the sun didn’t rise until
eight—but it was also lovely. The falling snow and the early hours conspired to
paint Prague ghostly, like a tintype photograph, all silver and haze.”
proverbial cake. Like decking out our poor lost troopers for marriage rather
than death. All their uniforms brushed down with lamp-oil into a state never
seen when they were alive. Their faces clean shaved, as if the embalmer sure
didn’t like no whiskers showing. No one that knew him could have recognized
Trooper Watchorn because those famous Dundrearies was gone. Anyway Death likes
to make a stranger of your face. True enough their boxes weren’t but cheap wood
but that was not the point. You lift one of those boxes and the body makes a
big sag in it. Wood cut so thin at the mill it was more a wafer than a plank.
But dead boys don’t mind things like that. The point was, we were glad to see
them so well turned out, considering.”
I do on the first day of snowfall every year: I step out of the house early in
the morning, still in my pajamas, hugging my arms against the chill. I find the
driveway, my father’s car, the walls, the trees, the rooftops, and the hills
buried under a foot of snow. I smile. The sky is seamless and blue, the snow so
white my eyes burn. I shovel a handful of the fresh snow into my mouth, listen
to the muffled stillness broken only by the cawing of crows. I walk down the
front steps, barefoot, and call for Hassan to come out and see.”
hooked you from the first paragraph?