First Sentences!

This is a response to kimberlyreads's video on youtube. She's the creator of the First Sentence Challenge, and recently she made another video about some of her favorite first sentences. I thought it would be fun to do the same...

How do you choose??? I went through my entire bookcase(s) and ended up with a stack of about twenty books. Eventually I narrowed it down. Ish. Well. Let's get started. (These are not in any particular order).

I'm going to assume The Fault in Our Stars goes without saying. "Late in the winter of my seventeenth year my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I ate infrequently, read the same book over and over again, and spent most of my abundant free time thinking about death." How did I do? I didn't look at my book(s) (I'm lazy), so that's probably off by a bit, but you know the one.

"It was a pleasure to burn."

Talk about powerful first sentences. I remember the first time I read this book, that line completely took me by surprise. That's a sentence that just makes you stop and go, "Wait, what?" and then you have to read more. It's simple and powerful. Also it's just a fantastic book in general.

"The last thing I wanted to do on my summer break was blow up another school."

I don't think I need to elaborate. 

"The man billed as Prospero the Enchanter receives a fair amount of correspondence via the theater office, but this is the first envelope addressed to him that contains a suicide note, and it is also the first to arrive carefully pinned to the coat of a five-year-old girl."

Uh...

Translation: "What... that's... intriguing... GIVE ME MORE."

"I AM A COWARD."

If you've read the book, you know why this is such a fantastic first sentence. It's a great first sentence anyway, because it immediately draws you into the story and starts a really important theme that carries through the rest of the book, while at the same time giving a pretty good character detail and also READ THE BOOK.

"The gorilla who clung to the ceiling was wearing a Princeton t-shirt."

Yeah. 

"Not long after I moved with my family to a small town in New Hampshire I happened upon a path that vanished into a wood on the edge of town."

I actually didn't like this book that much, but I do like this first sentence. It's such an over-simplification of the beautiful monstrosity that is the Appalachian Trail, but that's the point, and it works, because everybody (myself included) oversimplifies the AT.

"Motion is impossible."

It's one of those sentences you read and then you keep reading and then you stop and you're like, "Wait, hang on, what?". It's one of those sentences. Also it's a pretty major theme throughout the book, so there's that.

"This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast."

Classic Vonnegut.

"The future isn't what it used to be."

Again, another one of those, "Wait, what?" sentences.

That's it for now, folks!