Top 10 Favorite Book Beginnings
1. The Lovely Bones Alice Sebold - "My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973."
2. The Glass Castle Jeannette Walls - “I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a dumpster.”
3. On The Road Jack Kerouac - “ I first met met Neal not long after my father died... I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about except that it really had something to do with my father’s death and my awful feeling that everything was dead.”
4. The Best of Walden and Civil Disobedience Henry David Thoreau - “When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only.”
5. Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven Susan Jane Gilman - “No one else seemed concerned when our plane took a nosedive.”
6. Water for Elephants Sara Gruen- “ I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other. When you’re five, you know your age down to the month.”
7. Brida Paulo Coelho- “ I want to learn about magic, said the girl. The Magus looked at her. Faded jeans, T-shirt, the challenging look adopted by all shy people precisely when it’s least needed. I must have been twice her age, he thought. And despite this, he knew that he had met his Soul Mate.”
8. Breakfast at Tiffany’s Truman Capote- “ I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods.”
9. Veronika Decides to Die Paulo Coelho- “On 11 November 1997, Veronika decided that the moment to kill herself had at last! - arrived.”
10. Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens - “ It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
Top Ten Favorite Book Endings-
1. Wise Blood Flannery O’Connor- “She sat staring with her eyes shut, into his
eyes, and felt as if she had finally got to the beginning of something she couldn’t begin, and she saw him moving farther and farther away, farther and farther into the darkness until he was the pin point of light.”
2. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Ken Kesey- “ I’d give something to see that. Mostly, I’d just like to look over the country around the gorge again, just to bring some of it clear in my mind again. I been away a long time.”
3. The Things They Carried Tim O’Brien- “ I’m young and happy. I’ll never die. I’m skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a leap into the dark and come down thirty year later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story.
4. The Secret Life of Bees Sue Monk Kidd- “ And there they were. All these mothers. I have more mothers than any eight girls off the street. They are the moons shining over me.”
5. Animal Farm George Orwell- “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
6. Gone with the Wind Margaret Mitchell- “Tomorrow, I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.”
7.The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald- “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
8.Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll- “Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood; and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago; and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days.”
9. The Old Man and the Sea Ernest Hemingway- “ The old man was dreaming
about the lions.”
10. The House at Pooh Corner A.A. Milne- “But wherever they go, and whatever
happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.”
