As we move toward the release of The Holocaust Engine and our own first lines, it seems fitting to drop a few of our favorite fiction first lines.
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- It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984
- A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
- All this happened, more or less. —Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
- He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. —Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
- It was a pleasure to burn. —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
- In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Don’t forget: “Once a guy stood all day shaking the bugs from his hair.” A Scanner Darkly, Phillip K. Dick — the perfect combination of fairy tale and noir sets up the book as a wild fever dream of a story.