Opening sentences......................

 

The only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer to a challenge.  Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel.

-G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Trade......................

 

Time is the broker through which we trade our youth and vitality for experience and wisdom.

-Dale E. Bredesen, The Ageless Brain: How to Sharpen and Protect Your Mind for a Lifetime

Opening paragraphs (as a sentence).......

 

It was one of those nights for Anthony Carter, forty-two, two years unemployed, two years separated from his wife and stepdaughter, six months into cocaine sobriety and recently moved into his late parents' apartment on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, when to be alone with his thoughts, alone with his losses, was not survivable, so he did what he always did—hit the streets, meaning hit the bars on Lenox, one after the other, finding this one too ghetto, that one to Scandanavian-tourist, this one  too loud, that one too quiet, on and on, taking a few sips of his drink in each one, dropping dollars and heading out for the next establishment like an 80-proof Goldilocks, thinking maybe this next place, this next conversation would be the trigger for some kind of epiphany that would show him a new way to be, but it was all part of a routine that never let him anywhere but back to the apartment, this he knew, this he had learned over and over, but maybe-this time is a drug, you-never-know is a drug, so out the door he went.

-Richard Price, Lazarus Man

Opening sentences..................

 

I grew up under the Cantor's gaze.  The celebrated Haussmann portrait of Bach had been given to my parents for safekeeping for the duration of the war, and it took pride of place on the first-floor landing of the old mill in Dorset where I was born.  Every night on my way to bed I tried to avoid its forbidding stare.

-John Eliot Gardiner, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

thanks Kurt

Opening sentences..............

What follows is a truthful account, as best I am able to provide it, of my role in the British deception operation, codenamed Windfall, that was mounted against the East German Intelligence Service (Stasi) in the late nineteen fifties and early sixties, and resulted in the death of the best British secret agent I ever worked with, and of the innocent woman for whom he gave his life.

-John Le Carré,  A Legacy Of Spies

Cognative dissonance.....................

President Trump’s official reason for the Comey firing has to do with a loss of confidence over his handling of the Clinton email investigation. The beauty of that official explanation (true or not) is that it is making heads explode with Democrats and the Opposition Media. How dare President Trump fire the person we publicly demanded he fire!


-Scott Adams, as taken from this post


Just love his first sentence.  Scott Adams is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Great moments in parenting................

"Hit it hard, boy, go find it, and hit it hard again."

-Arnold Palmer, quoting his father's advice about golf, from the opening sentence in A Life Well Played:  My Stories

Great moments in opening sentences....

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether this station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

-Charles Dickens,  David Copperfield

additional "great moments" may be found here

Opening sentences...........................

Before he came into a lot of money in 1839, Richard Plantagenet Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville, second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, led a largely uneventful life.
-Bill Bryson,  Shakespeare:  The World as Stage