Pick your favorite of these story or novel opening sentences...

• "When the blind man arrived in the city, he claimed that he had traveled across a desert of living sand."

  — "The Brief History of the Dead" by Kevin Brockmeier
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• "Today I saw Ikenna Okoro, a man I had long thought was dead."

  — "Ghosts" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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• "Her father would say years later that she had dreamed that part of it, that she had never gone out through the kitchen window at two or three in the morning to visit the birds."

  — "The Girl Who Raised Pigeons" by Edward P. Jones
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• "The other evening, I was having a drink with a friend, when the sight of two women at the next table caused me to stop speaking in midsentence."

  — "Flotsam" by Deborah Eisenberg
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• ""Drip on?" Abnesti said over the P.A."

  — "Escape from the spiderhead" by George Saunders
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• "He flourished on a signature ability: a technique for cheating the electric company by slowing down the revolutions of its meters, so cunningly performed that his customers could specify to the hundred-rupee note the desired monthly savings."

  — "Nawabdin Electrician" Daniyal Mueenuddin
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• "No live organism can continue for long to exist under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream."

  — "The Haunting of Hill House" by Shirley Jackson
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• "They say it takes just three alcoholics to keep a small bar running in a country town and while myself and the cousin, Thomas, were doing what we could, we were a man shy, and these were difficult days for Mr Kelliher, licensee of the North Star, Pearse Street."

  — "Breakfast Wine" by Kevin Berry
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• "In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages."

  — "Perfume" by Patrick Süskind
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• "Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu."

  — "Waiting" by Ha Jin
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• "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

  — "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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• "The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation."

  — "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt
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• "The first annoying thing is when I ask Dad what he thinks happened to Mom, he always says, 'What's most important is for you to understand it's not your fault.'"

  — "Where'd You Go Bernadette" by Maria Semple
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• "The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years — if it ever did end — began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain."

  — "It" by Stephen King
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