“Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of the cornflake and peanut butter, not to mention caramel-cereal coffee, Bromose, Nuttolene and some seventy-five other gastronomically correct foods, paused to level his gaze on the heavyset women in front of him.”
The beginning is simple to mark.
“If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.”
Conventions, like clichés, have a way of surviving their own usefulness.
“Dr Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients had died or got any worse.”
The primroses were over.
“It’s freezing - an extraordinary 0 Fahrenfeit - and its snowing, and in the language that is no longer mine, the snow is qanik - big, almost weightless crystals falling in clumps and covering the ground with a layer of pulverized white frost.”
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
“To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.”
Today I’m five.
Literature's finest first phrases, paragraphs, and
