First Sentence Wonders!

Taken from: http://www.all-story.com/issues.cgi?show=back

1. I grew up in so many neighborhoods and went to so many schools that each place created a kind of temporal slice of life for me, like the striations in rock formations.

2. Agnes O’Leary feels a peculiar thrill riding the subway, now that the question is not if the Germans will bomb New York but when.

3. Sixteen hours after my arrival, a car pulls into the parking lot—someone enters the building, a light goes on.

4. Whenever I hear the commentators on the National Public Radio series This I Believe professing their admirable commitments to honor, family ties, work or poetry or the kindness of strangers, I always think, This is all very nice and inspiring, but have these people heard of hushpuppies?

5. It was a hot, dry, glaring July day that made Lowell Swift feel as though every germ and sin in him were being baked out forever.

6. Four in the morning.

7. He was pygmy-height, and she came up to his waist.

8. A few days after Stephanie called and told me Bob had shot himself in the foot, then in the gut, Sammy Sosa got caught corking his bat.

9. We used to put Percy in our dresses, and when he started to crawl Nell tied her jump rope around his neck like a leash.

10. Welcome.

11. There are four of them.

12. She's going to have a baby.

13. In fifth period, we learn about Agent Orange.

14. I was surprised to hear my name mentioned on the evening news one day.

15. Just west of Boston, just north of the turnpike, the ghost of Missy Goodby sleeps curled up against the cyclone fence at the dead end of Winter Terrace, dressed in a pair of ectoplasmic dungarees.

16. In October, the men and women of Sorrento harvest the primofiore, or "first fruit," the most succulent lem-ons; in March, the yellow bianchetti ripen, followed in June by the green verdelli. In every season you can find me sitting at my bench, watching them fall.