Story starters

"Aaah! Aaaaah! Aaaaaaaaaaaaah!"
Leo groaned.  His leg ached.  He tried to move but he was in too much pain.



"Let me have a look", she whispered.
"N-N-No!", I stammered.  "You'll scare them."




The butter struggled in my hand.
Not the fridge!", it begged.  "Don't put me in the fridge; it's much too cold."




The room was dark.  Dark and damp.  The air smelled of stale food and beer.  I stepped cautionsly inside.  Suddenly, the door slammed behind me.  I jumped.



And now, some first lines from novels:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)

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 (1952)

"Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.
Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (1956)

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)

High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.
David Lodge, Changing Places (1975)