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Mélanie Berliet

6,037 Quotes
I like to write, yo.
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6,037 quotes curated by Mélanie Berliet:

“On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide— it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese— the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.”
— Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides: A Novel
Tagged: first lines of books, Sleeping Pills, Suicide, Killing Yourself
“Sometimes the sordidness of his present existence, not to mention the stifling, clammy heat of the apartment his finances had forced him to take, on the third floor of an ugly old house on Binghamton’s West Side—‘ the nice part of town,’ everybody said (God have mercy on those who had to live in the bad parts)— made Peter Mickelsson clench his square yellow teeth in anger and once, in a moment of rage and frustration greater than usual, bring down the heel of his fist on the heavy old Goodwill oak table where his typewriter, papers, and books were laid out, or rather strewn. He’d intended to split the thing in two, though perhaps the intent was not quite conscious.”
— John Gardner, Mickelsson's Ghosts
Tagged: Binghamton, first lines of books
“The American flag is the most exquisite and artistic of all the banners of all the nations.”
— Elizabeth Wurtzel, Creatocracy: How the Constitution Invented Hollywood
Tagged: First Line of Books, America, The United States, USA, American Flag, Flags, first lines of books
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”
— Vladimir Nabokov,
Tagged: first lines of books, Abyss, Meaning Of Life
“Seeing that I must shortly approach mankind with the heaviest demand that has ever been made on it, it seems to me indispensable to say who I am.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Why I Am So Wise (Penguin Great Ideas)
Tagged: first lines of books
“Abandon all hope ye who enter here is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Misérables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn’t seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, ‘Be My Baby’ on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho
Tagged: first lines of books
“Tyler get me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Tagged: Fight Club, first lines of books, Guns
“I was 50 years old and hadn’t been to bed with a woman for four years.”
— Charles Bukowski, Women: A Novel
Tagged: first lines of books
“There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I’d been treated by at least six of them.”
— Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
Tagged: first lines of books
“One summer, at a honeymoon resort in the Catskill mountains, I saw a young woman named Sheila Kahn fall in love with her waiter.”
— Leonard Michaels, Honeymoon