Best First Lines of YA 2012! Survey

Select your top ten favorite opening lines from the list below! “The Buzzard knew. He gave the first warning.”

“Our mother was a witch too, she hid it better.”

“’Look,’ says the detective. He stares down at the girl huddled on the gurney.”

“The knife came out of nowhere.”

“They called the world beyond the walls of the Pod the “the Death Shop”.

“I should probably start with the blood. If it bleeds it leads and all that, right?”

“I had my back to the room as I stared out the window.”

“When I grow up, I’m gonna be a millionaire.”

“My mama’s in jail.”

“By the time Jazz got to the field outside of town, yellow police tape was everywhere, strung from stake to stake in a sort of drunken, off-kilter hexagon.”

“If I had to do it all over again, I would not have chosen this life.”

“At first I thought it all began with a foul –if an elbow to the head’s not a foul, then what is? –but I have figured out, maybe not as soon as I should have, that the beginning had come a little earlier.”

“Chains clanked in the darkness of the holding cells.”

“You know it’s a bad day when you pull into the parking garage at work and someone tries to run you over.”

“The aircraft flew eastward, its airspeed steady at one hundred and ninety miles per hour, one thousand feet above the Pacific, a red and white twin-engine customized de Havilland, outfitted for water takeoff and landing.”

“The way the old lady looked at Mom and me, it was like we were buying Buckingham Palace from her, not a 1992-model Regency Northland mobile home.”

“’So what if we let the air out of his tires, and then we rig the car so that it crushes his arms when he goes to check? He can’t give you another F if he doesn’t have arms.’”

“Most people would find being led into an underground bunker on a stormy night scary. Not me.”

“Lex wondered, for a fleeting moment, what her principal’s head might look like if it were stabbed atop a giant wooden spear.”

“My nose prickled with the stench of dead flowers and mildew. I wish I had allergies. Or Asthma. Or the Black Plague. Anything to get me out of here.”

“Brick walls and wooden fences were the boarders of her world, roads of dirt or broken cobblestone its fields, rickety staircases its trees.

“Before you read the paper or watch tonight’s news, before you grab the Time magazine in your orthodontist’s office or dig into the police report, before the protesters’ shouts distract you, you should hear the whole thing from the beginning.

“Everybody keeps saying to be satisfied with Jesus’s love, and he will give us our daily bread. I keep waiting, but we never get any bread, so I have to go out and do things for myself.”

“Airports are torture chambers if you’re claustrophobic.”

“A two-faced moon hung over the black-and-white city, in turns shining as bold as the sun and hiding, shamed, behind the veil of cirrus clouds.”

“Enders gave me creeps. The doorman flashed a practiced smile as he let me into the body bank.”

“So in order to understand everything that happened, you have to start from the premise that high school sucks.”

“The train whistle did not sound through the valley the day Ernesto Fermin’s men found Luis.”

“The small crystal mirror was ancient.”

“At night in our town, it’s music everywhere.”

“Twenty minutes after the war ends, I’m watching stumpers pour up out of a frozen hole in the ground like ants from hell and praying that I keep my natural legs for another day.”

“I am unlike most people because I began, not in the body of my mother, but in the brain of my father.”

“There’s too much sky, and the further out of London we go, the more of it there is.”

“I hear the first wave before I see it –hear the rumble of the sky that reaches down to the belly of the sea, hear the clouds that appear out of nowhere.”

“I sometimes have this dream that I’m drowning in a giant bowl of oatmeal.”

“The shackles binding my arms and legs to the chair scour my blistered skin into a bloody mash.”

“I remember being born.”

“I just want to tell you straight up that this story has no happy ending.”

“The charcoal sky spits cold rain as we rumble to a stop at a crossroad.”

“Let me show you a secret.”

“There’s this totally false map of the human tongue.”

“Steve Jobs’s fir story involved connecting dots, and it began with a most unusual promise.”

“As a kid, I always skipped the prefaces in the comedy books I owned.”

“The Stark River flowed around the oxbow at Murrayville the way blood flowed through Margo Crane’s heart.”

“Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest.”

“I was really young when I realized my brain wasn’t like other people’s brains.”

“Remember when you watched Bambi for the first time and you got to the part where Bambi’s mom dies?”

“ I awake to the sound of a growling stomach. It’s not mine, it’s the cat’s.”

“When my sister was a baby, my mother would lift her from the high chair and sing ‘Shake, shake, shake. Shake out the Devil.’”

“It’s 7 a.m., just north of the town of Safar, Afghanistan and Fenji M675 is already panting.”

“Wherever you happen to be right now, as you read this sentence, stop for a moment and look around.”

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Best First Lines of YA 2012!
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