First Paragraph:

“New Year’s Eve 1899 must have felt momentous even if you weren’t a four-year-old backstage at Proctor’s Twenty-Third Street Theater, still buzzing from last week’s Christmas gift: a big brown stitched-leather ball meant for playing an American game less than a decade old, which was just beginning to organize into professional leagues. Of course, Buster was still too young to grasp what it meant for one century to turn into the next, or for that matter what it meant that his parents—who had struggled so hard to find work in New York that winter that the three Keatons had at times gone cold and hungry—were suddenly flush enough to buy him such a lavish present."

—Dana Stevens, Camera Man

First Paragraph:

“Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was an officer in the Union Army. He stood six feet three inches tall and had a soldierly bearing. In later life, he loved to use military metaphors in his speeches and his conversation; he didn't mind being referred to good-naturedly as Captain Holmes; and he wore his enormous military mustaches until his death in 1935, at the age of ninety-three. The war was the central experience of his life, and he kept its memory alive. Every year he drank a glass of wine in observance of the anniversary of the battle Antietam, where he had been shot in the neck and left, briefly behind enemy lines, for dead."

—Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

First Paragraph:

“I've been taught bloodstones can cure a snakebite, can stop the bleeding—most people forgot this when the war ended. The war ended depending on which war you mean: those we started, before those, millennia ago and onward, those which started me, which I lost and won—these ever-blooming wounds."

—Natalie Diaz, Post Colonial Love Poem"

Natalie Diaz writes of her heritage, her connection to earth and water, and her lovers, as if they are all part of the same emotional (erotically charged) experience. The synthesis is eloquent and moving.

Pulitzer prize for Poetry, 2021

First Paragraph:

“IN THE MYRIADIC YEAR OF OUR LORD—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!—Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth."

–Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth

First Paragraph:

“When we were new, Rosa and I were mid-store, on the magazines table side, and could see through more than half of the window. So we were able to watch the outside – the office workers hurrying by, the taxis, the runners, the tourists, Beggar Man and his dog, the lower part of the RPO Building. Once we were more settled, Manager allowed us to walk up to the front until we were right behind the window display, and then we could see how tall the RPO Building was. And if we were there at just the right time, we would see the Sun on his journey, crossing between the building tops from our side over to the RPO Building side."

—Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun

First Paragraph:

“First there was nothing. Then there was everything.
Then, in a park above a western city after dusk, the air is raining messages.
A woman sits on the ground, leaning against a pine. Its bark presses hard against her back, as hard as life. Its needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies. The tree is saying things, in words before words."

—Richard Powers, The Overstory

First Paragraph:

“O anti-verdurous phallic were't not for your pouring weight looming in tears like a sick tree or your ever-gaudy-comfort jabbing your city's much wrinkled sky you'd seem an absurd Babel squatting before mortal millions"

—Gregory Corso, from Ode to Coit Tower, in Gasoline

First Paragraph:

“To say the truth, it was not how I expected—stepping off toward America past a drowned horse."

—Ivan Doig, from Dancing at the Rascal Fair

First Paragraph:

“After all," said the Duchess vaguely, "there are certain things you can't get away from. Right and wrong, good conduct and moral rectitude, have certain well-defined limits."

—Saki, Reginald at the Theatre, The Best of Saki

First Paragraph:

“There was once a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself—not just sometimes, but always."

—Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

First Paragraph:

“Dypaloh. There was a house made of dawn. It was made of pollen and of rain, and the land was very old and everlasting. There were many colors on the hills, and the plain was bright with different-colored clays and sands. Red and blue and spotted horses grazed in the plain, and there was a dark wilderness on the mountains beyond. The land was still and strong. It was beautiful all around."

—N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn

First Paragraph:

“I was stunned by Mary Karr’s memoir, The Liars’ Club. Not just by its ferocity, its beauty, and by her delightful grasp of the vernacular, but by its totality—she is a woman who remembers everything about her early years.”

—Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

I found a copy of this book at The Dusty Bookshelf here in Lawrence, KS today. It's reputation proceeds it but I would have purchased it on the strength of the epigram alone.

“When someone is honestly 55% right, that’s very good and there’s no use wrangling. And if someone is 60% right, it’s wonderful, it’s great luck, and let him thank God. But what’s to be said about 75% right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100% right? Whoever says he’s 100% right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal."

—An old Jew of Galicia

First Paragraph:

"It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the real­ization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy. Their bread, their work, their private lives began to depend on this or that decision in disputes on principles to which, until then, they had never paid any attention. In their eyes, the philosopher had always been a sort of dreamer whose divagations had no effect on real­ity. The average human being, even if he had once been exposed to it, wrote philosophy off as utterly impractical and useless. Therefore the great intellec­tual work of the Marxists could easily pass as just one more variation on a sterile pastime. Only a few in­dividuals understood the causes and probable conse­quences of this general indifference.

—Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, 1953