Absolute Beginnings

"All children, except one, grow up." ~ Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie

"In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines lived twelve little girls in two straight lines." ~ Madeline, Ludwig Bemelmans

"In the great green room, there was a telephone and a red balloon."
~ Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown

"Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice "without pictures or conversation?" ~ Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

"When Mrs. Frederick C. Little's second son arrived, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse." ~ Stuart Little, E.B. White

"This is George. He lived in Africa." ~ Curious George, H.A. Rey

"Chug, chug, chug. Puff, puff, puff. Ding-dong, ding-dong ."
~ The Little Engine that Could, Watty Piper

"Most motorcars are conglomerations (this is a long word for bundles) of steel and wire and rubber and plastic, and electricity and oil and gasoline and water, and the toffee papers you pushed down the crack in the back seat last Sunday." ~ Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, Ian Fleming

"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, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so." ~ Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

"1801-- I have just returned from a visit to my landlord -- the solitary neighbor that I shall be troubled with." ~ Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

"This is the saddest story I have ever heard."
~ The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford

"People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day." ~ True Grit, Charles Portis

"The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail." ~ Jaws, Peter Benchley

"At seven o'clock, the morning of the 26th of December, the S.S. Poseidon, 81,000 tons, homeward bound for Lisbon after a month-long Christmas cruise to African and South American ports, suddenly found herself in the midst of an unaccountable swell, 400 miles south-west of the Azores, and began to roll like a pig." ~ The Poseidon Adventure, Paul Gallico

"Garp's mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theater." ~ The World According to Garp, John Irving

"A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard."
~ Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Phillip K. Dick

"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water." ~ The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells

"Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith."
~ Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." ~ Neuromancer, William Gibson

"Everytime he drove through Yorkville, Rosenbaum got angry, just on general principles." ~ Marathon Man, William Goldman