329 Quotes About Opening-lines

It did not take Lil-Umbra long with her fifteen-year-old legs and her slender figure to scamper down the quarter-of-a-mile avenue of over-arching elms that led due eastward from the Fortress of Roque, where she lived, to the ancient circle of Druidic stones that had come to be known as "Castrum Sanctum".

Night had insensibly superseded day, when Ferdinand’s carriage continued its slow course through the forest; the postilion uttering a thousand complaints on the badness of the roads, and Ferdinand employing the leisure which the tedious progress of his carriage allowed, with reflection to which the purpose of his journey gave rise.

For the most wild yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief.

About the end of the American war, when the officers of Lord Cornwallis’s army which surrendered at Yorktown, and others, who had been made prisoners during the impolitic and ill-fated controversy were returning to their own country, to relate their adventures and repose themselves after their fatigues, there was amongst them a general officer, to whom Miss S. Gave the name of Browne, but merely, as I understood, to save the inconvenience of introducing a nameless agent in the narrative.

I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia.

How very still you sit!

The course of this narrative describes the return of a disembodied spirit to earth, and leads the reader on new and strange ground.

For there be divers sorts of death—some wherein the body remained; and in some it vanished quite away with the spirit.

It was during the Retreat of the Eighty Thousand, and the authority of the Censorship is sufficient excuse for not being more explicit.