First Lines

I got an idea (from something on LibraryThing) to list the first lines of all the books I've read. Mostly I don't count the prologues or other introductory material because I couldn't find them online. Sometimes the first line might be from the
prologue though, just cause I feel like it. I'll mix them up and it will be like a guessing game. Or it would be if anyone was around to guess.

(Also I just realized my reading is a bit heavy on fantasy/ scifi. I don't know why.)

1. Christofer Marley died as he was born: on the bank of a river, within the sound and stench of slaughterhouses.

2. Once upon a time in New York City, there lived a Mage with a crippled right hand.

3. When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.

4. On a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in a bowl.

5. There, two pennorth on the nail.

6. Last night's delivery was easier than the others.

7. Warren Beatty may well have been the first man to kiss Jack Warner's feet, certainly the last.

8. Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole night of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss.

9. Michelangelo Osiris Leary Kusanagi-Jones had been drinking since fourteen hundred.

10. I remember exactly where and when David Bowie and I first slept together

11. In the year 1598, during the month of September, ships from Holland under the command of Vice-Admiral Wybrant van Warwijck drew close to the shores of Mauritius.

12. It was felling night, and the usual crowd had gathered at the Waystone Inn.

13. On just such mornings as this, when the threat of rain hangs over London in the manner of a sentence neither stayed nor pardoned, but rather perpetually executed, Creff, my factotum, interrupted the breakfast he had brought me only a few minutes earlier and announced that a crazed Ethiope was at the door, presumably to buy a watch.

14. I used to love this season.

15. When I opened the door, I could tell that Thamuris was dosed to the gills on laudanum.

16. It is starting like this.

17. Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.

18. Through the small tall bathroom window the December yard is gray and scratchy, the trees calligraphic.

19. The play- for which Briony had designed the posters, programs and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper- was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch.

20. I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.

21. I moved to New York to find the place where I would be happy, where I belonged, where my essence was.