From Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower
“Dear Friend, I am writing to you because she said you listen and understand and didn’t try to sleep with that person at that party even though you could have.”
“‘Beep, beep,’ Lindsay calls out.”
From Lauren Oliver's Before I Fall
“I inhaled deeply, then exhaled.”
Arvin Ahmadi's Down and Across
“One afternoon, when Bruno came home from school, he was surprised to find Maria, the family’s maid — who always kept her head bowed and never looked up from the carpet — standing in his bedroom, pulling all his belongings out of the wardrobe and packing them in four large wooden crates, even the things he’d hidden at the back that belonged to him and were nobody else’s business.”
John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
“The day after my mother died, the priest and I wrapped her body in a gray shroud and carried her to the village church.”
From Avi's Crispin: The Cross of Lead.
“The reel screeched, nearly jerked the pole from my fingers.”
From Kathy Reichs and Brendan Reichs' Virals: Code
“We rowed out through the harbor, past bobbing boats weeping rust from their seams, past juries of silent seabirds roosting atop the barnacled remains of sunken docks, past fishermen who lowered their nets to frozenly as we slipped by, uncertain whether we were real or imagined; a procession of waterborne ghosts, or ghosts soon to be.”
Ransom Rigg's Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children: Hollow City
“Hello, friend.”
From James Patterson and Maxine Paetro's Confessions: The Paris Mysteries.
“I know I’m not an ordinary ten-year-old kid.”
R. J. Palacio's Wonder.
“‘Yea, thou I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…'”
Camille Regholec's Look on the Heart.
“The end of the world started when a pegasus landed on the hood of my car.”
From Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Last Olympian.
“It was the night before Christmas.”
From Maureen Johnson, John Green, and Lauren Myracle’s Let It Snow.
“The peculiars in the village of Swampmuck lived very modestly.”
From Ransom Riggs' Tales of the Peculiar.
“My god, Mae thought.”
From Dave Eggers' The Circle.
“‘I… I killed them,’ I stammered.”
From Eric Walters' Rule of Three: Will to Survive.
First Sentence of a New World 