From Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust
“As summer wheat came ripe, so did I, born at home, on the kitchen floor.”
“I am eleven years old, and I am invisible.”
From Deborah Wiles' Countdown
“Most everyone in Utah remembers 1896 as the year the territory became a state.”
From John D. Fitzgerald's The Great Brain
“Like silent, hungry sharks that swim in the darkness of the sea, the German submarines arrived in the middle of the night.”
From Theodore Taylor's The Cay
“Noonday sun now.”
From Julia Billet's Catherine's War
“The light woke Jessie, though it was just a glimmer downstairs.”
From Margaret Peterson Haddix's Running Out of Time
“Wake up, Hilda, it’s almost time to get off the train.”
From Matilda Nordtvedt's Song of the Brook
“Hilda carefully wiped the dishes that Papa had washed.”
From Matilda Nordtvedt's Secret in the Maple Tree
“So far, my only clients as ‘Dr. Ragostin, Scientific Perditorian’ had been a stout, elderly widow anxious to find her lost lapdog; a frightened lady who could not locate a valuable heart-shaped ruby that had been given to her by her husband; and an army general whose most cherished souvenir of the Crimean War had disappeared, namely, his bullet-riddled leg-bone signed by the field doctor who had amputated it.”
From Nancy Springer's Enola Holmes: The Case of the Peculiar Pink Fan
“One evening at supper, Pa asked, ‘How would you like to work in town, Laura?'”
From Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House: Little Town on the Prairie
“The mowing machine’s whirring sounded cheerfully from the old buffalo wallow south of the claim shanty, where bluestem grass stood thick and tall and Pa was cutting it for hay.”
From Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House: The Long Winter
“Laura was washing the dishes one morning when old Jack, lying in the sunshine on the doorstep, growled to tell her that someone was coming.”
From Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House: By the Shores of Silver Lake
“A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the woods of Wisconsin.”
From Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie
“Thank you, Lord, for letting me see a purpose for my life.”
From Camille Regholec's The Secret Way to the Heart
“On a bitter November day in Washington, D.C., when everything felt metallic—when the sky was gray and the wind stung and the dry leaves were making death-rattle sounds in the alleys—thirteen-year-old Arthur Owens picked up a brick from the corner of a crumbling building and threw it at an old man’s head.”
From Shelley Pearsall’s The Seventh Most Important Thing
First Sentence of a New World 