Love great first lines and paragraphs. From The Yiddish Policemen's Union:Nine months Landsman's been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered. Now somebody has put a bullet in the brain of the occupant of 208, a yid who was calling himself Emanuel Lasker. Michael Chabon
About This Quote

The power of a great first line is a major part of a good book. The reader does not have to read the entire book to know that this book is going to be different from other books. A great first line can draw the reader right in and keep them there until the end. In this quote, the author has captured her readers' attention with a great opening line. It pulls the reader into the story and doesn't let them go until they have finished reading.

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More Quotes By Michael Chabon
  1. There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.

  2. The whole house seemed to exhale a melancholy breath of emptiness

  3. Mendel had a remarkable nature as a boy. I’m not talking about miracles. Miracles are a burden for a tzaddik, not the proof of one. Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir. There was something in Mendele. There was...

  4. Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. Telling the truth when the truth matters most is almost always a frightening prospect. If a writer doesn't...

  5. I have come to see this fear, this sense of my own imperilment by my creations, as not only an inevitable, necessary part of writing fiction but as virtual guarantor, insofar as such a thing is possible, of the power of my work: as a...

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