First Lines; Last Lines

First Lines & Last Lines from books.

[firstlineslastlines]

First: I wasn't born a First Lady or a senator. 

Last: Then I said good-bye to the house where I had spent eight years living history.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History

[firstlineslastlines]

First: Visitors to the Carter farm in Archery, Georgia, where Jimmy Carter spent most of his childhood, cannot fail to be impressed by his humble origins. 

Last: Jimmy Carter himself, however, may be the last to know.

Randall Balmer, Redeemer, The Life of Jimmy Carter

[firstlineslastlines]

First: When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan riders galloped up to our home in Omaha, Nebraska, one night.

Last: Only the mistakes have been mine.

Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

[firstlineslastlines]

First: "My God, how does one write a Biography?" 

Last: So we discuss suicide, and the ghosts as I say, change so oddly in my mind; like people who live, & are changed by what one hears of them.

Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf

[firstlineslastlines]

First: The sun had not yet risen. 

Last: The waves broke on the shore.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves

[firstlineslastlines]

First: Mrs. Dalloway said she woud buy the flowers herself. 

Last: For there she was.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

[firstlineslastlines]

First: It's been almost ten years since I first ran for political office. 

Last: My heart is filled with love for this country.

Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

[firstlineslastlines]

First: Notwithstanding the great number of books that have been written about Abraham Lincoln during our generation, a major need, perhaps the major need so far as most persons are concerned, has long remained unfulfilled. 

Last: For in democracy, made genuine, he saw our "last, best hope" of frustrating any tyrant who seeks to regiment or debase or mislead any people, anywhere, and of achieving peace on earth and good will among men through "the universal liberty of mankind."

Benjamin P. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, A Biography

[firstlineslastlines]

First: Each year, in the morning on December 28, a military honor guard carrying the American flag presents a wreath that bears the words "The President." 

Last: The man whose bones lie in the cathedral would leave behind a mind and spirit that live on in everything he touched.

John Milton Cooper Jr., Woodrow Wilson, A Biography

[firstlineslastlines]

First: “There you are!” 

Last: And he listened yet more intently to what was within him, to the past, to see whether that voice of memory truly foretelling the future would not speak to him again, revealing the present to him as well as the past.

Stefan Zweig, Journey Into The Past

[firstlineslastlines]

First: When R., the famous novelist, returned to Vienna early in the morning, after a refreshing three-day excursion into the mountains, and bought a newspaper at the railway station, he was reminded as soon as his eye fell on the date that this was his birthday.

Last: And slowly, slowly, imperceptibly, the smile on her dreaming lips dies away.

Stefan Zweig, Letter from an Unknown Woman, and other stories

[firstlineslastlines]

First: No artist is an artist through the entire twenty-four hours of his normal day; he succeeds in producing all that is essential, all that will last, only in a few, rare moments of inspiration.

Last: And once again the eternal vision of a humane world recedes into mist and into the distance.

Stefan Zweig, Shooting Stars, Ten Historical Miniatures

[firstlineslastlines]

First: If I try to find some useful phrase so sum up the time of my childhood and youth before the First World War, I hope I can put it most succintly by calling it the Golden Age of Security. 

Last: But in the last resort, every shadow is also the child of light, and only those who have known the light and the dark, have seen war and peace, rise and fall, have truly lived their lives.

Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

[firstlineslastlines]

First: The whole affair began with a piece of ineptitude, of entirely accidental foolishness, a faux pas, as the French would say. 

Last: But since that hour I have known that no guilt is forgotten while the conscience still remembers it.

Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity

[firstlineslastlines]

First: Your mother was born in 1879, and as some six years at least must have passed before I knew that she was my sister, I can say nothing of that time. 

Last: And the car drove off, and she sat by my side, trying to impress me with the fact that she had known Henry James.

Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being

[firstlineslastlines]

First: Two Chroniclers: The two speaking together: Kinsmen, you shall behold Our stage, in mimic action, mould A man's character.

Last: Second Chronicler: And that endures; it is token sent Always to man for man's own government.

John Drinkwater, Abraham Lincoln, A Play

[firstlineslastlines]

First: All of us face hard choices in our lives. 

Last: I folded up the quilt and got back to work.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hard Choices