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With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city. Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#music

There were crimson roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

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I know what you want to hear, doctor, but I'm sorry, you're not going to pry some sordid confession out of me. ↗

— Bárbara Mujica

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Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. ↗

— Isabel Allende

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There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

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Granted: I AM an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peep-hole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. ↗

— Günter Grass

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One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six. ↗

— Dylan Thomas

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I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well. ↗

— Orhan Pamuk

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Jose Palacios, his oldest servant, found him floating naked with his eyes open in the purifying waters of his bath and thought he had drowned. ↗

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

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I might be the villain of this story. ↗

— Rebecca Makkai

#villains #first-sentence