Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide — it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese — the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.

For a few saturated moments, Jesse feels and sees and smells and hears everything.

Lee turned his attention to a Jewish boy named Carl Steinberg, whom he had known casually for about a year.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.

Dear Elizabeth; Although we haven’t spoken in more than a year (I believe it was before last Christmas when you stopped calling me and refused to tell me why), I feel I should warn you about Mr. Kropstadt, the German, or the Kraut, as we used to call him — the man who owns Osborn’s Opticians, on Park Avenue.

I get the willies when I see closed doors.

Call me Ishmael.

These are the first lines from a few of my favorite novels. Some famous, some not so famous, but all of them are stories that touched me in a way that was surprising. This month of beginnings here at Necessary Fiction was enlightening. It seemed so uncomplicated at the start of the month. Beginning is easy, right? Don’t we all begin all the time? It’s the ending that’s hard. But, here a month later, it seems clear to me that it’s the ending that is easy. You have fewer choices, your options are exhausted. In the beginning, anything is possible.

I read a lot of fiction and this month I have been revisiting some of my favorite books to see if I could identify what, if anything, distinguished their beginnings. All the sentences I’ve quoted above set the tone for the novels that follow, but none seem earth-shattering in their brilliance. The brilliance within these books is slow, and perhaps, debatable. Those first sentences, though, are entry into the author’s world. And you know what they say, first impressions are everything.

My thanks to Steve Himmer for this opportunity to spend a month in meditation on a central theme. I have to say, I will never look at starting the same way again. He has all of my appreciation. I’m looking foreward to July’s Writer in Residence.