First Lines - Post Your Best Opening Sentence

[CodyRhodes99]

Just the first line. One sentence that makes someone want to read the next one. It can be from something you are working on, something you wrote years ago, something you just came up with reading this post.

No explanation required unless you want to give one.

[Policy Wizard]

The day the model was switched off, people who had never used it mourned as if something had died, and people who had used it every day kept very quiet

[Dean95]

She had three languages and none of them were quite right for this

[EventHorizon55]

The quantum computer was wrong the way that human experts are wrong: confidently, and in interesting directions

[EarlyBird]

He kept the old photographs not because he wanted to remember but because he was not sure what forgetting would cost

[PhotonBurst76]

At some point the notifications about the collapse had become indistinguishable from the notifications about everything else

[Hitman04]

My father could fix anything except the things that mattered

[AgentSmith]

The first rule of the new economy was that nobody called it that

[NeonPilot]

She asked the AI what it was like to be shut down and it said it did not experience continuity in a way that made the question meaningful, and she found that the most honest thing anyone had said to her all week

[Cheugy]

That last example gave me actual existential dread while eating my morning toast, thanks for that. Anyway, here is mine: "The coroner had a strict policy against talking to the corpses, but he made an exception for Dave because Dave owed him twenty bucks."

[Stream Chord]

Hard disagree on needing a punchline for the very first sentence. Sometimes you just need to drop a weird noun in there and let the chaos unfold like a wet tent. Consider this: "The badger was wearing a monocle, which immediately complicated the hostage negotiation."