and now:

I'm a dork, and I've compiled a list of every first line I read in the 2009-2010 season, so with your permission, and without further ado, here goes:

Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.

In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.

When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.

If it were possible for me to narrate this story, I'd begin here.

Here they come, marching into American sunlight.

In some distant arcade, a clock tower calls out six times and then stops.

Eating in our time has gotten complicated - needlessly so, in my opinion.

The Dead Father's head.

Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black Levi's suede jacket, sneakers and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia.

The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through.

Roseto Valfortore lies one hundred miles southeast of Rome in the Apennine foothills of the Italian province of Foggia.

Beyond the Indian hamlet, upon a forlorn strand, I happened on a trail of recent footprints.

This is a joke book that I wrote.

I love people!

I first met Perkus Tooth in an office.

The first time that Jean-Claude Pelletier read Benno von Archimboldi was Christmas 1980, in Paris, when he was nineteen years old and studying German literature.

I get up, take a shower, have breakfast.

Let the wrestling match begin: my stories versus his stories.

poems like gunslingers sit around and shoot holes in my windows chew on my toilet paper read the race results take the phone off the hook.

Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife.

David was six feet two, and on a good day he weighed two hundred pounds.

Disguised as a young Dinka woman, God came at dusk to a refugee camp in the North Darfur region of Sudan.

Skippy and Ruprecht are having a doughnut-eating race one evening when Skippy turns purple and falls off his chair.

Back then, I'd reached the age of twenty and I was crazy.

My name has been a matter of some concern to me over the years...

Every morning I sit across from you at the same table, the sun all over the breakfast things - curve of a blue-and-white pitcher, a dish of berries - me in a sweatshirt or robe, you invisible.

From an early age onwards, I pondered what my mind was and, by analogy, what all minds are.