I’ll be blunt: that phrase is everywhere, so finding the exact book by only 'I close my eyes' is a bit like trying to find one specific seashell on a beach. Still, I’ve tracked down similar lines before by using a few tricks. Quick tactics: search the exact phrase in quotes on Google with 'prologue' added; check Google Books for snippet view; search quote sites like BrainyQuote, Goodreads, or even the Poetry Foundation if it feels poetic.
Another tip—think about where you read it. If it was in a YA novel, contemporary romance, or a fantasy prologue, that narrows things down a lot. Many YA books use short, punchy prologue lines like that. If you want, give me any other word or the mood of the line (sad, wistful, eerie), and I’ll try a few searches and come back with likely matches.
I often do this detective work for fun—last month I tracked down a half-remembered epigraph that turned out to be from a poem an author had used as a prologue quote—so I can walk you through my usual checklist. First, I ask whether the line was literally the entire prologue (some books open with a single line) or part of a longer paragraph. If it was a single-line prologue, it’s more likely to be an epigraph or borrowed poetic line (think Sylvia Plath, Rainer Maria Rilke, or a song lyric). If it lived inside a longer prologue paragraph, then the book itself probably wrote that sentence.
My go-to tools are: Google Books (search the phrase in quotes), the 'Search Inside' on Amazon or Kindle samples, and Goodreads quotes pages. Also, searching lyric databases is useful because song lines often get repurposed. If you can tell me one more nearby word, even a connector like 'and' or 'then', I’ll do a few targeted searches and report back—I love these little literary treasure hunts.
Short and practical: I need a little more context to be certain, because 'I close my eyes' is a very common string of words. If you remember the book’s genre, an image from the cover, or another snippet of text, that’ll help a ton. Meanwhile, try typing "\"I close my eyes\" prologue" into Google or Google Books—it often turns up the book excerpt or at least points to the Goodreads page.
If you want, paste any other phrase you half-remember here and I’ll run searches across quote databases and book previews; I enjoy this kind of sleuthing and usually find a match or a short list of contenders.
There’s a few ways I’d go hunting for that line, and I’ll throw in some concrete leads so you can chase them down. First, the exact phrase 'I close my eyes' shows up in a ton of poems, song lyrics, and short epigraphs, so it’s really common and not necessarily unique to one prologue. A famous close-match is Sylvia Plath’s line from the poem 'Mad Girl’s Love Song'—'I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead'—which authors sometimes quote as an epigraph or echo in prologues.
If you’re trying to pin down a novel specifically, do a targeted search: put the phrase in quotes and add the word prologue ("\"I close my eyes\" prologue") or search on Google Books and Goodreads quotes. If the book is recent and you have a Kindle, use the search-inside feature. If you remember even one more word from the sentence, that often seals the deal. Tell me any tiny detail you recall—genre, a character, or whether the line felt lyrical or clinical—and I’ll dig further with you.
2025-09-03 07:34:20
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I let a stranger destroy me in a hotel room.
Two days later, I walked into my internship and found him sitting behind the CEO's desk.
Now I fetch coffee for the man who made me moan, and he acts like I’m the one who crossed a line.
***
It started with a dare. It ended with the one man she should never want.
June Alexander didn’t plan to sleep with a stranger. But on the night she celebrates landing her dream internship, a wild dare leads her into the arms of a mysterious man. He’s intense, quiet, and unforgettable.
She thought she’d never see him again.
Until she walks into her first day at work—
And finds out he’s her new boss.
The CEO.
Now June has to work under the man she shared one reckless night with. Hermes Grande is powerful, cold, and completely off-limits. But the tension between them won’t go away.
The closer they get, the harder it becomes to keep her heart and their secrets safe.
Avery Tate was forced to marry a bigshot by her stepmother as her father's company was on the verge of bankruptcy. There was a catch, the bigshot—Elliot Foster—was in a state of coma. In the public’s eye, it was only a matter of time until she was deemed a widow and be kicked out of the family.A twist of event happened when Elliot unexpectedly woke up from his coma.Fuming at his marriage situation, he lashed out on Avery and threatened to kill their babies if they had any. “I’ll kill them with my very hands!” he bawled.Four years had passed when Avery returned to her homeland with her fraternal twins—a boy and a girl.As she pointed at Elliot’s face on a TV screen, she reminded her babies, “Stay far away from this man, he’s sworn to kill you both.” That night, Elliot’s computer was hacked and he was challenged—by one of the twins—to kill them. “Come and get me, *sshole!”
In the third year of her marriage, Natalie Spencer uncovers a devastating truth.
Her blindness wasn't caused by a car accident. No, it was because her beloved husband, Jason Pereira, plotted to have her corneas removed and transplanted them into his first love.
The only reason he married her in the first place was to save that other woman.
The marriage Natalie once took pride in turns out to be nothing but a calculated lie.
Crushed, she quietly begins planning her escape.
Half a month later, she vanishes without warning. She leaves behind nothing but a signed divorce agreement and a jar of formaldehyde containing an undeveloped embryo.
Those are her final gifts to Jason.
He loses his mind searching for her, scouring the world in desperation.
But when he finally finds her, she's no longer alone. There's another man by her side.
Jason stands in front of her, eyes red with guilt and regret. "Natalie, I was wrong. Please don't leave me. Not like this."
But the Natalie standing before him now is radiant and powerful—she's an internationally acclaimed artist and a woman reborn.
She looks at the man she once loved and feels nothing. "Jason, I'm not that blind bat who used to live and breathe for you anymore."
She turns and wraps her arms around the regal man beside her with a smile. "Someone's bothering your wife. Aren't you going to deal with him?"
The man smiles back, leans in, and kisses her in front of everyone. "Of course. Whatever my wife says, goes."
I spent years trying to be the perfect wife.
I swallowed the insults. Excused the betrayal. Gave up my dreams because I was told they didn't matter. Convinced myself that I was the problem.
Then one day, something inside me broke.
I thought leaving would end my misery.
Instead, it dragged me into a mess I never saw coming.
The husband who never appreciated me suddenly refuses to let me go.
The man who should have been nothing more than a stranger keeps finding his way into my life, looking at me like I’m the one thing he is determined to have.
One is desperate to reclaim what he lost.
The other wants me for all the wrong reasons.
But after years of living for everyone else, I've made one promise to myself:
I will never lose who I am for love again.
And if they want a war?
They'll have to fight it without me.
When I was six years old, I became an actual dummy after playing a silly game with my older sister, Hannah Hubbard.
My mental age is stuck at six years old. Because of that, my grandma receives a huge shock, causing her condition to deteriorate.
Since then, Hannah has completely transformed into a brand new person. Thanks to her scholarship and her efforts to collect and sell trash, Grandma and I are able to survive under her care.
Hannah is such a prideful person, and yet when her classmates call her stupid nicknames, she doesn't get mad at them at all.
But if anyone is to call me an idiot, Hannah will seek justice for me no matter what.
That night, Hannah gathers me in her arms while crying soundlessly.
"My Oliver isn't an idiot at all. You just haven't grown up yet. Oliver, promise me that you will never leave me, okay?"
I just nod blankly. For the next three years, I cling to her like glue.
That is, until Blake Mueller appears in our lives.
When I'm done playing with the mud, I forget to wash my hands, so I accidentally soil Blake's white shirt with my soiled hands.
That's when Hannah suddenly breaks down emotionally and kicks me out of the house.
"Oliver Hubbard, you've dragged me down my whole life! Are you going to cause trouble for Blake as well? Can you please be more understanding and stop causing more trouble for me?"
Finally, an idea sparks inside my dim-witted brain for once.
It turns out that my existence brings nothing but misery to Hannah.
So, I hide inside the casket Grandma has custom-ordered for herself. There, I close my eyes and begin counting down quietly.
Three, two, one.
Let the game begin.
My dad always calls me a lazy bum. It is because I often fall asleep without warning. I sleep in class, while eating, and even while crossing the street.
My homeroom teacher, Yvonne Smith, suggests that he take me to a hospital for an examination.
But Dad scoffs and says, "He's just staying up all night playing on his phone."
After that, he confiscates my phone and removes the lock from my bedroom door. Every time I get sleepy, he slaps me.
I don't want to be hit, and I don't want to make Dad angry. So, I start pinching my thighs, pulling out my hair, and even rubbing hand sanitizer spray under my nose to stay awake.
But whenever the overwhelming drowsiness hits, nothing can stop it.
On the day of the final exams, Dad happens to be one of the invigilators.
I bite my lip until it bleeds and silently beg myself inwardly, "Just this once, please stay awake."
Still, I fail to fight off the sleepiness.
Suddenly, someone flips over my desk. The chair tips with it, and I crash to the floor. My temple slams into the corner of the desk, and darkness instantly floods my vision.
Dad stands over me, furious and disappointed. "Zach Davies, are you really so obsessed with sleeping that you don't even care about your final exams? If you're that lazy, then stay down there and keep sleeping!"
I lie sprawled across my exam paper as my vision slowly fades away.
Dad, I think I am going to sleep for a very long time…
I get a little giddy over questions like this, because it’s one of those tiny literary mysteries that turns into a rabbit hole fast. If you mean the literal phrase 'I closed my eyes' showing up in novels, the short reality is: there isn’t a neat, single date. Prose narratives describing someone shutting their eyes go back long before the modern novel — think classical epics and medieval romances — but the modern novel as we think of it only really stabilizes with works like 'The Tale of Genji' (11th century Japan) and, in the West, 'Don Quixote' (1605).
Those early long prose works contain scenes where characters close their eyes, fall asleep, or die with eyes shut, but the precise English phrasing 'I closed my eyes' depends on translation and first-person narration. First-person narrative forms became common in later centuries, so literal first-person statements like 'I closed my eyes' are most traceable from 17th–19th century English prose onward. If you want to hunt specific instances, I’d poke around 'Google Books', 'Project Gutenberg', and corpora for 18th–19th century texts — you’ll find an explosion of interior, confessional lines once the novel leans into psychological realism.
Honestly, I love that this question forces you to think about how language, translation, and narrative voice all tangle together. If you want, I can sketch a search strategy that will help you find early printed instances in English.