Most memorable first lines

[paperplane]

More than one line but..

 

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like

[Book Fiend]

'Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge'

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

[libri vermis]

Here are quite a few that stick with me:

 

The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. - The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle.

 

O Palicrovol, with death and vengeance in your eyes, I write to you because over the centuries there are tales you have forgotten, and tales you never knew. - Hart's Hope by Orson Scott Card

 

On a certain day in June, 19--, a young man was making his way on foot northward from the great City to a town or place called Edgewood, that he had been told of but never visited. His name was Smoky Barnable, and he was going to Edgewood to get married; the fact that he walked and didn't ride was one of the conditions placed on his coming there at all. - Little, Big by John Crowley

 

The story of Terisa and Geraden began very much like a fable. - The Mirror of Her Dreams by Stephen R. Donaldson

 

A great city is nothing more than a portrait of itself, and yet when all is said and done, its arsenals of scenes and images are part of a deeply moving plan. - Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin

 

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. - Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov

 

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. - 1984 by George Orwell

 

The magician's underwear had just been found in a cardboard suitcase floating in a stagnant pond on the outskirts of Miami. - Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins

 

Dante stared and stared at the corpse, but a blindness waited behind his eyes. It was as if he couldn't see the body; couldn't grasp it, or what it meant. - Resurrection Man by Sean Stewart

[Rawr]

'The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.' - Stephen King, The Dark Tower series. When you read this amazing story, you'll understand why it is such a brilliant line

 

'Call me Ishmael.' - Herman Melville, Moby Dick. Don't know why that stands out so much, it's just a great opening

 

'No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.' Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House - it's the whole opening paragraph that is so beautifully and provocatively written.

Edited December 2, 2009 by Rawr

[Nicola]

Lestat here. You know who I am? Then Skip the next few paragraphs. For those whom I have not met before, I want this to be love at first sight. Anne Rice - Memnoch The Devil.

 

I'm currently reading this book and it really struck me

[poppyshake]

'Marley was dead, to begin with' ... Charles Dickens 'A Christmas Carol

 

'Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much' ... J.K. Rowling 'Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone

 

'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit' ... JRR Tolkien 'the Hobbit

 

'I have just returned from a visit to my landlord, the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with ... Emily Bronte 'Wuthering Heights'

 

'If I should die, think only this of me, that there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England' ... Rupert Brooke 'the Soldier'

[FaustoMerckx]

I flicked through a sci-fi book recently where the first line was something about a goat falling off of the world. I can't remember what it was but maybe someone will?

I always love to be punched in the face by the opening paragraph to a book, here are some of my favourite first lines -

1984 - Orwell - It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

 

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S Thompson - We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.

 

Notes from Underground - Dostoyevsky - I am a sick man . . . I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver.

[Ben Mines]

"I remember him (I have no right to utter this sacred verb; only one man on earth had that right, and he is dead) holding a dark passion flower in his hand and seeing it as no one has ever seen it, even if he had stared at it from the first light of dawn to the last light of evening for an entire lifetime."

 

The opening line of Funes the Memorious by Jorge Luis Borges. For context, it is a story about a man with an infallible and unlimited memory. Shades of Tennyson's Flower in the Crannied Wall, I think.

[Rawr]

Lestat here. You know who I am? Then Skip the next few paragraphs. For those whom I have not met before, I want this to be love at first sight. Anne Rice - Memnoch The Devil.

 

I'm currently reading this book and it really struck me

 

I like that line, it is very compelling from only a few words. Great beginning

[Raskolnikov]

here are some more i liked.

 

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it,

[Raskolnikov]

This one is a classic but I cannot copy it here, so you have to jump to the screenshot :

 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/reader/0140317937/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-page

[Ben Mines]

 

I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it - without knowing why.

 

The book of disquiet, Fernando Pessoa

 

 

I like it.

[Wilde Lily]

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. ~ Middlemarch by George Eliot

 

 

Midway in our life's journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood. ~ The Divine Comedy, Inferno by Dante Alighieri

[BookJumper]

Condemned to death!

The last day of a condemned man, Victor Hugo

 

Which one, among you all, deserves eternal life?

The possibility of an island, Michel Houellebecq

 

For Christmas, i wanted a rat, for I hoped it would help for a poem about education for mankind

The rat, Gunter Grass

I like these three, particularly Victor's - pithy & to the point, or, how to grab a reader in three words. I really must read this, as soon as I find it in a decent translation (in Italian; I read Les Miserabl

[emelee]

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

--- Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice.

 

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

--- Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina

 

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

--- George Orwell: 1984

 

"Call me Ishmael".

--- Herman Melville: Moby-Dick

[Rawr]

'It was a pleasure to burn.'

 

- Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

[vinay87]

"In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit."

 

 

100 points to whoever guesses which book.

 

Other favs include

 

"The wheel of time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend."

-Every book of the Wheel of Time

 

"In dreams, memories haunt us."

 

Every book of my series.

Edited February 23, 2010 by vinay87

[Chrissy]

"In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit."

100 points to whoever guesses which book.

That's such a toughie Vinay. I may have to ponder this one.

 

On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.

 

'Riddley Walker' by Russell Hoban

[AbielleRose]

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of ****, but I don't feel like going into it.

 

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

[ethan]

A couple of famous ones:

 

"Who is John Galt?" Atlas Shrugged

 

"A screaming comes across the sky." Gravity's Rainbow

 

Some recent favorites:

 

"I am dying now, but I still have many things to say" By Night in Chile

 

"Context is everything" Motherless Brooklyn

 

Here's my all-time favorite:

 

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

By the false azure in the windowpain;

I was the smudge of ashen fluff - and I

Lived on; flew on, in the reflected sky.

 

Pale Fire

[StephenKingman]

My name is Salmon, like the fish, i was 14 years old when i was murdered. (The Lovely Bones).

 

Definitely catches your attention.

[:HerculeHastings:]

This is a cool first line from "Back When We Were Grownups".

 

Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered that she had turned into the wrong person.

[Rawr]

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

--- George Orwell: 1984

 

[Emmaline]

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."

Kafka The Metamorphosis

 

"Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo."

James Joyce Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

 

"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."

Raphael Sabatini Scaramouche

 

"When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--had seen in at least ten years."

William Faulkner A Rose For Emily

 

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

 

 

Yes I know its more than the first line, but it sets up the rest of the book for the large amount of absurdity encountered on this five part trilogy.

 

 

 

 

[chrysalis_stage]

'No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.' Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House - it's the whole opening paragraph that is so beautifully and provocatively written.

 

I like this one, not read the book myself yet but I really want to.

 

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."

Kafka The Metamorphosis

 

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

 

Yes I know its more than the first line, but it sets up the rest of the book for the large amount of absurdity encountered on this five part trilogy.

 

Enjoyed both these books and both these openings.

 

Some others I enjoyed were:

 

Michel Faber - The Crimson Petal and the White (reading now)

Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them. This city I am bringing you to is vast and intricate, and you have not been here before. You may imagine, from other stories you've read, that you know it well, but those stories flattered you, welcoming you as a friend, treating you as if you belonged. The truth is that you are an alien from another time and place altogether.

 

Haruki Murakami - After Dark

Eyes mark the shape of the city. Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair. In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature - or more like a single collective entity created by many intertwining organisms. Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting old, sending out new consumables and collecting the old, sending out new contradictions and collecting the old. To the rythm of its pulsing, all parts of the body flicker and flare up and squirm. Midnight is approaching and the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished, producing the basso continuo of the city's moan, a monotonous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding.

 

Nicci French - Land of the Living

Darkness. Darkness for a long time. Open my eyes and close, open and close. The same. Darkness inside, darkness outside.

I'd been dreaming. Tossed around in a black dark sea. Staked out on a mountain in the night. An animal I couldn't see sniffed and snuffled around me. I felt a wet nose on my skin. When you know you're dreaming you wake into another dream. But when you wake and nothing changes, that must be reality.

 

H. P. Lovecraft - The Call of Chthulhu

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hithero harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revalation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Edited March 7, 2010 by chrysalis_stage