Famous first lines -

[pinto]

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." - Dickens

[pinto]

1. "Call me Ishmael" - Melville

[Rancid Crabtree]

16. A screaming comes across the sky.

Or how about: The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.

[EFerrari]

2. What about first multiply dependent clauses? lol

Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe
With loss of Eden, till one greater man
Restore us and regain the blissful seat
Sing, Heavenly Muse! -- Milton


O8) O8) O8)

[pinto]

3. Yeah.

I Sing the Body Electric - Whitman

:hi:

[lob1]

4. What's your sign?

Said by everyone in the 60's.

[pinto]

7. LOL.

[NanceGreggs]

5. "Zeke's grandmother always ate with one eye closed."

Well, that opening line is only famous in my own head. My friend Don came up with it thirty years ago - always said that if he could only build an entire novel around that opening, he'd have a bestseller on his hands.

Zeke was actually his cousin, and Zeke's grandmother did eat with one eye closed. No one in the family ever had the nerve to ask why - but the reasons speculated became the stuff of family legend.

I promised Don that if I ever wrote a book, I would open it with that line. I would of course go on to explain that I never met Zeke, no less his grandmother, and had no idea why she ate with one eye closed - but nonetheless felt it too intriguing an opening to pass up.

[pinto]

6. I love off the wall opening lines that imply a story.

[EFerrari]

8. "Who's there?" -- WS, Hamlet

[EFerrari]

9. Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents, grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.

-- Alcott

[Lancer]

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

Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

[Beregond2]

11. "Marley was dead."

[no_hypocrisy]

12. Elmer Gantry was drunk.

[Richardo]

13. "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold..."

Hunter S Thompson

[YankeyMCC]

14. Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Acilles,

murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses, hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls, great fighters' souls, but made there bodies carrion, feasts for the dogs and birds, and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.

[Gwendolyn]

15. "Last night I dreamed I went to Manderlay again"

Rebecca/Daphne Du Maurier

[terrya]

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

From "Anna Karenina"

[joshcryer]

18. "If youth, throughout all history, had had a champion to stand up for it..."

"...to show a doubting world that a child can think; and, possibly, do it practically; you wouldn’t constantly run across folks today who claim that “a child don’t know anything.”"

[Paladin]

19. "When I Finally Caught Up With Abraham Trahearne,...."

....he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshakle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart out of a fine spring afternoon."

(First line of James Crumley's "The Last Good Kiss," maybe the best mystery novel ever written. If you haven't read it, do so immediately. I'm starting my re-read---probably my fourth---today.....)

[Forrest Greene]

20. Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

In late September of 1973, I set out with GS on a journey to the Crystal Mountain, walking west under Annapurna and north along the Kali Gandaki River, then west and north again, around the Dhaulagiri peaks and across the Kanjiroba, two hundred and fifty miles or more to the Land of Dolpo, on the Tibetan Plateau.

[fishwax]

21. We were somewhere around Barstow when the drugs began to take hold

[cobalt1999]

22. “A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy ballon of a head.”

Confederacy of Dunces

[Billy Ruffian]

23. Master and Commander

The music-room in the Governor's House at Port Mahon, a tall, handsome, pillared octagon, was filled with the triumphant first movement of Locatelli's C major quartet.

[comrade snarky]

24. OK, controversial but

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.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.


One of the best writers I've ever read. Jerk had only been speaking English for a few years too.

[Jim__]

25. I agree. One of the best writers.

But, Nabokov spoke English from early childhood. His father is said to have gotten angry once because he could speak French and English better than Russian. It would be hard to believe that he could write English like that after only speaking it for a few years.

[comrade snarky]

26. Ah!

I had heard wrong, thanks.

Funny how these things start, my whole circle of friends believes that too. I really should read a biography of him before I go flappin my lips or fingers as the case may be.

[DemoTex]

29. Late learners of English also included Joseph Conrad and Jack Kerouac.

Conrad did not begin learning English until he was about twenty. Kerouac grew up in a French-Canadian household (in the US) immersed in a strange dialect of French. Kerouac did not master English until his late teens, and he flunked standard French in school.

[pitohui]

27. in five years the penis will be obsolete

seriously, this can't be the original "famous first lines" thread w.out several references to this, the greatest SFnal first line of all time

in five years the penis will be obsolete, said the salesman -- steel beach, john varley

perhaps i'm thinking of the slashdot thread on the subject!!!

[Lokijohn]

42. A classic!

And the novel lived up to the great start.
Though I don't recall much of the story or characters, I still remember Robert Silverberg's first sentence in Thorns, 'Pain is instructive.'

[DemoTex]

28. "This is the saddest story I have ever heard."

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford.

[cali]

31. that's my all time favorite

[gauguin57]

38. I just read that book for the first time. LOVED it.

Thanks for including that line.

[Daveparts]

30. I admit,

That I am an inmate in a mental institution.

The Tin Drum
Gunter Grass

[TheWraith]

32. "It is a pain in the ass waiting around for someone to try and kill you." --Zelazny. nt

[stlove1000]

33. "The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there."

The Go-Between

[Zomby Woof]

34. You don't know about me,

without you have read a book by the name The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain't no matter.

[pscot]

35. Stately, plump

Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

[silverweb]

36. "It was a dark and stormy night."

Snoopy.

Actually, it was Edward Bulwer-Lytton in Paul Clifford, which spawned an annual contest of worst drama-laden fiction writing.

Besides, it's always a dark and stormy night. :D

On edit: As an aside, when my daughter was a little girl and I'd read stories to her, I'd often start with, "It was a dark and stormy night," then act exasperated and exclaim, "But it's always a dark and stormy night!" -- and she'd dissolve into a heap of giggles. It was one of our favorite "jokes," replayed often no matter what the book I was about to read her actually was. She's all grown up now, but I'll bet she remembers.

[bluescribbler]

37. "I HAD SEEN A DAWN like this one only twice in my life:"

"I HAD SEEN A DAWN like this one only twice in my life: once in Vietnam, after a Bouncing Betty had risen from the earth on a night trial and twisted its tentacles of light around my thighs, and years earlier outside of Franklin, Louisiana, when my father and I discovered the body of a labor organizer who had been crucified with sixteen-penny nails, ankle and wrist, against a barn wall."

from Sunset Limited/u], by James Lee Burke

Doesn't that just make you want to read the whole thing?

[cemaphonic]

39. My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood.

I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death cap mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.”


Ok, a few sentences, but still, one of the most memorable novel openings ever.

[friendly_iconoclast]

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

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four

[elehhhhna]

41. I had a farm in Africa.

[ZombieHorde]

43. From H.P.Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu."

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."

[BlueIris]

44. "They shoot the white girl first."

Toni Morrison's "Paradise."

[litlady]

45. "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

[Greyskye]

46. "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains..."

"...must be in want of more brains."

Jane Austen & Seth Grahame-Smith: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies






:evilgrin:

[Jim__]

47. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

Nabokov's Pale Fire opens with a 999 line poem. The first sentence (verse):

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!