Memorable First Sentences

From One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez:

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

From Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen:
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

edited to add the end quotation mark

Off the top of my head, from Herman Melville's Moby Dick: "Call me Ishmael."

Also, from Beowulf: "Hwæt!" which roughly means "be quiet and listen" or "Hark!"

In response to #3, from Kurt Vonnegutt's Cat's Cradle: "Call me Jonah."

From This Is Not Civilization by Robert Rosenberg:

'The idea of using porn films to encourage the dairy cows to breed had been a poor one.'

A Tale Of Two Cities

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

The Crow Road

"It was the day my grandmother exploded".

For me one of the most evocative first sentences is from Mystic River by Dennis Lehane. When I first read it, I had to read this first line several times just to absorb the beauty of it.

"When Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus were kids, their fathers worked together at the Coleman Candy plant and carried the stench of warm chocolate back home with them."

What did it for me was the word stench - not something normally associated with the smell of chocolate and totally gave me the idea that it had become a bad smell for everyone because it was so pervasive. Once sentence later, this was borne out with this:

"By the time they were eleven, Sean and Jimmy had developed a hatred of sweets so total that they took their coffee black for the rest of their lives and never ate dessert."

It also sets the whole idea that they are a blue collar family and all that that entails. Genius first line.

A random selection of my favorites:

"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 crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth." - Catcher in the Rye

"'Did Mama sing every day?' asked Caleb." - Sarah Plain and Tall

"Marley was dead: to begin with." - A Christmas Carol

"Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York; especially in the summer of 1912." - A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

"The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended." - 2001: A Space Odyssey

I have more - but I'll stop now!! :-)

edited to add Touchstones

Don't stop!

"In the last quarter of the twentieth century, at a time when Western civilization was declining too rapidly for comfort and yet too slowly to be very exciting, much of the world sat on the edge of an increasingly expensive theater seat, waiting--with various combinations of dread, hope, ennui--for something momentous to occur" Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins

"Take my camel, dear," said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.

The Towers of Trebizond, Rose Macaulay

From Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez:

"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."

If it has to be one sentence rather than one paragraph, the shortest one is this:

"London."

Bleak House (not even a sentence, but it says it all. It gets even better after that, but as we are restricted to opening sentences only....)

"I write this sitting in the kitchen sink."

I capture the Castle

"I am an American."

The Adventures of Augie March

"With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer
undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of
the past."

Adam Bede

And my absolute favourite:

"It was the afternoon of my 81st birthday and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to call."
Earthly Powers

Two favourites:
"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..."
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

"Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. I love this sentence because it is the opening for one of my favourite chapters in English literature.

In the second century of the Christian Aera, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.
Edward Gibbon - The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me.

Fyodor Dostoevsky -
Notes from the Underground

To begin at the beginning: it is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobble streets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloe black, slow, black, crow black fishing boat-bobbing sea.

Dylan Thomas - Under Milk Wood

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
William Shakespeare - Henry V

"A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct."
Frank Herbert - Dune

"Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Social Contract

"The world is all that is the case."
Ludwig Wittgenstein - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

"One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit."
Harry G. Frankfurt - On Bullshit

More random selections (Random is my best thing):

"What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?" Love Story

"The Wednesday in every month was a Perfectly Awful Day - a day to be awaited with dread, endured with courage and forgotten with haste." Daddy Long Legs

"At five o'clock that morning reveille was sounded as usual, by the blows of a hammer on a length of rail hanging up near the staff quarters." One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

"If you want to find Cherry-Tree Lane, all you have to do is ask the Policeman at the crossroads." Mary Poppins

"I am Sam. Sam I am." Green Eggs and Ham

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

"The Hermans were absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world." Best Christmas Pagaent Ever

"I will always remember when the stars fell down around me and lifted me up above the George Washington Bridge." Tar Beach

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

More? I have more. I collect these!

More MerryMary More!

tomcatMurr: I looked up "catamite". Wow! That IS an amazing first sentence.

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect." ~ The metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

"On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge." ~Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

"In the department of -- but it is better not to mention the department. There is nothing more irritable than departments, regiments, courts of justice, and, in a word, every branch of public service." ~The Overcoat by Nikolai V. Gogol

"Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy." ~The Odyssey by Homer

"TRUE! - nervous - very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?" ~The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe

"WHEN Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun." ~Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy (My FAVORITE opening line. So very descriptive!)

I'll post more later!

Hey, isn't more fun to try to guess what book the sentences are from?

"I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil-doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train."

"I sing of warfare and a man at war." -the Aeneid

My favorite opening line.

"There was a point at which, after the Baker/Pottville melee had wound down with the last twenty or thirty handcuffed Soderbrook poultry-plant wetbacks, Buzzard's-Roost Hessians, Dowler Street trolls, and east-side Baker factory rats being crammed into Sheriff Tom Dippold's departmental paddy wagon and sent on their way to the overstuffed abattoirs at Keller and Powell, the trash fires along Main St. had been hosed down and blown apart amid the smoldering wreckage of Gingerbread row, the school gymnasium had been gassed and raided by a poorly equipped and this-side-of-flabbergasted outfit of regional deputies, the general looting along Geiger had tapered off, the the 3rd and Poplar riot had been subdued,an outraged pack of coal-truck operators from Ebony Steed's reservoir number six had long since paid its ill-fated reconciliatory midnight visit to the Patokah-side river rats in a barreling steam-roller procession of Dodge Rams, and the rest of the community had become so far entombed in its own excrement that even Pottville 6's newscasters were having tp admit Baker appeared to be awaiting the arrival of the four horsemen--there was a point at which, in the full pitch midst of it all, every cognizant and functioning citizen left in Greene County knew exactly who and what John Kaltenbrunner was all about."

And yes, it's all one sentence.

From Lord of the Barnyard:Killing the Fatted Calf and Arming the Aware in the Cornbelt by Tristan Egolf

#20. It gets better. It's a hilarious and profound book. Thoroughly recommended.

A few more. (I feel quite frivolous next to some of you - you cite books much more sophisticated than mine. But I am a k-12 librarian and this is what I know.)

"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 conversation in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'" Alice in Wonderland

"All children, but one, grow up." Peter Pan

"Miyax pushed back the hood of her sealskin parka and looked at the Arctic sun." Julie of the Wolves

"'Where's Papa going with that ax?"' Charlotte's Web

"Hi, teach!" Up the Down Staircase

"It was my devil's own temper that brought me to grief, my temper and a skill with weapons born of my father's teaching." Sackett's Land

#26 More please MerryMary

"The Signora had no business to do it," said Miss Bartlett, "no business at all."

A Room with a View by E.M. Forster

and my favorite from when I was a child:

"Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin."
Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne

>28 jenknox: Love that Pooh Bear line.

Here's a few more:

"There are songs that come free from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads." The Bridges of Madison County

"The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years - if it ever did end - began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain." It

"He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish." The Old Man and the Sea

Just let me say right off the bat, it was a bike accident. Mick Harte Was Here

"Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs." Little House in the Big Woods

"I have never begun a novel with more misgiving." The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

#29
man, It scares me so much even the opening line creeps me out. I'm scared of three things: Clowns, needles, and spiders and that book has an abundance of all of them :-(

Here's another opening line:

"The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn't sure it was worth all the effort"
The Light Fantastic from Terry Pratchett

"I wonder if there isn't a lot of bunkum in higher education?" Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley

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

The Scaramouche line just sings, doesn't it?

Not a bad epitaph, either. :-)

"Mr. Hungerton, her father, really was the most tactless person upon earth-a fluffy, feathery, untidy cockatoo of a man, perfectly good-natured, but absolutely centred upon his own silly self." -the Lost World

"In the Beginning ... it was a nice day."
- Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

"Sam Vimes sighed when he heard the scream, but he finished shaving before he did anything about it."
- Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
- Neuromancer by William Gibson

"This book is largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history."
- The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

"I always get the shakes before a drop."
- Starship Troopers, by Robert A. Heinlein

"I have a story to tell you."
- The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks

"It started in mud, as many things do."
- City of Golden Shadow by Tad Williams

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

- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

"Ashton Hilary Akbar Pelham-Martyn was born in a camp near the crest of a pass in the Himalayas, and subsequently christened in a patent canvas bucket."

The Far Pavilions by M. M. Kaye

"It was a pleasure to burn." - Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

"Maman died today." -The Stranger by Albert Camus

Remembering all the first sentences from novels I read in high school tends to come in little trickles. :P

My very favourite:

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to kno is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how may parents were ocupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want the truth."
-- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

And some others I like:

"They're all dead now."
-- Fall On Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald

"The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw."
-- White Oleander by Janet Fitch

"A mile above Oz, the Witch balanced on the wind's foreward edge, as if she were a green fleck of the land itself, flung up and set wheeling away by the turbulent air."
-- Wicked by Gregory Maguire

"Dr. Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in whih none of his patients had died or gotten any worse."
-- Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres

"Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy."
-- The Odyssey by Homer

"Taran wanted to make a sword; but Coll, charged with the practical side of his education, decided on horseshoes."
-- The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander

"If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model with collagen-puffed lips and silicone-inflated breasts, a woman in a magenta convertible with heart-shaped sunglasses and cotton candy hair; if Los Angeles is this woman, then the San Fernando Valley is her teeny-bopper sister."
-- I Was A Teenage Fairy by Francesca Lia Block

"One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all."
--The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry

"The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting."
--The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

And the first line from Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, but I am not sure I have it right:
"I dreamed of Manderlay again last night."

"Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind hasn't always been so lucky." -Sirens of Titan -- Kurt Vonnegut (2 i know, but they work so well together and technically the second is an incomplete)

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins." -Lolita -- Vladimir Nabakov

"There was once a boy named Milo who didnt know what to do with himself - not just sometimes, but always." -The Phantom Tollbooth -- Norton Juster

"Oomm, yoom, yoom, um?" -Tiny Alice -- Edward Albee

"One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it - it was the black kitten's fault entirely." -Through the Looking Glass --Lewis Carroll

"What's the worst thing you've ever done?" -Ghost Story -- Peter Straub

"This is a beautiful library, timed perfectly, lush and American." The Abortion -- Richard Brautigan

"It has been reported that Tanuki fell from the sky using his scrotum as a parachute." -Villa Incognito -- Tom Robbins

"I have noticed that when someone asks for you on the telephone and, finding you out, leaves a message begging you to call him the moment you come in, as it's important, the matter is more often important to him than to you." - Cakes and Ale -- W. Somerset Maugham

wow...kinda went overboard, but there's oh so many lovely ones out there....

"If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book"
The Bad Beginning: A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket

"They called him Moshe the Beadle, as though he had never had a surname in his life."
Elie Wiesel - Night

"One night last summer, all the killers in my head assembled on a stage in Massachusetts to sing show tunes."
Sarah Vowell - Assassination Vacation

"I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time."
Carlos Ruiz Zafon - The Shadow of the Wind

"I marmaladed a slice of toast with something of a flourish, and I don't suppose I have ever come much closer to saying 'Tra-la-la' as I did the lathering, for I was feeling in mid-season form this morning."
--Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse

"Writing is difficult. That's why there's so little of it that's any good." (From the preface)
"My car and my body are in about the same shape." (From Chapter I) "Making arrangements to get work done on a house is full-time work." (From Chapter II)
Word for Word by Andrew A. Rooney

I am really enjoying this thread, especially #17-- great choices!

My favorite first line is from "The Sea and Little Fishes" by Terry Pratchett:

"Trouble began, and not for the first time, with an apple."

He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform outside the old Ajaib-Gher -- the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum. --- Kim

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me. --- The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman

(the second one is a bit of a cheat, because it ends on a semicolon...)

First, in order to provide touchstones to the unattributed sentence in #22 I add Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs.

Now,

"Supposing Truth is a woman - what then?" Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche.

"Some of the evil in my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances." Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence.

"Already, beneath him, through the golden evening, the shadowed hills had dug their furrows and the plains grew luminous with long-enduring light." Night Flight by Saint-Exupery.

"In the early nineties (it might have been 1992, but it's hard to tell when you're having a good time) I joined a rock-and-roll band composed mostly of writers"

On Writing by Stephan King although technically its the first line in the first forward.

"this is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit."

the first sentance of the second forward.

Dick Francis is a good man for an excellent first line: pithy, to the point and irresistable.

"I told the boys to be quiet while I went to fetch my gun." - Twice Shy

"There was a God-awful cock-up in Bologna." - The Danger

and my absolute favourite:

"Art Mathews shot himself, loudly and messily, in the centre of the parade ring at Dunstable races." - Nerve

"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 before him nor I aint looking to see none agen."
Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban

"In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street." -- Wittgenstein's Mistress

"I wasn't doing any work that day, just catching up on my foot-dangling." -- from the short story Goldfish, by Raymond Chandler

"The voice on the telephone seemed to be sharp and peremptory, but I didn't hear too well what it said--partly because I was only half awake and partly because I was holding the receiver upside down."-- Playback

"A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head."
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

"It's an unlikely story, I concede."
Mischief by Chris Wilson

"Arthur Daane was several steps away from Schoeler's Bookstore before he realized that a word had stuck in his head and that he had already translated it into his own language."
All Souls Day by Cees Nooteboom

Christopher Columbus landed first in the New World at the island of San Salvador, and after praising God enquired urgently for gold.

The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James

"When God throws angels down, it starts like this."

The wall: a thriller by Jeff Long

#54, you took mine! Glad I'm not alone.

"A gentleman friend and I were dining at the Ritz last evening and he said that if I took a pencil and paper and put down all of my thoughts it would make a book." -- Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

"After distributing the eight ice-creams -- they were the largest vanilla, chocolate and raspberry super-bumpers, each in yellow, brown and almost purple stripes -- Pop Larkin climbed up into the cab of the gentian blue, home-painted thirty-hundredweight truck laughing happily." -- The darling buds of May (a good one to cite if anyone tells you that real writers don't use adjectives!)

"It was a morning when all nature shouted 'Fore!'" -- The heart of a goof

"I exist!" -- Behind the scenes at the museum

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by CS Lewis.

Just thought of another one:

"Mrs. Jane Tabby could not explain why all four of her children had wings"

Catwings, by Ursula K. Le Guin

-------------

" For a long time I went to bed early."

marcel proust swann's way

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents – except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."
—Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

(The criterion is just "memorable" – nothing about 'good' or 'interesting' – and this sentence, or at least its first clause, is remembered by more people than have even heard of the book.)

Edited for HTML

> #21

In accordance with Tim's diktat that "A Greek edition of Homer is not the same as an English translation" (from the right sidebar of the Combine Works page), I'm going to have to disagree with you on the first line of Homer's The Odyssey. Not that it's not memorable; just what it actually is. I submit the following:

ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μου̂σα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ
πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν:
πολλω̂ν δ' ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω,
πολλὰ δ' ὅ γ' ἐν πόντῳ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν,
ἀρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχὴν καὶ νόστον ἑταίρων.

(Why, yes; I am bored. Why do you ask?)

And this is from the "not a first sentence but good enough that it should've been" category (although evidently the Vulgate Bible didn't come with punctuation so I can say this is in the first sentence if I want to, and maybe I do):

dixitque Deus fiat lux

That's got a whole lot more "sha-ZAM!" to it than, "God said, 'Let there be light.'" (Maybe if they translated it, "There WILL be light"....)

"124 was spiteful."
Beloved, by Toni Morrison

Quite possibly my favorite book of all time!

"Christmas crept into town like a creeping Christmas thing: dragging garland, ribbon, and sleigh bells, oozing eggnog, reeking of pine, and threatening festive doom like a cold sore under the mistletoe."
--The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror by Christopher Moore

"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water."
--The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

"Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die."
--Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

"You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.'"
--The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

"The year 1866 was signalised by a remarkable incident, a mysterious and puzzling phenomenon, which doubtless no one has yet forgotten."
--20000 Leagues under the Sea by Jules Verne

"No matter who you are, no matter where you live, and no matter how many people are chasing you, what you don't read is often as important as what you do read."
--The Vile Village by Lemony Snicket

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

"There was no possibility of taking a walk that day."
--Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

"The man who was not Terrence O'Grady had come quietly."
--Agent of Change by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

> 40, you were close, but it really starts, "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."
--Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."
--The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

"When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow."
-- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

"The night Max wore his wolf suit, and made mischief of one kind and another, his mother called him, "WILD THING!" and Max said, "I'LL EAT YOU UP!!" and he was sent to bed without eating anything.

--Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

#22 I don't think anyone answered you... it was Underworld I believe.

I posted these in the other thread in Green Dragon, but I'll add them again here:

"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany." - A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

"It was hell's season, and the air smelled of burning children." - Gone South by Robert McCammon

"The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed." from Stephen King's The Gunslinger

The opening line of The Trial: "Someone must have been slandering Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested." Franz Kafka

"This is not for you." House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski I think, technically, that may be the dedication, but it might as well be the first line.

Edit: This makes it sound like I didn't like the book, which is not the case at all.

I don't think anyone has mentioned this one yet:

"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler."

This, of course, is from a book titled If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, by--you guessed it--Italo Calvino.

This is the first line from a book does anyone know which one it is ?

My mother was a virgin, trust me

David Perrings

Kate Atkinson's Emotionally Wierd

Next Line...

Despite all you may have heard to the contrary, I have never had a ride in a patrol wagon.

"Nick Naylor had been called many things since becoming chief spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, but until now no one had actually compared him to Satan." -- Thank You For Smoking by Christopher Buckley

I haven't read this since I was 14, 30+ years ago, but I can still remember it I think.

"Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when captured by her charms as the Tarlton twins were."

Gone with the Wind

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

"I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen."

The Book Thief

"First the colors. Then the humans. That's usually how I see things."

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

"Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number 4, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much."

For me it was doing 1 to 3 at Dannemora...

"Snow-Balls havse flown their Arcs, starr'd the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware,-- the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stocking'd-foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen, in a purposeful Dither since Morning, punctuated by the ringing Lids of Boilers and Stewing-Pots, fragrant with Pie-Spices, peel'd Fruits, Suet, heated Sugar,-- the Children, having all upon the Fly, among rhythmic slaps of Batter and Spoon, coax'd and stolen what they might, proceed, as upon each afternoon all this nowy December, to a comfortable Room at the rear of the House, years since given over to their carefree Assaults."

Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon

For some inexplainable reason, I find this hilarious.

" 'Take my camel, dear', said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass."

The Towers of Trebizond - Rose Macaulay

"For Forty-two years, Lewis and Benjamin Jones slept side by side, in their parents bed, a their farm which was know as The Vision." from a treasured little book On The Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin BTW the men were twins.

>80 tropics: I do like the sound of Aunt Dot.

>11 pamelad: >80 tropics: >82 aussieh: We are agreed!

"He began to die when he was twenty-one, but tuberculosis is slow and sly and subtle."
Doc byMary Doria Russell .

"Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you."

Suttree by Cormac McCarthy

" The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they both died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living."

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Blind people got a hummin’ jones if you notice.

“My Man Bovanne” from Gorilla, My Love by Toni Cade Bambara

" People are not always kind, but the kind thing to say of Jenny was that she was simple."

The Great World by David Malouf

"Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat."

A People's History Of The United States - Howard Zinn

" It was inevitable : the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. "

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask." (Oh well, two sentences but one thought that succinctly captures Maria's character.)

Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

In this case at least, the last should come first. The perfect start to the incomparable "Earthly Powers".

Seven to ten at Spofford...

"The first thing you should know about me is I am my father's son." Red Rising by Pierce Brown

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." From "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" by C.S. Lewis

“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.” The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley

"They threw me off the hay truck about noon." The Postman Always Rings Twice

From Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem: "Context is Everything."

" Evelyn, the mother of Small Henry, succumbed to a kidney infection and died hours after he was born."

Loving Daughters by Olga Masters

"March, that year, was full of wind that rolled across the world with a sound as clean and lonely as rushing water." From Rima in the Weeds by Deirdre McNamer

"A white Pomeranian named Fluffy flew out of a fifth-floor window in Panna, which was a brand-new building with the painter's scaffolding still around it."
From Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra

“In Watermelon Sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.” - Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar (1968)

"Chef Andre Pierre Jaramillo, or Pete for short, wanted to make the perfect breakfast burrito because his life was a mess." TIME BURRITO by Aaron Frale
"INCOGNOLIO. Ever since the concussion, I can't get the damn word out of my head." INCOGNOLIO by Michael Sussman
"Metropolis. Everything that was seen or heard, every smell, and almost every feeling belonged to it." LIQUID COOL by Austin Dragon
"It was about the hub of the evening, on the planet of Porlumma, when Captain Pausert, commercial traveler from Nikkeldepain, met the first of the witches of Karres." THE WITCHES OF KARRES by James H. Schmitz (© 1949, novella; © 1966 novel)

" On a February morning in the year 1933 Andreas Egger lifted the dying goatherd Johannes Kalischka, know to all the valley as Horned Hannes, off his sodden and rather sour-smelling pallet to carry him down to the village along a three-kilometre mountain path that lay buried beneath a thick layer of snow.

A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler

NOT EVERYBODY knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar.

'The Third Policeman' by Flann O'Brien (Brian O'Nolan)

''Ye wavering shapes, again ye do enfold me,
As erst upon my troubled sight ye stole;
Shall I this time attempt to clasp, to hold ye?
Still for the fond illusion yearns my soul?
Ye press around! Come thenn, you captive hold me,
As upward from the vapoury mist ye roll;
Within my breast youth's throbbing pulse is bounding,
Fann'd by the magic breath your march surrounding.

Shades fondly loved appear....'

Opening paragraph to Goethe's Faust

' I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angleheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,'

First paragraph in the stream of consciousness poem: Howl by Allen Ginsberg

' In my younger and more vunerable years my father
gave me some advice that I have been turning over in my
mind ever since.'

Opening sentence in The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

''Following the example of the ancient priest who is
said to have travelled thousands of miles caring naught
for his provisions and attaining the state of sheer esctacy
under the pure beams of the moon, i left my broken house
on the River Sumida in the August of the first year of
Jyokyo among the wails of the autumn wind.'

First sentence from first the travel short story titled The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton from Matsuo Basho's The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches

'Did not Ossian hear a voice? Or is it the sound of days that are
no more? Often does the memory of former times come,
like the evening sun, on my soul.'

Opening sentences From the epic poem Conlath and Cuthona from James Macphersons Fingal, an Epic Poem

"A screaming comes across the sky." - Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

Love your input and your taste! You writing this here peaked my interest in looking up Mystic River and a dozen more by this author! Bravo

“If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done.” Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

A classic from Rose Macaulay in "The Towers of Trebizond."

"Take my camel, dear", said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.

Call me Ishmael.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost.

--Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

"The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida."

A Good Man Is Hard To Find by Flannery O'Connor

>109 apex157x: I am also looking up certain authors from these interesting opening lines.

"Zeke's probably got the only dog in the world that can walk sideways," Ned remarked to Tuxie Miller as they sat astride their horses, watching the cautious Zeke Proctor and his short, fat, black dog, Pete, sidestepping along in front of the dry goods store.

ZEKE and NED by Larry McMurtry

A great beginning to a great book in the first book of an epic series.

regards to:67royalhistorian
Jun 29, 2007, 9:21am

"The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed." from Stephen King's The Gunslinger

The primroses were over.

Watership Down by Richard Adams

From S.E. Hilton's "The Outsiders"

"When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home."

The first book I ever read cover to cover in one sitting.

John D. MacDonald's "Darker than Amber"

"We were about to give up and call it a night when someone dropped the girl off of the bridge"

"While Pearl Tull was dying, a funny thought occurred to her."

Dinner at the Homesick Restuarant by Anne Tyler

>116 LarYungmann: I just loved Zeke and Ned and the dog Pete.

"I was not sorry when my brother died."

Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga

>70 Nickelini: That's such a good one! The whole opening chapter is excellent--it's like a love letter to book nerds.

On a Friday in April, Penrod Schofield, having returned from school at noon promptly, on account of an earnest appetite, found lunch considerably delayed and himself (after a bit of simple technique) alone in the pantry with a large, open, metal receptacle containing about two-thirds of a peck of perfect doughnuts just come into the world.

Penrod Jashber by Booth Tarkington

My father was a connoisseur of wine; but times and incomes change and we with them; and now I am a connoisseur of weather.

The Innocents by Margery Sharp

>122 iamFOXFIRE:, I daresay Albert Camus did it better. "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure." (The Stranger)

He was a man too busy to flush toilets.

A Regular Guy by Mona Simpson

The "man" being a fictionalized Steve Jobs

"Last night I dreamt I went to Mandalay again" -- Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)

"The child's name is Melodie."

from Trespass by Rose Tremain

>125 Cecrow: You know, I laughed when I read your comment because I hadn't realized that, out of context, it DOES sound like a Camus ripoff, doesn't it?

Of course, Camus's opening lines are brilliantly setting up the narrator's completely indifferent (almost sociopathic) attitude.

For Dangarembga's narrator, it's a blunt admission of guilt because she knows she shouldn't be happy that her brother is dead but his death leads to a significant and positive change in her life. She'd never casually forget when her brother died; she spends the first chunk of the book detailing all of the events that led up to it.

" Phil always did the castrating; first he sliced off the cup of the scrotum and tossed it aside; next he forced down one and then the other testicle, slit the rainbow membrane that enclosed it, tore it out and tossed it into the fire where the branding irons glowed."

The Power of the Dog by Thomas Savage

"Paul chose Greece for its predictable whiteness: the blanching heat by day, the rush of stars at night, the glint of the line-washed houses crowding its coast."

Three Junes by Julia Glass

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small regarded yellow sun.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams

Was she beautiful or not beautiful?

Daniel Deronda by George Eliot

" He'd first began to steal when he was eleven. "

The Slow Natives by Thea Astley

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." L.P. Hartley's "The Go-Between."

Wherever Wyatt Earp appeared, the world seemed to go mad around him, and it forever baffled him that history would not just leave him alone.

Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend by Casey Tefertiller

"The Coldest winds came from the south and the Cob House had been built in the pathway of the winds."

The Colour by Rose Tremain

“It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld my man completed.”

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley

"It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."

Earthly Powers byAnthony Burgess

" Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile ; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse ; back-ward in sentiment ; lean, long, dusty, dreary, and yet somehow lovable."

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson