📗 Favourite First Line?

What's your favourite first line?

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

I'm a sucker for Tolkien so while it's a bit of an obvious choice I have to choose the first line of The Hobbit , it immediately has me feeling like curling up in a big old chair and disappearing into story wonderland for awhile.

I can't wait to hear yours.

I love that and know that feeling, too. I have curled up in this book below multiple times and always feel I'm transported to a place I want to be.

My favorite first line is from my current favorite novel, which I adore with all my heart, Timothy or Notes of an Abject Reptile written in the first person narrative of the famous tortoise belonging to the real 18th century English naturalist Gilbert White. Here's the first line and first paragraph,

I was gone for more than a week before they found me. A rustling in the bean-field, heavy steps nearby. A shout--the boy's voice--more shouts. Thomas catches me up in his hand with sickening haste. I weigh six pounds thirteen ounces. He lifts me as though I weigh nothing at all.

And thus begins the beautifully philosophical ruminations of the old tortoise Timothy and her own naturalist observations of the humans. (White erroneously assumed she was male. It was only discovered decades later, from her remaining shell still on display at the Gilbert White museum in Selbourne, that he was discovered to be a she.)

“ 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.” ~ Mystic River by Dennis Lehane, 2001

It establishes the relationship between Jimmy and Sean, and the use of the word stench to describe the smell of chocolate is not one I’ve ever seen. I have to think that Lehane had a similar experience with the Schrafft Candy Company in Charlestown, MA.

>3 Bookmarque: Stench does stand out. I haven't read the book but seeing the film, I see how that first line is establishing so much--even the sweet smell of chocolate can be a terrible thing, a stink, over the course of a horribly-tested friendship.

I would say I'd love to read the book but I know it would hurt too much, because the film broke my heart, leaving me in anguish.

>4 DebiCates: Yeah, Lehane is a rough ride, but I've been a fan since the early 90s. I even went to a talk he gave in NH and got him to sign a book. He's pretty darn methodical, if slightly autobiographical in some details. Having read and loved the book, I can't bring myself to watch the movie. It's the same with others I love like Gorky Park.

>5 Bookmarque: It's wonderful that you got to attend a talk and get him to sign your book. I live too much in the boonies to have opportunities like that. Besides, I'm sure I'd go all mute with ga-ga. I walked passed Jane Goodall in the Brussels (I think it was Brussels) airport once. I stopped in my tracks, she turned and waited kindly for a few seconds. I couldn't say anything. I'm still embarrassed by that.

SPACEGRAM
From: Jed Michaels,
Ryttuk, Eros

To: H. E. Horrocks,
Interplanetary Amusement Corp.,
Cosmopolis, Earth
I QUIT, YOU BALLOON BRAIN.
JED

The opening of Celestial Hammerlock by Donald Colvin, a sci-fi short story.

Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.

opening from one I'm about to start: The Trial by Franz Kafka