The most beautiful first sentence in literature

In my opinion the most beautiful first sentence in literature was written by Franz Kafka in The metamorphosis:

'When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.'

I don't think beautiful would be my first response. Arresting, perhaps. Most definitely perfect.

Despite (or maybe because of) the superfluous "s", I might nominate the opening line of Updike's story A & P:

In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits.

Fahrenheit 451

"It was a pleasure to burn."

Pride and Prejudice:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man, in posession of a large fortune, must be in want of a wife.

(Note that I'm not entirely certain that I've got that to a hyper-exact degree of accuracy. I typed that from memory.)

In the Name of Allah, The Merciful, The Compassionate

Cry, The Beloved Country:

There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo to the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it.

(ok, the loveliest first TWO sentences. Lovely beyond any singing of it!)

A good song, I think.

The Praise Singer by Mary Renault

>1 Zentralbibliothek_ZH:

You may be right in German, but it's a famously difficult sentence to translate, and I don't think any of the English versions gets anywhere near the effectiveness of "einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer".

In my opinion the most beautiful first sentence in English literature is

"Blandings Castle slept in the sunshine."

No messy syntax, no clauses to get tangled up in, clever assonance, a perfect sense of rhythm, and it makes the reader want to know more. The second most beautiful first sentence in English literature is perhaps

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."

ETA: I was going to mention "Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure" as well, but then I noticed that it's just gone midnight here...

Proust!

Longtemps je me suis couche de bonne heure. From Du cote de chez Swann.

Tell Me a Riddle:

I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron.

*********************************************

Charlotte's Web:
"Where's Papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.

*************************************

Brideshead Revisited
'I have been here before,' I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest."

>9 bostonbibliophile: Proust!

Gesundheit!

I don't know about "beautiful" but the best first sentence is definitely:

"If five years, the penis will be obsolete," said the salesman.

From John Varley's Steel Beach

You are right.

The sound of a sentence depends on the language an original text is written.

The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) by Kafka sounds better in German than in English; but in my opinion it sounds almost as good as in English;-)

It is "kafkaesk".

10> Oooh, the first line of Brideshead Revisited gives me chills up me spine. Love it.

Also, some G. K. Chesterton, because the man is clearly a genius:

Between the silver ribbon of morning and the green glittering ribbon of
sea, the boat touched Harwich and let loose a swarm of folk like flies,
among whom the man we must follow was by no means conspicuous--nor
wished to be.

(The Blue Cross, first story in The Innocence of Father Brown.)

does this count?

"This is a story about love. . . ."

from the movie Moulin Rouge.

#11, LOL.

Two from Bruno Schulz -

"In July my father went to take the waters and left me, with my mother and elder brother, a prey to the blinding white heat of the summer days. Dizzy with light, we dipped into that enormous book of holidays, its pages blazing with sunshine and scented with the sweet melting pulp of golden pears." The Street of Crocodiles

"I am simply calling it The Book without any epithets of qualifications, and in this sobriety there is a shade of helplessness, a silent capitulation before the vastness of the transcendental, for no word, no allusion, can adequately suggest the shiver or fear, the presentiment of a thing without name that exceeds all our capacity for wonder." Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

I think the first sentence (or half-sentence?) of Finnegans Wake is quite evocative:

riverrun, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

14> That Chesterton line is exquisite.

A River Runs Through It:

In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.

I suppose that this is cheating, since it's only the first line of a poem within a novel, but anyway:


’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

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

I just can't wait for old age absent-mindedness to get a little worse so that I can read The Hobbit and LotR as for the first time!

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

#2
never read Updike's A & P but that line alone makes me want to.

Cannery row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.

>22 misericordia:: wow.

A River Runs Through It I am haunted by waters.

OK I know its not the first sentence but to me it is one of the most beautiful.

yep. i fell in love with montana; and hopefully retire there, unless Ted Turner has already bought it all up.

*****

The Hallelujah Side
"It had been a Second Coming sky all day, which meant they might be in heaven by this evening."

The Raven
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

The Guns of August

So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admirarion. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last.

The Haunting of Hill House

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. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.

All children, but one, grow up.

Peter Pan

>30 MerryMary: Mary
Yes, I remember reading that as a child and thinking "Really? All but one?" Then, years later, re-reading it for my kids and thinking "and me, please, and me."

"She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue."

From "Eveline," in Joyce's Dubliners.

"I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills."

Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy:

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

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte:

1801—I have just returned from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.

My Antonia by Willa Cather:

I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America.

Pride and Prejudices and Zombies: Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.

... heh.

I love the beginning of Lolita...

"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."

And I second (or third) the awesomeness of Brideshead Revisited, and not just the opening line.

i don't think twain ever published this---stumbled upon it in the Imperial Presidency, of all places)---so i'm not sure if it counts or even if it's the first sentence, but it's too good not to sow:

"Reader, suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."

>32 Scratch:: love that line. wish i had the time to read dubliners. what is it with Ireland that creates such great writers?

how about a sentence from that other joyce work:

"Yes."

>37 beardo:: did you see the movie brideshead revisited movie?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y25nc5ZrrnU
dont think it measured up to the book, though that's unfair. i dont think anything can. although, since finding out there was a "celebrated television production," im trying the tv version and see how it goes.

#2

I haven't read that particular Updike story, but I agree completely.

If not for that extra "s" tacked onto "walk" I think I would be less enamored with it.

To me, the addition of the "s" is the perfect example of how to write dialect without appearing cartoonish. I don't know if it's the same in the United States, but here in Canada, the addition of the "s" to verbs is common in our Atlantic provinces. Thus: " So then I says to him" or "After I gets off the truck".

To forestall the inevitable objections, not all residents of the Atlantic provinces do this, but when I hear it here on the West Coast, I know I'm talking to a Maritimer.

Is this true as well for the northeastern states in the U.S.?

I don't know if "A & P" is set in Maine or Mass., but I like to think that opening is then a perfect use of Atlantic Coast dialect.

So then, how mistaken am I?

"Call me Ishmael." Moby Dick

"Its was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." 1984

Top marks for both Anna Karenina and Lolita.

>24 kgriffith: Love Cannery Row.

"This all started because of a clerical error." The Pleasure of My Company Steve Martin

>38 snickersnee:

love 1984's opening sentence. when i read that line, a chill thru me, as if a snake were slithering up my back; i mean, April have always struck me as, just plain wrong, you know?

Ah, one of my favorite subjects, first sentences. I was so happy to find this thread.

I'm loving reading these--some of which I knew, some I didn't.

I'll be back with more, but let me start with one:

"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."

--One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wondrous.

I've heard that you really need to read Marquez in Spanish to appreciate the beauty, but it's pretty damn good in translation.

Anyone native Spanish speakers want to comment on the original?

35: I love the opening of Lolita, too. I have that under favorite quotes on my facebook page, actually. And I just pasted it in to another site a few hours ago, oddly enough.

I need to go find a copy of Catcher in the Rye to type it in. Most of my favorite first lines I know by heart, but I'll never remember all of that one.

34: I like the Tolstoy a lot. (My mentor used to say that the term "dysfunctional family" was redundant.)

I also loved the My Antonia. And I had never heard the Pride and Prejudices and Zombies line, but snickering, and thinking maybe I should try that book after all.

From a book that was never published, yet known to many:
"It was a dark and stormy night." by Snoopy (Charles M. Schulz)

>#42: First lines are in the Common Knowledge section of the LT work:

"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 the truth."

Lucky, because i would have guessed it was something like "you're all godd*mn phonies".

>#44: Yes it was. Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer Lytton.

ETA approximate touchstone

>46 MrAndrew:: That was a different (longer) sentence in a different book.
It was very disappointing for Snoopy that after all his work, no publisher would want to publish his book.

Yes well, the dog was plagiarising.

Besides, his true calling was to be a WWI flying ace. And freeform dancer.

The hotel and it's bright, tan prayer rug of a beach were one.

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Always puts me right there on that beach.

#30 - Mary, that line always make me feel sad.

#44 - Poor Snoopy. But I do love that first line.

45: Thanks. I do love that line. We sure have a sense of the character, and the book from that one line.

This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying ... but nobody thought so.

The Stars My Destinaton - Alfred Bester

Perhaps a little word but still good...

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 scru- tinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

War of the Worlds - H.G. Wells

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

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

Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash.
Crash - J. G. Ballard

What a wonderful thread, I must contribute!
These may not qualify as some of the most beautiful first lines, but they certainly are among my favorites...

This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.

-- The Princess Bride - William Goldman

By the ancient city gate sat an old coffee-brown, black-veiled woman who made her living by telling stories.

--The Blank Page, from Last Tales - Karen Blixen

Well the #1 winner for me is from Peter Pan:
All children, except one, grow up.

But we also have, as runner-up:
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
David Copperfield never disappoints!

I love all these first lines, and especially agree with the "A&P" - it's a great read.

Just to scramble it up a bit, how about last lines in a book. My favorite - "Tomorrow is another day." Scarlett in: Gone with the Wind.

Only if you're an entomologist.

not the most beautiful first line ever but to me one of the, if not the, most captivating:

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

from the towers of trebizond by rose macaulay

and it just keeps getting better.

From A Tale of Two Cities:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way -- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

35> *head explodes*

OK, I have to go read Lolita right now, this very second. This man is clearly a terrifying genius.

>58 janoorani24:: To quote Norman Peterson: "Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa. Which was it? "

"When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him." - Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Here are a couple:

Jeanette Winterson's Lighthousekeeping:
"My mother called me Silver. I was born part precious metal part pirate."

or

Witold Gombrowicz's Cosmos:
"But let me tell you about another, even more curious adventure."

oooooh! the lighthouse one is stunning! i'll have to look that up. thanks.

#59 "This man is clearly a terrifying genius."

That would definitely describe Nabokov!

As much as I love Joyce and Proust,
Durrell and Faulkner,
Cortazar and ...
Bruno Schulz is a most excellent choice, DieFledermaus!
"Sanatorium" is in my top 25 of favorites, actually ...

>62 hcomtois:
don't stop there!

I'll add one more, because I started this book yesterday and the first line amuses me:

Martin Millar's The Good Fairies of New York:

"Dinnie, an overweight enemy of humanity, was the worst violinist in New York, but was practicing gamely when two cute little fairies stumbled through his fourth-floor window and vomited on the carpet."

One of my all-time favorite openers is from Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five: "All of this happened, more or less."

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, one I'm reading right now:

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."

#67 Loved the Good Fairies opener, although for me the rest of the book didn't live up to it.

I've always been a sucker for the non-zombie Pride and Prejudice beginning.

"Only the young have such moments"
The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad

Also not beautiful but, intriguing ;

“One day in the spring of 1998, Bluma Lennon bought a secondhand copy of Emily Dickinson’s poems in a bookshop in Soho, and as she reached the second poem on the first street corner, she was knocked down by a car.”

From The House of Paper by Carlos Maria Dominguez

#70 I love that line from House of Paper, now I have to read that book.

"None of them knew the color of the sky", from the short story The Open Boat by Stephen Crane remains my favorite opening sentence since I first read it 40-plus years ago.

71: Jodyreadseverything,
It's a great book about book collecting and book collectors. Throw in a mystery (who's Carlos?) and find an answer to the question "Why?" is a book covered in concrete sent to the deceased.

#70/73 - I just clicked on the touchstone and it brought up The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton instead. I will keep a look out for it though.

He came one late, wet spring, and brought the wide world back to my doorstep. From Fool's Errand by Robin Hobb

"Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again."
Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier

"This afternoon, i heard that bl**dy Manderlay quote again."

Post #77, MrAndrew.

footnote to #77: Cf. # 69

"These are the times that try men's souls."

American Crisis by Thomas Paine.

"Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not YET sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHt, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of freedom."

Common Sense by Thomas Paine

Is it possible that one of the tricks used by authors to unjam writer's block is to craft a stunning opening line, and then see where it leads ... ?

For all I know it's 'Trick Number One' in the manual ...

LoL

Definitely not!

There's a manual? Why didn't anybody tell me? LOL!

The Crow Road (from memory)

"It was the day my grandmother exploded"

>81 Zentralbibliothek_ZH:
I admire your certitude! Any foundation for this ...?

>82 avidmom:
JKR borrowed it from the library, and hasn't returned it yet!

>80 CliffordDorset:: The surest trick is to go to a card game, lose a lot of money, and spin stories why you don't have to pay (or already paid, or why they should pay you, and whatever you can imagine). The stories that table have heard! Oscar Wilde would be green with envy.

and if that doesn't work, the Pope's phone number is +39.06.6982. well, the Vatican switchboard, anyway. and yes, there's a story behind that, too, but whatever you're thinking of right now is bound to be a lot better than the actual events.

"The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief."
The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell.

...small as a doll in her dress of innocence....
I cant remember where I read that ,,, my spellink sukz. sorrye

I just finished A Prayer for Owen Meany:

"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."

Chiliad by Simon Otius, at unhappened dot com, is almost wholly written in notable sentences. Here is the opening sentence:

"To avoid giving the impression, – most particularly here at the very gatehouse of this, for the most part, linear narrating of what is believed a remarkable enough history, one that may, — making its slow but inexorable way to credit, — challenge the very tenets of traditional biography, – that words, – generally believed good-fellows, merry men nearly all, – are already right eager, – by building a labyrinth of intricable mystery, – to confound the unwary reader at the very onset : it will prove very useful if a few, simple, but important facts, concerning the family Troke, and their seat, are first supplied."

>34 ktbarnes:

That is always the first sentence that I think of. Although >1 Zentralbibliothek_ZH: is definitely a top 10!

I'm surprised no-one's mentioned Anthony Burgess yet - he's normally a sure bet whenever the topic of opening lines comes up, especially with the very well-known opening line of Earthly powers.

The wanting seed is a good one too: "This was the day before the night when the knives of official disappointment struck."

One I came across a couple of weeks ago that really struck me was the opening of Unamuno's Niebla, which has a lovely bit of bathos in the second sentence- in Spanish it is:
"Al aparecer Augusto a la puerta de su casa extendió el brazo derecho, con la mano palma abajo y abierta, y dirigiendo los ojos al cielo quedóse un momento parado en esta actitud estatuaria y augusta. No era que tomaba posesión del mundo exterior, sino que observaba si llovía."

When Reginald Iolanthe Perrin set out for work on the Thursday morning, he had no intention of calling his mother-in-law a hippopotamus.

The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin by David Nobbs

Marcello, as a child, was fascinated, magpie-like, by objects.

The Conformist by Alberto Moravia

You better not never tell nobody but God.

The color Purple by Alice Walker

Imagine, then, a flat landscape, dark for the moment, but even so conveying to a girl running in the still deeper shadow cast by the wall of the Bibighar Gardens an idea of immensity, of distance, such as years before Miss Crane had been conscious of, standing where a lane ended and cultivation began: a different landscape but also in the alluvial plain between the mountains of the north and the plateau of the south.

The Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott

There was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. (The Voyage of the DawnTreader, CSLewis)

This is the forest primeval. (Evangeline, Longfellow)

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." The Gunslinger - Stephen King

More of a first stanza, from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, transcribed by Paul Battles:

Sithen the sege and the assaut was sesed at Troye,
The borgh brittened and brent to brondes and askes,
The tulk that the trammes of tresoun ther wroght
Was tried for his tricherie, the trewest on erthe.
Hit was Ennias the athel, and his highe kynde,
That sithen depreced provinces, and patrounes bicome
Welneghe of al the wele in the west iles:
Fro riche Romulus to Rome ricchis hym swythe -
With gret bobbaunce that burghe he biges upon fyrst,
And nevenes hit his aune nome, as hit now hat -
Ticius to Tuskan and teldes bigynnes,
Langaberde in Lumbardie lyftes up homes,
And fer over the French flod Felix Brutus
On mony bonkkes ful brode Bretayn he settes
wyth wynne -
Where werre and wrake and wonder
Bi sythes has wont therinne,
And oft bothe blysse and blunder
Ful skete has skyfted synne.

This is such a great thread, so many of these sentences are so moving. I'll add this one.

"So."
-Beowulf (trans. Seamus Heaney)

>97 Settings:

Not really. There is some debate on how to translate Hwaet!

"So." is a bit anodyne for me - sorry Seamus Heaney. "Listen!" might be better. If you are going in that direction a modern "Yo!" might work well these days - is there a rap version of Beowulf? But at least one scholar thinks the first line should be translated completely differently with the Hwaet! being more of a "How ..."

'Twas brillig;

That's how I read it, too. "Listen!" sounds a little more exciting than "so," and a little more suited to the soaring praise that follows.

Fine, fine, I have edited it so it should no longer be objectionable. :)

I spent a long time trying to memorize the first lines of Beowulf (trans. Seamus Heaney). Regardless of the accuracy of the translation, I'm very attached to "So."

,
"A man dreams of a miracle and wakes up to loaves of break"

Latin, French and Anglo Saxon, all mixed together! I so love the Spring, and I love this randy prologue:

WHAN that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open ye,
So priketh hem nature in hir corages:
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmers for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The holy blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.

Then there's always this classic:

"UP PUP Pup is up."

I have to give my vote to the city of dreaming books (https://www.librarything.com/author/moerswalter) by Walter Moers.

“This is where my story begins.”

Interesting thread to be resurrected given the new Beowulf translation.

Still giving my vote for most beautiful first sentence to "So." :P