First Page

I’d like to share some memorable and delightful first lines of books.
I’ve got Georgianne Ensign’s book Great Beginnings waiting for me at the library, but my shelves are already full of examples that I particularly love. I judge a book by it’s first page. How ‘bout you?

Here's the one that made me a convert:

"It is a question of method. Whether to rush you up to the girls pell-mell, leaving you to become acquainted as best you can; or, with elaborate slyness, to slip you so casually into their family life that they will not even glance up when you enter the room or leave it; or to present the three of them in solemn order according to age, epoch, and story."

-The Girls by Edna Ferber

Well, you can't beat the first line of The Crow Road by Iain Banks: "It was the day my grandmother exploded."

Yes! That's exactly what I mean!
Already on the hunt for The Crow Road, no matter what it is about.

Thanks.

In the days when spinning-wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses --- and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread-lace, had their toy spinning-wheels of polished oak --- there might be seen, in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race.

No fair! You have to tell where it's from!

Silas Marner :)

We used to play a game here, trying to guess a first line - and I think I let it drop - let me go and check (and oops if I did).

Wow, I haven't read that for decades. Time to re-visit.

I do not think I had read it at all - the first few pages were in a textbook that I was studying from more than a decade ago (always thought to actually track it down and read it, never got to it). :)

That's almost as many words in a sentence as Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Here's one that's obscure, but sweet:

"Mrs. Penfield’s house had originally been a barn; but it had chanced to come up in the world as Mrs. Penfield went down, and they had met and joined forces to make a home where none had been intended."

-The Custard Cup by Florence Bingham Livingston

Here's a more recent one that I just loved I had to keep reading-

Burn This Book.
Go On.Quickly, while there's still time.Burn it.Don't look at another word.Did you hear me? Not.One.More.Word.

- Mister B. Gone by, Clive Barker

I've heard it said that the main argument for the Beatles being the most famous (note: 'famous', not 'best') pop group ever is that you can begin listing them by first name and do two - "John, Paul ..." - and the majority of people in the Western world will guess. Fewer now, no doubt, but I reckon no contemporary band comes near this level of fame.

Anyway, some openings have that level of fame, I'd say...

"In a hole..."

"It is a truth..."

"It was the best..."

>11 JoannaON:
That could be a whole new guessing game - truncated first lines. Joyce would be good: if you omit Portrait of the artist, you can reduce the other major books to one word each:
"riverrun..." Finnegan's Wake
"Stately..." Ulysses

Virginia Woolf might be too much of a giveaway:
"Mrs Dalloway said..." Mrs Dalloway

Robert Graves might be willfully misleading:
"I, Tiberius..." I, Claudius

And Herman Melville becomes an advert for the telephone company:
"Call me..." Moby-Dick

(edited for touchstones)

Like listening to just a few notes of a song. But do we play these lines in our heads all the time?

Sometimes a memorable first page takes it's time, and you are caught so smoothly, you don't even feel the jolt. In fact, it's love...

"This is the story of Danny and of Danny’s friends and of Danny’s house. It is a story of how these three things became one thing, so that in Tortilla Flat if you speak of Danny’s house you do not mean a structure of wood flaked with old whitewash, overgrown with an ancient untrimmed rose of Castile. No, when you speak of Danny’s house you are understood to mean a unit of which the parts are men, from which came sweetness and joy, philanthropy and, in the end, a mystic sorrow. For Danny’s house was not unlike the Round Table, and Danny’s friends were not unlike the knights of it. And this is the story of how that group came into being, of how it flourished and grew to be an organization beautiful and wise.
…It is well that this cycle be put down on paper so that in future time scholars, hearing the legends, may not say as they say of Arthur and of Roland and of Robin Hood – “There was no Danny nor any group of Danny’s friends, nor any house. Danny is a nature god and his friends primitive symbols of the wind, the sky, the sun.” This history is designed now and ever to keep the sneers from the lips of sour scholars."

Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck

>13 2wonderY:
Yes, definitely.
Flippancy aside, that's exactly how the openings of Mrs Dalloway and Portrait of the artist as a young man work.

One I particularly like is the opening of P.G. Wodehouse's Summer lightning. You get the best part of a page of gentle, lyrical description of an afternoon at Blandings Castle ("...that gracious hour of a summer afternoon, midway between luncheon and afternoon tea, when nature seems to unbutton its waistcoat and put its feet up."), the butler taking a nap in the shade of a laurel bush, and then, artfully placed at the very bottom of the first page, there is a new paragraph:

At this moment, the laurel bush, which had hitherto not spoken, said "Pssst!"

I defy anyone to read that without an irresistible urge to turn the page and find out what happens next.

But the best example I know of an opening that creeps up at you and drags you in is Under Milk Wood. Of course, that was written as a radio play, which is probably the toughest medium in which to grab the audience's attention. A single snappy first line is wasted if half your audience is boiling kettles and the other half rustling biscuit wrappers as they settle down in their comfy chairs. But by the time the First Voice gets to the "sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea", they're listening, and they keep on listening.
(Burton doing it on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuPO2Kvqlms )
Of course, most of us listening nowadays have grown up with Oliver Postgate's Ivor the Engine, which uses almost exactly the same tricks to get your attention, so the effect isn't quite the same as it was in 1954!

>15 moondance2010:
Frankly, no. My eyes seem to wander agonisedly down the page.

Here's another of my favorites:

"Long ago, centuries perhaps, the village of Greenwillow had been stood in the corner and forgotten."

The rest of the first page describes the river: "By the time it passed the steepled and sober church, with its two pastors and its two front doors and its two ways of walking before the Lord, the Meander was as narrow as a needle and as polite as a pussycat."

Greenwillow by B.J. Chute.

I love it... the use of similies and alliteration really reaches out and captures my attention. I haven't read {Greenwillow} yet, but I will seek out a copy soon!

You will certainly enjoy it.

I got Great Beginnings from the library, and the author has systematized the types of beginnings. And of course, is using many well known books as examples. I think I will adopt her system for my own use for the more obscure novels in my collection. I've ordered another book along the same lines, but can't recall the title just now. I'll post my impressions here when I get it.

>16 thorold:,17
Susan - thanks for taking it in the spirit in which it was intended! - I did feel a bit guilty about my comment afterwards. But you did ask. I'm obviously not in your target audience. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to read a whole book written in that Moody & Sankey style, however well it's done, and however appropriate it is to the time and place.

Memorable:

"Hello darkness, my old friend, I've come to talk with you again..." {Sound of Silence} {{Paul Simon}}

Also memorable:

"As summer wheat came ripe, so did I...."

{Out of the Dust} {{Karen Hesse}}

both use personification, metaphors, and alliteration to create memorable impressions that stay with the reader long after the "song/story" has ended.

I found and bought another book that catalogs first lines - In the Beginning; Great First Lines from Your Favorite Books.
It is alphabetic by book title, and has only the first sentence, whether it be 2 words or 100. It claims over 500 entries ranging from classic to obscure. Shall I share some with you?
There are definitely some that could easily be identified:

"All children, except one, grow up."

and then:
"When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere." - The Day of the Triffids

Lots of good stuff here, my lists just got much longer.

A couple memorable beginnings:

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. -{{ Leo Tolstoy}}, {Anna Karenina} (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl's underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self. - {{John Hawkes}}, {Second Skin} (1964)

and a most memorable last line.."Frankly Scarlett..."

Shirley Jackson is the master (mistress?) of great opening lines. Stephen King dissected the first paragraph of The Haunting of Hill House in his wonderful Danse Macabre. Here is the beginning of Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle:

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 dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

John Crowley has some good beginnings too. This one is kind of a cheat: The Solitudes has two different prologues (The Prologue in Heaven and The Prologue on Earth!) but the book proper begins like this:

If ever some power with three wishes to grant were to appear before Pierce Moffett, he or she or it (djinn, fairy godmother, ring curiously inscribed) would find him not entirely unprepared, but not entirely ready either.

Hate to pick nits, moondance, but the last line of Gone With the Wind is actually "Tomorrow is another day."

Lots of praise for {We Have Always Lived in the Castle} in Girlybooks group. I'm intrigued by the first page, but I don't like horror. Would you classify it as such, revelshade?

A couple of really short ones from old novels:

"I admit I kissed her." The Way of A Man by Emerson Hough

and
"Land hunger is so general that it may be regarded as a natural craving." The Home Acre by E.P. Roe.

2wonderY (great name, btw)- I would call it a psychological mystery story. Although there is no detective character it does revolve around past deaths that may or may not have been murders. There's no grue or gore, if that's what horror means to you. It is non-supernatural, although for one giddy moment in the middle of the book Jackson makes you wonder if you've been reading a ghost story without knowing it. It's hard to say anything meaningful about the book without spoiling it. It's very restrained and subtle. I wouldn't hesitate to offer it to a smart junior high student. Jackson's intent isn't to frighten but to fascinate. It even has a happy ending, of a sort, heh heh...

You've sold me. The suspense has already heightened.

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, and the perfect beginning to the quintessential private eye novel.

I hope this thread doesn't die out too soon. Great opening lines are a special kind of poetry, plus they give you an excuse to pull out old books!

I totally agree!
I won't be back on till next week, so the rest of you need to chime in here with some more lovelies.

I'll keep this thread going all by myself if I have to. I'm not proud. This is from A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle.

The baloney weighed the raven down, and the shopkeeper almost caught him as he whisked out the delicatessen door. Frantically he flapped his wings to gain altitude, looking like a small black electric fan. An updraft caught him and threw him into the sky. He circled twice, to get his bearings, and began to fly north.
Below, the shopkeeper stood with his hands on his hips, looking up at the diminishing cinder in the sky. Presently he shrugged and went back into his delicatessen. He was not without philosophy, this shopkeeper, and he knew that if a raven comes into your delicatessen and steals a whole baloney it is either an act of God or it isn't, and in either case there isn't very much you can do about it.

When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man. His knees pressed down on the interloper's back, his hands were clasped around his forehead. He heard the phone ring, distantly, in the house, as he jerked his forearms back; heard the neck snap; heard the phone's second ring, cut off, as Claire answered, somewhere in the house.

Firebreak by the late, great Richard Stark, pseudonym of the equally late, even greater Donald Westlake.

Amal wanted a closer look into the soldier's eyes, but the muzzle of his automatic rifle,pressed against her forehead,would not allow it.

Mornings in Jenin by, Susan Abulhawa

"Kidnapping is a fact of life. Always has been, always will be. Extorting a ransom is an age-old pastime, less risky and more lucrative than robbing banks."

pre-page 1 from The Danger by Dick Francis

page 1 actually says:

"There was a God-awful screw-up in Bologna."

both quotes are excellent.
love this book!!

This thread could be my downfall. TOO MANY wonderful choices!

And I'm thinking they can start to be catagorized by subject.
For instance:

"I thought about being dead." -Inferno, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

adding to #33 and #34 - Death or Near Death

Ha ha, Niven has some great hooks. We can keep the dead theme going with one of his solo works, A World Out of Time.

Once there was a dead man.
He had been waiting for two hundred years inside a coffin, suitably labelled, whose outer shell held liquid nitrogen. There were frozen clumps of cancer all through his frozen body. He had had it bad.
He was waiting for medical science to find him a cure.
He waited in vain. Most varieties of cancer could be cured now, but no cure existed for the billions of cell walls ruptured by expanding crystals of ice. He had known the risk. He had gambled anyway. Why not? He'd been dying.
The vaults held over a million of these frozen bodies. Why not? They'd been dying.

Here's the entire first chapter of Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal (warning: salty language)

I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess. Clad only in garter belt and one dress shield, I held off the entire elite of the Trobriand Islanders, a race who possess no words for "why" or "because." Wielding a stone axe, I broke the arms, the limbs, the balls of their finest warriors, my beauty blinding them, as it does all men, unmanning them in the way that King Kong was reduced to a mere simian whimper by beauteous Fay Wray whom I resemble left three-quarter profile if the key light is no more than five feet high during the close shot.

WOW!!!

"Mrs Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies' eardrops, and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde's Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs Rachel Lynde's door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof."

The first paragraph (of the first chapter, entitled 'Mrs Rachel Lynde is Surprised') of Anne of Green Gables. One of my favourite books; reading this gives me a little thrill, because the story isn't about Mrs Rachel, it's about a little red-headed orphan with a vivid imagination, and this is just the prelude to the treasures that follow. And I quite sympathise with the stream.

I canʻt give an idea of it in words alone, but the first 3 pages of McLuhanʻs The Medium is the Massage (sic) consists of (with a lot of illustrations) these 9 words:

The medium is the massage. -- The MASSAGE!!?? --
AND H O W !!!!!

Now that I'm sensitized to it, I'm 'wading through' all sorts of personification of water examples. Time for a new thread? Thanks humouress. I'd forgotten how wonderful Lucy Maude is.

"They're out there."
-One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey

I hate to hog this thread, but I've got several more to share.
As I'm cataloging now, I'm looking at first pages, cover art, frontespice, interesting inscriptions, interesting bookmarks, paper or otherwise (there is a thread on that)http://www.librarything.com/topic/63105
as well as publishing information so that I can contribute to CK etc.
I attend one REALLY good booksale every year, and buy by the car-full. So my shelves have lots of books I haven't read yet. I buy from the first page and also authors who have delighted me in the past.
I've only read one by Arnold Bennett, Buried Alive. But I opened this one yesterday and recall why he so delights me:

“Those two girls, Constance and Sophia Baines, paid no heed to the manifold interest of their situation, of which, indeed, they had never been conscious. They were, for example, established almost precisely on the fifty-third parallel of latitude. A little way to the north of them, in the creases of a hill famous for its religious orgies, rose the river Trent, the calm and characteristic stream of middle England. Somewhat further northwards, in the near neighborhood of the highest public-house in the realm, rose two lesser rivers, the Dane and the Dove, which, quarreling in early infancy, turned their backs on each other, and, the one by favour of the Weaver and the other by favour of the Trent, watered between them the whole width of England, and poured themselves respectively into the Irish Sea and the German Ocean. What a county of modest, unnoticed rivers! What a natural, simple county, content to fix its boundaries by these torturous island brooks, with their comfortable names – Trent, Mease, Dove, Tern, Dane, Mees, Stour, Tame, and even hasty Severn! Not that the Severn is suitable to the county! In the county excess is deprecated. The county is happy in not exciting remark. It is content that Shropshire should possess that swollen bump, the Wrekin, and that the exaggerated wildness of the Peak should lie over its border. “

-The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett
http://www.librarything.com/work/58156
touchstone is not working

This also qualifies as water personification! tee-hee

Can't believe I didn't think of this one right off the bat. Imagine grabbing a 75 cent paperback off the spinner rack at your local drugstore circa 1970 and reading this:

There is entwined seven-tentacled lightning. It is fire-masses, it is sheets, it is arms. It is seven-colored writhing in the darkness, electric and alive. It pulsates, it sends, it sparkles, it blinds!
It explodes!
It is seven murderous thunder-snakes striking in seven directions along the ground! Blindingly fast! Under your feet! Now! At you!
And You! You who glanced in here for but a moment, you are already snake-bit!
It is too late for you to withdraw. The damage is done to you. That faintly odd taste in your mouth, that smallest of tingles which you feel, they signal the snake-death.
Die a little. There is reason for it.

Fourth Mansions by R. A. Lafferty.

*high five!*
Nice!

“Lord Orcis was on one of his tours of inspection. With Duke Agla his next in command, and Hifni his expert on authors, and a trio decked out like sirens strumming on lutes, and his humble servant (and yours) hobbling hindmost. We’d just come into Carmichael’s motor cortex, lit up by the spasmodic flashing of synapses directing his index fingers to poke at his typewriter, when the whole place went more or less dark, even the neuron chains hooked up to his eyeballs, leaving nothing but the regular dull flicker of his autonomous nervous system. The bank that worked his lungs surged in a sigh. Then muscle controls began to pulse all around us as Carmichael pushed back his chair and heaved himself upright.”
Carmichael’s Dog by R. M. Koster

I can't believe nobody's done this one yet:

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

(One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez).

Not that I've ever read it, but it's been quoted so often, it's stuck in my brain at the moment:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it ws 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 directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way."

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (sorry - touchstone behaving erratically. I confess, I got the quote from the internet)

Actually, this was the one I wanted to put in:

"The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend"

The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan

(and he continues this theme in the following books)

"The magic in that country was so thick and tenacious that it settled over the land like chalk-dust and over floors and shelves like slightly sticky plaster dust."

Spindle's End by Robin McKinley

"Women on their own run in Alice's family. This dawns on her with the unkindness of a heart attack and she sits up in bed to get a closer look at her thoughts, which have collected above her in the dark."

Why are these kinds of thoughts so partial to the dark?

The first lines of Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver.

Lovely stuff.

Kingsolver makes me think of Africa (The Poisonwood Bible) which always makes me (old-timer that I am) think of the great white hunter Allan Quatermain.

This is another cheat: a line buried in the third paragraph of King Solomon's Mines that would have made a great hook, but of course back in the 1880s novels tended to start with something like "My name is So-and-so and I was born in Blah-blah of such and such a family and I am writing this account because on a winter's evening in 18-- I was yadda yadda yadda..."

Anyway, if I had been a devil sitting on Haggard's shoulder he would have started his best known book like this:

"It is a hard thing that when one has shot sixty-five lions, as I have in the course of my life, that the sixty-sixth should chew your leg like a quid of tobacco. It breaks the routine of the thing, and, putting other considerations aside, I am an orderly man and don't like that."

A perfect introduction to Quatermain's oh-so-English understatement, his stoicism, his profession, and the reason he has time to record this adventure, being laid up with a bad leg.

Though I have to admit the book did pretty well for itself, even without my help :)

Hey! Unfair criticism of old books!!! There are several examples already posted here, revelshade.

Though I absolutely DO agree that the passage you quote would have been at it's best at the veriest beginning. But it's still on the FIRST PAGE.

I went back and looked at my Barbara Kingsolvers and found this one:

"I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign. I'm not lying."
from The Bean Trees.

I'll have you know some of my best friends are old books. But you don't want to live next door to one, they tend to be all Get off my lawn! and Watch your language! and Stream of consciousness? Unreliable narrators? Fiddlesticks! When I was first published...

Yeah, whatever, grandpa.

Someday I'll finish Moby Dick (God willing), but one thing I dug about the hundred or so pages I read was how Melville sidesteps the whole "who am I?" business with the first line (do I really need to type it?) and how, although ostensibly a first person narrator, once "Ishmael" gets on the Pequod he sort of diffuses throughout the ship, becoming impossibly aware not just of what everyone says and does but what they think - he even describes someone's dream! Then when the plot requires him to actually do anything he coalesces into an ordinary sailor again. Very pomo for the nineteenth century.

"If only you could see me now."

Memoirs of an Invisible Man by H.F. Saint

your turn

why, thank 'ee.

"It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea."

Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve

I may not know where to stop, as this entire book flows along as it starts:

"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.
The history of catastrophe is merely the history of irresistable juxtapositions. When Penrod left the pantry he walked slowly. In the large metal receptacle were left a small number of untouched doughnuts; while upon the shelf beside it were two further doughnuts, each with a small bite experimentally removed - and one of these bites, itself, lay, little mangled, beside the parent doughnut.
Nothing having been discovered, he seated himself gently at the lunch-table, and making no attempt to take part in the family conversation, avoided rather than sought attention. This decorum on his part was so unusual as to be the means of defeating its object..."

-Penrod Jashber by Booth Tarkington

"You think you know about pain?" -
The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum, a hideous and tragic novel the likes of which I have not read again.

................took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirtcuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.

It's not a first page at all, but it's so delicious, I couldn't resist:

From "Anne of Green Gables" again "Anne Comes to Grief in an Affair of Honour" (Anne has been double dared to cross the ridge-pole of the kitchen roof, and has just fallen off)

If Anne had tumbled off the roof on the side up which she had ascended, Diana would probably have fallen heir to the pearl bead ring then and there. Fortunately she fell on the other side, where the roof extended down over the porch so nearly to the ground that a fall therefrom was a much less serious thing. Nevertheless, when Diana and the other girls had rushed frantically around the house - except Ruby Gillis, who remained as if rooted to the ground and went into hysterics - they found Anne lying all white and limp among the wreck and ruin of the Virginia creeper.

'Anne, are you killed?' shrieked Diana, throwing herself on her knees beside her friend. 'Oh, Anne, dear Anne, speak just one word to me and tell me if you're killed.'

To the immense relief of all the girls, and especially of Josie Pye, who, in spite of lack of imagination, had been seized with horrible visions of a future branded as the girl who was the cause of Anne Shirley's early and tragic death, Anne sat dizzily up and answered uncertainly:

'No, Diana, I am not killed, but I think I am rendered unconscious.'

'Where?' sobbed Carrie Sloane. 'Oh, where, Anne?'

No, we ARE NOT DONE with this thread.

"The evidence is that Benjamin Franklin, born in 1706, first "came alive," as the saying is, about the year 1718. Let us consider then, his small and somewhat pudgy person at the age of twelve."
-Benjamin Franklin, The First Civil American, by Phillips Russell

"As a baby, Tom Avery had twenty-seven mothers."
-Republic of Love, by Carol Shields

and my favorite of the day:

"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

"Personally I blame the Pope" from A Death In The Venetian Quarter by Alan R Gordon - this line opens up to a full introduction that assigns the blame for the Fourth Crusade's sack on Constantinople by degrees of importance, followed by a rather humorous description of the discussion within the Imperial Court of what to do when the Crusading Fleet is first sighted.

My copy of the previous book in the series Jester Leaps In had the first chapter of the next book at the end. I was hooked and Oh how I waited for the release of this next book, which was much delayed as the author changed publishers.

The wait was worthwhile - this is one of my favourite books still and the author's note at the end is also a great laugh.

Cheers

"Theodore is in the ground."

The Alienist by Caleb Carr

"There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb. And he almost deserved it."

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis

Skittles,

I meant to thank you for using Robin McKinley above.
For some reason, she doesn't stand out in my memory, but I always fall back in love with her each time I read her.

2wonderY: I love Robin McKinley!! She's absolutely "wonder"ful! I need to re-read her again, too!!

'It was nine o'clock at night and Tremaine was trying to find a way to kill herself that would bring in a verdict of natural causes in court when someone banged on the door.'

The Wizard Hunters by Martha Wells.

Not in the category of most of those already posted, but still promises to be an enjoyable read:

"Margaret Trevennon was young and beautiful. Her faithful biographer can say no less, though aware of the possibilty that, on this account, the satiated reader of romances may make her acquaintance with a certain degree of reluctance, reflecting upon the two well-worn types - the maiden in the first flush of youth, who is so immaculately lovely as to be extrememly improbable, and the maturer female, who is so strong-minded as to be wholly ineligible to romantic situations."

-Across the Chasm by Julia Magruder

reminds me a tiny bit of Jane Austen's attitude towards her heroines.

Here's an opener that's been a personal favourite of mine for many years. Since I'm new to this group, I checked all 67 previous messages in this thread, as I was sure someone would have included it, but it seems not to have been, so I've decided to remedy that situation.

I tend not to remember things like first sentences, but this one is impossible to forget (in my case, at least). It's from Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess.

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.

>69 jpyvr:
I'm pretty sure it's been in every other "first lines" thread I've seen since joining LT.
I've always suspected that Burgess must have got that sentence from a game of "consequences" or something of the sort, then built a novel around it as a challenge. I don't think the novel quite lives up to the first line, but it's still pretty good.

I've been hearing this a lot lately, and it doesn't seem to be here, so (going from memory, I'm afraid, as I don't have a copy, much to my sorrow):

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

(Yay for the internet; I found the quote, so I didn't have to rely on memory - though I was within an ace, I must say.)

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

". . .built a novel around it as a challenge. . ."
( 70)

A related anecdote about submitting a novel to a publisher "on a bet":

Thereʻs a story that Ernest Hemingwayʻs unsuccessful Across the River and into the Trees was really written by a young unknown acquantance of his--and routinely rejected. The young unpublished writer griped that "My novel would be published - if my name were Ernest Hemingway." E H said, "OK, Iʻll let you submit it to another publisher under my name -- and youʻll see that it WON"T be published."
It was submitted -- the story says -- but neither side was really proved right: Hemingway was wrong that it wouldnʻt be published, (if he ever did "bet" that) but it was very badly reviewed and called not up to Hemingwayʻs usual writing.

Hard to believe this story is true. If such an arrangement were made, part of the "deal" would probably have been that, if it was published, Hemingway had to admit that another was the
real author.

>72 rolandperkins:
Isn't there a similar anecdote about Graham Greene (under another name) once winning third prize in a competition for the best Graham Greene parody?

ADVERTISEMENT
BY THE AUTHORESS
TO
NORTHANGER ABBEY

THIS little work was finished in the year 1803, and intended for immediate publication. It was disposed of to a Bookseller, it was even advertised, and why the business proceeded no farther, the author has never been able to learn. That any bookseller should think it worth while to purchase what he did not think worth while to publish seems extraordinary. But with this, neither the author nor the public have any other concern than as some observation is necessary upon those parts of the work which thirteen years have made comparatively obsolete. The public are entreated to bear in mind that thirteen years have passed since it was finished, many more since it was begun, and that during that period, places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes.

First Line:

Much later, as he watched his manservant,Perkins, eating the dog,Quimby gloomily reflected on the unusual events of the evening.

Queen Victoria Demon Hunter by, A.E. Moorat

How very wonderful to continue this thread. Thanks to you both. I've put the Moorat book on my wishlist to find for my daughter, who collects the Zombie genre. (ugh)

This one reminds me of Edna Ferber (as above) and also Jane Austen. The presumption of speaking directly to the reader!

This is from The Minister's Wooing.

“Mrs. Katy Scudder had invited Mrs. Brown, and Mrs. Jones, and Deacon Twitchel's wife to take tea with her on the afternoon of June second, A.D. 17--.
When one has a story to tell, one is always puzzled which end of it you begin at. You have a whole corps of people to introduce that you know and your reader doesn’t; and one thing so pre-supposes another, that, whichever way you turn your patchwork, the figures still seem ill-arranged. The small item which I have given will do as well as other to begin with, as it will certainly lead you to ask, “Pray, who was Mrs. Katy Scudder?” – and this will start me systematically on my story.”

I found another fun entry.

"Dear Pierrepont: Your Ma got back safe this morning and she wants me to be sure to tell you not to over-study, and I want to tell you to be sure not to under-study. What we're really sending you to Harvard for is to get a little of the education that's so good and plenty there. When it's passed around you don't want to be bashful, but reach right out and take a big helping every time, for I want you to get your share. You'll find that education's about the only thing lying around loose in this world, and that it's about the only thing a fellow can have as much as he's willing to haul away. Everything else is screwed down tight and the screw-driver lost."

From a classic of 1902, Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to his Son
The author is George Horace Lorimer.

yoo-hoo!

I found one that I've loved, but hadn't been able to recall where it was from. It's actually several pages long, but I've distilled it:

If old Jeremy Clapp had not sneezed his teeth into the fire that winter day this story might have had a more seemly beginning; but, being a true record, it must start with that sneeze, because it was the first happening in Georgina Huntingdon's life which she could remember distinctly….
If his eyes had suddenly dropped from their sockets upon the hearth, or his ears floated off from the sides of his head, she could not have been more terrified, for she had not yet learned that one’s teeth may be a separate part of one’s anatomy. It was such a terrible thing to see a man go to pieces in this un-dreamed of fashion, that she began to scream and writhe around in her high-chair until it nearly turned over….
It was the awful knowledge, vague though it was to her infant mind, that a human body could fly apart in that way….
It was several years before Georgina learned the truth, and the impression made by the accident grew into a lurking fear which often haunted her as time wore on. She never knew at what moment she might fly apart herself."
-Georgina of the Rainbows, by Annie Fellows Johnston, a vintage Kentucky writer.

Definitely recalls the theme way back in #2 that Sophie shared with us.

revelshade, where are you????

The bookseller replied the other day that it was tatty, and no-one would read it, in response to my surprise in retrieving it from the 20p trolley (amongst the near to pulp subject to all weathers); however flicking through the pages they seem to have gotten elasticity and colour back into them now.

Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, with elucidations Introduction chapter 1. Anti-dryasdust ...

What and how great are the interests which connect themselves with the hope that England may yet attain to some practical belief and understanding of its History during the Seventeenth Century, need not be insisted on at present; such hope being still very distant, very uncertain. We have wandered far away from the ideas which guided us in that Century; and indeed which had guided us in all preceding Centuries, but of which that Century was the ultimate manifestation: we have wandered very far; and must endeavour to return, and connect ourselves therewith again! It is with other feelings than those of poor peddling Dilettantism, other aims than the writing of successful or unsuccessful Publications, that an earnest man occupies himself in those dreary provinces of the dead and buried. The last glimpse of the Godlike vanishing from this England; conviction and veracity giving place to hollow cant and formulism, -antique 'Reign of God,' which all true men in their several dialects and modes have always striven for, giving place to modern Reign of No-God, whom men name Devil: this, in its multitudinous meanings and results, is a sight to create reflections in the earnest man! One wishes there were a History of English Puritanism, the last of all our Heroisms; but sees small prospect of such a thing at present.

I have to add:

"A tall, slim girl, 'half past sixteen', with serious grey eyes and hair which her friends called auburn, had sat down on the broad red sandstone doorstep of a Prince Edward Island farmhouse one ripe afternoon in August, firmly resolved to construe so many lines of Virgil.

"But an August afternoon, with blue hazes scarfing the harvest slopes, little winds whispering elfishly in the poplars, and a dancing splendour of red poppies outflaming against the dark coppice of young firs in a corner of the cherry orchard was fitter for dreams than dead languages. The Virgil soon slipped unheaded to the ground, and Anne, her chin propped on her clasped hands, and her eyes on the splendid mass of fluffy clouds that were heaping up just over Mr J.A. Harrison's house like a great white mountain, was far away in a delicious world where a certain school-teacher was doing a wonderful work, shaping the destinies of future statesmen, and inspiring youthful minds and hearts with high and lofty ambitions."

The beginning of Anne of Avonlea by L.M. Montgomery

I got a huge box of books on Saturday - old novels - for $4.

I found a Corra Harris book from 1912, The Recording Angel, and this is the first page:

If you take a certain train at two o'clock in the afternoon, say, at Twenty-third Street Station in New York, and travel steadily southward till you are an hour behind time, you come to the carmine hills of Georgia - round, soft hills that the grasses love.... The hills do not notice you as you pass. They are suckling the grass. They are asleep in the golden sunshine. They are dreaming in the perfume of the cotton blooms. You would not be astonished if one of them should turn over and stretch and show the other breast, they are so very comfortable, so very fertile and lazy. No wonder that every train coming southward in this direction loses time. You cannot "stoke" even a New England engine enough to make it hurry in such an atmosphere of repose and somnambulance.

>81 2wonderY:
...and people complain that D.H. Lawrence overdoes the fertility metaphors :-)

I would quote the opening of The Rainbow (1915!), but the bit about "the intercourse between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in the daytime, nakedness that comes under the wind in autumn" (etc. ad nauseam) only comes on page 2 in most editions.

Hey! Welcome back thorold! Where've you been?

And it was quite a surprise from Ms. Harris. She was a minister's wife. Her writing career was spurred by her a** of a husband. Over the years it lightens considerably.

>83 2wonderY: Oh, around, you know...

Here's one I'd forgotten about until I re-read the book last weekend - more dodgy agricultural images from T. C. Boyle's Water Music:

At an age when most young Scotsman were lifting skirts, ploughing furrows and spreading seed, Mungo Park was displaying his bare buttocks to al-haj' Ali Ibn Fatoudi, Emir of Ludamar.

I've never encountered T. C. Boyle.
Love the cross-fertilizations that happen here. >smirk

Mungo Park? We studied about him in history class.

Welcome mersenne6!

That's a great contribution. Feel free to share more.

Good strategy!

I'll have to try it with my grandson, who loves Calvin and Hobbes, but not much more. He's 9, so he needs to find his passion in books.
Is that story appropriate for his age, do you think?

Weeding through my piles, I found another by Booth Tarkington.

Here, his book The Turmoil, addresses the American idol, PROGRESS.

"There is a midland city in the heart of fair, open country, a dirty and wonderful city nestling dingily in the fog of its own smoke. The stranger must feel the dirt before he feels the wonder, for the dirt will be upon him instantly. It will be upon him and within him, since he must breathe it, and he may care for no further proof that wealth is here better loved than cleanliness; but whether he cares or not, the negligently tended streets incessantly press home the point, and so do the flecked and grimy citizens. At a breeze he must smother in whirlpools of dust, and if he should decline at any time to inhale the smoke he has the meager alternative of suicide."

A note on The Turmoil (92)

I read it during 2nd year of high school, and I remember my mother saying that it would be taken (because of passages on smoke/dirt like the above)
to be modeled on Pittsburgh, but was really modeled on Indianapolis, Tarkingtonʻs home town. Indianapolis, although more industrial than we Easterners realized, did not have the "smoky/dirty" reputation of the Pittsburgh of that time. In fact, I donʻt remember my motherʻs ever saying anything unfavorable about it, except as the Turmoil locale, (my parents having lived there for a short time before my sister and I were born in Massachusetts.)

A good book, too. Iʻd probably say: Tarkingtonʻs best, but I havenʻt read enough of him to be sure of that.

Of course B T had his faults, including racial bigotry. Thatʻs another question.

A timely piece, after hearing the news of the river Danube getting flooded with the sludge from an Aluminum works the other day.

Sorting history books, I found a couple of memoirs that promise to be absorbing.

"Benjamin Leopold Farjeon was born in 1838 of Jewish parents. His mother, Dinah, was a native of Deal; she had twenty-five sisters. Her parents’ name was Levy. His father Jacob had come from the East, and romantic rumours clung about him in our nursery: as that he had been the “Favorite Slave” of a Sultan, had escaped, been shipwrecked, and marooned – when he suffered an accident to his fourth toe which is transmitted to his children as a malformation. (Did not Papa show us his own twisted fourth toe as a proof of his father’s shipwreck?)"
-A Nursery in the Nineties, by Eleanor Farjeon

second, and I skip through the duller phrases because there are plenty of good nuggets:

"We lived at 2029 LaFontaine, the last house on the west side of the street from 178th to 179th, a row of five tenements that ended at a hat factory….At the corner of 178th Street, on our Jewish-German-Polish-Greek-Hungarian-Rumanian side, was Mrs. Katz’s candy store….And on their side of 179th Street, about midway between Arthur and LaFontaine, there was a big tree, the only street tree in the neighborhood, which showered me, and only me, with a million white blossoms. It was my tree and I watched and touched it as carefully as the Italian grandfathers watched and touched the tomato plants in their backyards….running from 178th to 179th, a resplendent, high empty lot as full of possibilities as a park….There were two ways of getting onto the lot: 178th Street was an easy gradual slope; 179th Street was jutting rock for a height of two stories. The few girls who managed it were never quite the same again, a little more defiant, a little more impudent."
Bronx Primitive, by Kati Simon

Best first page ever. Moon People by Dale M. Courtney. You can read it here:

http://i.imgur.com/5dkGc.gif

>96 MrAndrew:
...before we all get distracted, I should point out that we had a pretty good go at poor old Mr Courtney over in Pedants' Corner a week or so ago. He's probably had enough free publicity to last him a lifetime. We missed you, Mr A!

Thanks for posting that one here too, MrA.

I acquired another George Barr McCutcheon title recently. He's not for modern tastes, but I enjoy his repartee. This is from Castle Craneycrow.

“It was characteristic of Mr. Philip Quentin that he first lectured his servant on the superiority of mind over matter and then took him cheerfully by the throat and threw him into a far corner of the room. As the servant was not more than half the size of the master, his opposition was merely vocal, but it was nevertheless unmistakable. His early career had increased his vocabulary and his language was more picturesque than pretty. Yet of his loyalty and faithfulness, there could be no doubt.”
The next page describes how they met one night seven years ago. Quentin had woken to find a burglar in his rooms, and had held a revolver on him while they conversed. After some witty exchanges, the intruder claimed to be in desperate need of a meal. Quentin responds…
““So you’re hungry, are you?”
“As a bear.”
Quentin never tried to explain his subsequent actions; perhaps he had had a stupid evening. He merely yawned and addressed the burglar with all possible respect. “Do you imagine I’ll permit any guest of mine to go away hungry? If you’ll wait till I dress, we’ll stroll over to a restaurant in the next street and get some supper.”
“Police station, you mean.”
“Now, don’t be unkind, Mr. Burglar. I mean supper for two. I’m hungry myself, but not a bit sleepy. Will you wait?”
“Oh, I’m in no particular hurry.”
Quentin dressed calmly. The Burglar began to whistle softly.
“Are you ready?” asked Philip, putting on his overcoat and hat.
“I haven’t got me overcoat on yet,” replied the burglar, suggestively. Quentin saw he was dressed in the chilliest of rags. He opened a closet door and threw him a long coat.
“Ah, here is your coat. I must have taken it from the club by mistake. Pardon me.”
“T’anks; I never expected to git it back, coolly replied the burglar, donning the best coat that had ever touched his person. “You didn’t see anything of my gloves and hat in there, did you?”

'All children, except one, grow up.'

The opening line to Peter Pan. Oh, the pathos! (I have 2 small children)(smallish; that is, one is not quite as small as before ... *sigh*)

That is a great one.

You made me go back to all the Barrie books, and I found this in Sentimental Tommy.

"The celebrated Tommy first comes into view on a dirty London stair, and he was in sexless garments, which were all he had, and he was five, and so though we are looking at him, we must do it sideways, lest he sit down hurriedly to hide them."

I can see that I like when the author treats the reader as almost a participant. See Ferber and Stowe up above.

Still on the first page:

"On his way up and down the stair he often paused to sniff, but he never asked for anything; his mother had warned him against it, and he carried out her injunction with almost unnecessary spirit, declining offers before they were made, as when passing a room, whence came the smell of fried fish, he might call in, "I don't not want none of your fish," or "My mother says I don't not want the littlest bit," or wistfully, "I ain't hungry," or more wistfully still, "My mother says I ain't hungry."

I realized that I had missed reading/owning the first Penrod book, and - lo and behold - it jumped into my hand at the latest Trinity Book Sale.

"Penrod sat morosely upon the back fence and gazed with envy at Duke, his wistful dog.
A bitter soul dominated the various curved and angular surfaces known by a careless world as the face of Penrod Scofield. Except in solitude, that face was almost always cryptic and emotionless; for Penrod had come into his twelfth year wearing an expression carefully trained to be inscrutable. Since the world was sure to misunderstand everything, mere defensive instinct prompted him to give it as little as possible to lay hold upon."

I'm sure boys who chronically find themselves in trouble still practice this.

Finally made it up to my attic, and I'm cataloging a small collection that's been sitting up there - some old very favorite fiction. Echoes of the War by J. M. Barrie was up there, and this is why I love him-

"Three nice old ladies and a criminal, who is even nicer, are discussing the war over a cup of tea. The criminal, who is the hostess, calls it a dish of tea, which shows that she comes from Caledonia, but that is not her crime."
first line of one of the stories.

>102 2wonderY: For an unbiased opinion of the Scots, ask the man from Kirriemuir!

I'm not sure if he's right about "dish of tea" being Scottish: the OED cites Addison and Byron for "dish" and Jane Carlyle for "cup", which rather suggests the contrary. "Dish" is probably just more old-fashioned.

Nah, nah. It's probably an internal distinction of the Scots.

I think, as a teenager, I was turned off by
the opening words of Ulysses: "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan . . .". As a Catholic, I would
have been turned off, even more, if I had gone on
to read what "Buck Mulligan"* was doing -- parodying a priest at mass.
Joyce shows
his contempt for this kind of respectable and pseudo-witty blasphemy by someone who is ostensibly a devout Catholic.
I finally read it at about age 30, and it has been on my favorites List ever since.

*"Buck" is believed to be a thinly disguised associate --I assume not a close friend-- of Joyce named Oliver St.John Gogarty, also a writer. Gogarty thought that, among Joyceʻs many faults was having been too susceptile to the influence of Gertrude Stein. I, on the other hand would place Stein as about 160 degrees separated from Joyce in the matter of style.

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

1984

What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. Certainly there be that delight in giddiness, and count it a bondage to fix a belief; affecting free-will in thinking, as well as in acting. And though the sects of philosophers of that kind be gone, yet there remain certain discoursing wits which are of the same veins, though there be not so much blood in them as was in those of the ancients.

Essays

Picked this up this morning for his essay on atheism which I will read second to Greenblatt's essay "Invisible Bullets".

I'm glad you're adding some older examples here, armandine2 - and nonfiction as well. There is an elegance to our predecessors' writing which I find lacking in many writers today.

Even the trashy novelists of the early 20th century had better vocabularies and powers of metaphor.

"It all depends upon the manner of your entrance to the Castle of Adventure. One does not have to scale its beetling parapets or assault its scarps and frowning bastions; neither is one obliged to force with clamor and blaring trumpets and glittering gorgets the drawbridge and portcullis. Rather the pathway lies through one of those many little doors, obscure, yet easily accessible, latchless and boltless, to which the average person gives no particular attention, and yet which invariably lead to the very heart of this Castle Delectable. The whimsical chatelaine of this enchanted keep is a shy goddess. Circumspection has no part in her affairs, nor caution, nor practicality; nor does her eye linger upon the dullard and the blunderer. Imagination solves the secret riddle, and wit is the guide that leads the seeker through the winding, bewildering labyrinths."

-Hearts and Masks by Harold McGrath

As I was adding this to CK, I was reflecting on how many of these words would be incomprehensible to my co-workers, who frequently need me to re-phrase or define a word. They, of course, do not read for pleasure.

"The king sat on his throne and blinked at the sunlight streaming through the French window. His eyes were pools of liquid amber filled with a brooding dignity, and kind beyond expression. His throne was a big leather chair, worn and slouchy, that stood in the bay window of the Brookfield living-room. He had slept there all night, and it was time for the maid to come, open the French window, and let him out into the dew-washed rose garden.

Dumb-Bell of Brookfield by John Taintor Foote