Literature 101 Fun - Best First Line:

[pinto]

Call me Ishmael. - Moby Dick

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. My dear pinto...

I like: It was a dark and stormy night...

:P

:hi:

[pinto]

2. a classic CA Peggy,

it was truly a dark and stormy night, truly.

[hobbit709]

36. It was a stark and dormy night

[pinto]

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

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.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

[dubeskin]

5. I agree. Best first line(s) ever. n/t

[pinto]

8. Agree.

Also the best last line ever but I didn't want to muddy the topic.

This was a writing exercises I had way back when in journalism class. Still enjoy revisiting.

[dubeskin]

11. I guess we might as well classify it as one of the greatest books ever

Because it absolutely was.

[montanto]

41. It really is the best IMO, it says it all.

Shakespearean in its penetration. It tells the whole story right there.

[applegrove]

48. Above the town, on the hill brow, the stone angel used to stand. In memory of her who relinquished

her past as I gained my stubborn one.


The Stone Angel by Margaret Lawrence.

[DarkTirade]

49. Took the words right out of my mouth.

And I generally don't even like Dickens that much.

[bicentennial_baby]

4. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.

[pinto]

6. that's a great one.

[cemaphonic]

30. Pedantic nitpick time!

That's the first line of Humbert's manuscript, but the whole thing is framed by an introduction. It's clearly part of the story and not just a generic scholarly introduction since we find out among other things that Lolita has died in childbirth. (Plus, Nabokov clearly likes these sorts of structural games - look at Pale Fire.)

But yeah, it's a great great line.

[JTG of the PRB]

7. "The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed."

I gotta read that series again. It's been a couple of years.

[JTG of the PRB]

12. "Midway on our life's journey, I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost."

Another one I REALLY love.

[Richardo]

9. "We were somewhere in the desert around Barstow when the drugs began to take hold".

HST, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

[pinto]

15. That even worked in the movie take. It's a great line.

:hi:

[fishwax]

46. that was going to be mine as well

Great opening line :thumbsup:

[Z_I_Peevey]

52. Absolutely!

What excellent taste you have.

[otherlander]

58. YES.

:thumbsup:

[Kutjara]

10. "A screaming comes across the sky...

...It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now."

[Oeditpus Rex]

13. Oh, gah — it was Saroyan

But I can't remember the title. :(

The first line was something like, "I guess you don't know what it's like to be in love with a Mongolian dwarf."



If anyone knows, please refresh the memory of an aging, addled man.

[pokerfan]

14. "Lulu slept naked because she liked to ...

"Lulu slept naked because she liked to feel the sheets carressing her body and also because laundry was expensive."
--Jean-Paul Sartre, Intimacy

[pinto]

16. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.

William Faulkner, 'The Sound and the Fury'

[khashka]

17. The penis will be obsolete in 5 years

with good marketing maybe 2 said the salesman.

Steel Beach - Varley

Then the main character has sex with a woman:
"That was really obsolete."
"Not nearly as obsolete for you as it was for me."

Khash.

[enigmatic]

18. "It began as a mistake."

[tishaLA]

19. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead

bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. --Ulysses.

Although, i have to admit, "Call me Ishmael" is the best of all time, followed by "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

[tishaLA]

20. Happy families are all alike;

every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. --Anna Karenina

[FloridaJudy]

21. "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 Gabriel Garcia Marquez

[insanity]

25. good choice

great book

[blogslut]

22. "Scarlett O'Hara was not pretty, but men seldom realised this."

Not my favorite book but I love that line.

[begin_within]

23. riverrun, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay,

[FloridaJudy]

28. Finnegan's Wake.

Related, but a little more accessible -

"There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke".

[Heidi]

24. "MY NAME is Frank Bascombe. I am a sportswriter."

The Sportswriter, Richard Ford (Vintage, 1995)

[insanity]

26. In my younger and more vulnerable years

my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

[FloridaJudy]

27. Gatsby, right?

"Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton".

[Heidi]

29. Once when I was six years old I saw a beautiful picture in a book

about the primeval forest called True Stories.

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943)

[cemaphonic]

31. It was the day my grandmother exploded.

Iain Banks - The Crow Road

[XemaSab]

32. It was a bright, cold day in April and the clocks had just struck 13

:D

[Richardo]

39. One of the all time best

:patriot:

[WritingIsMyReligion]

50. Damn straight.

Orwell's great. :thumbsup:

[cemaphonic]

33. "See the child"

Blood Meridian

[datasuspect]

34. I am a sick man. . . . I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased.

[MilesColtrane]

65. Notes from Democratic Underground

[wickerwoman]

35. All happy families are happy in the same way, but each miserable family

finds its own unique way to be miserable.


(Sorry, butchering Anna Karenina... too lazy to look it up)

Also, the first line of Kafka's Metamorphosis (also too lazy to look up) about the guy waking up as a cockroach.

[FloridaJudy]

42. "Gregor Samsa woke up

After a night of strange dreams". Or something like that (I'm too lazy to look it up too).

[hobbit709]

37. This one

"His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god, but then he never claimed not to be a god."

[rug]

38. One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams he found himself transformed in his bed

into a horrible vermin.

[QueenOfCalifornia]

40. "It was a dark and stormy night"

Snoopy

[MrCoffee]

43. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

William Gibson - Neuromancer

[Sequoia]

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

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

[skygazer]

45. You don't know about me without you have read a book

by the name of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer"; but that ain't no matter.

[fishwax]

47. I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up

--On the Road

[Arkham House]

51. "Now is the winter of our discontent..."

"...made glorious summer by this sun of York." It doesn't get much better than that...

[Z_I_Peevey]

53. 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 by some Salinger guy (Hey! Isn't he supposed to be on Colbert soon?)

[sarge43]

54. It is a truth universally acknowledged

that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

[MorningGlow]

57. Ahhhh Austen

That's in my top five.

[Phillycat]

74. You took mine! :)

[apocalypsehow]

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

[GOPNotForMe]

69. You took mine!

[pink-o]

56. The Red Death had long devastated the country.

No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal--the redness and the horror of blood.

I love Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" because it's all about the powerful trying to isolate themselves from the inevitable. They party hysterically, pretending the truth isn't right outside their windows, they wear disguises (lies) and dance till they drop, thinking the forced cheer will save them. Only to find themselves face-to-face with the exact thing they're trying so hard to hide from.

I thought it was perfectly symbolic during the AIDS crisis, but it doesn't just apply to a physical epidemic. It works just as well with the bubble-boy idiots that're inhabiting the halls of power right now!

[HawkerHurricane]

59. No one would have believed that during the last years...

of the 19th century human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. - H. G. Wells, 'War of the Worlds'

[XemaSab]

60. .

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.

[puerco-bellies]

61. 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.

My personal favorite.

[WCGreen]

63. It's one of my favorite books...

And then, I gave it to a girl friend to read and she said it was boring.

Well, we soon parted ways.

No one, I mean no one disses Steinbeck.

[Danger Mouse]

62. 'Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday. I can't be sure.'

:D

[insanity]

71. ahhh Camus

Brilliant

[swag]

64. A long line composed of a few sentences

"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 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."

Gore Vidal, Myra Breckinridge

[XemaSab]

66. Here's a good contender for opening paragraph:

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

[cemaphonic]

68. Yeah, I thought about posting that one, but decided it was a bit too long.

[MilesColtrane]

67. An oblong puddle...

...inset in the coarse asphalt; like a fancy footprint filled to the brim with quicksilver; like a spatulate hole through which you can see the nether sky.
Surrounded, I note, by a diffuse tentacled black dampness where some dull dun dead leaves have struck. Drowned. I should say, before the puddle had shrunk to its present size.

[6000eliot]

70. "They threw me off the hay truck about noon"

From The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain.

[Heidi]

72. “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs,

and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

73. "Mamam died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. "

"I got a telegram from home: `Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.' That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday."

[LynneSin]

75. The temperature hit ninety degrees the day she arrived.....

New York was steaming--an angry concrete animal caught unawares in an unseasonable hot spell. But she didn't mind the heat or the littered midway called Times Square. She thought New York was the most exciting city in the world.

BEST OPENING PARAGRAPH - VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, Jacqueline Susann

[sarge43]

76. And something in contrast to Miss Austen

Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth.

[Doubting Thomas]

77. "Dadburn the Kid"

Clifford Simak in "City." Probably the best sci-fi I have ever read. Came out when I was in high school in 1957, hopelessly dated.