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Thread: Favorite Opening Lines

  1. #16
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    "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens,
    "first you have to die. Hoji! Hoji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first
    one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first
    you won't cry? How to win the darling's love, mister, without a sigh?"
    - Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

  2. #17
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    How many dawns, chill from the rippling rest,
    The seagulls wings shall dip and pivot him.
    —Crane

  3. #18
    Beginning paragraphs of Lolita are among my favorites too...
    Kundan
    Stack your Rack
    The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. - Mark Twain

  4. #19
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    Quote Originally Posted by armen_r10 View Post
    How many dawns, chill from the rippling rest,
    The seagulls wings shall dip and pivot him.
    —Crane
    Love all things Crane. Also

    Where the cedar leaf divides the sky
    I heard the sea.
    In saphire arenas of the hills
    I was promised an improved infancy.

    - Passage

  5. #20
    perhapsist Panglossian's Avatar
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    "In accordance with the law the death sentence was announced to Cincinnatus C. in a whisper."

    --Invitation to a Beheading (Nabokov)

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    Quote Originally Posted by conartist View Post

    I was promised an improved infancy.

    - Passage
    Doesn't that just beg a Freudian analysis?
    Or would we rather dub a Blakean return to innocence.

    And not to make this a spam:

    Regard the capture here, O Janus-faced,
    As double as the hands that twist this glass.
    —Recitative

  7. #22
    Registered User Chris 73's Avatar
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    The Haunting Of Hill House. Shirley Jackson. The sort of begining writers dream about.

    “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. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

    Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury.

    “The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm. He came along the street of Green Town, Illinois, in the late cloudy October day, sneaking glances over his shoulder. Somewhere not so far back, vast lightnings stomped the earth. Somewhere, a storm like a great beast with terrible teeth could not be denied.”

    Winters Bone by Daniel Woodrell.
    Ree Dolly stood at break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. Meat hung from trees across the creek. The carcasses hung pale of flesh with a fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagged limbs, venison left to the weather for two nights and three days so the early blossoming of decay might round the flavor, sweeten that meat to the bone.

    And finally True Grit by Charles Portis.
    People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.

  8. #23
    "124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom."


    Beloved - Toni Morrison. Ask me tomorrow and it may be different.

  9. #24
    Registered User Squabbles's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by ChicagoReader View Post
    Don't have it on me but the beginning paragraphs of Lolita are absolutely perfect.
    Since I and a few others have agreed, I give you the first two paragraphs:

    "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.

    She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita."

  10. #25
    Registered User Dark Passenger's Avatar
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    People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles.

    From Less Than Zero the debut novel by Bret Easton Ellis. It's a simple line compared to openings in his other books, and he even admits as much in a later piece, Lunar Park. I think it sets the bleak tone of the novel with a casual ease that suits the narrator, Clay.
    I want to play. I really, really do.

  11. #26
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    My Cousin Rachel (Daphne du Maurier)


    "They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days. Not any more though..."

    The above opening line made me sit up when I was reading the book.

    Though the quoted is not the opening line I also liked Shakespeare's lines in "Hamlet"

    Hamlet:
    To be, or not to be, that is the question:
    Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
    The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
    Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
    And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep

  12. #27
    Registered User Joyeuse's Avatar
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    "Howard Roark laughed. He stood naked at the edge of a cliff."
    -Ayn Rand's Fountainhead

    I just love the surprise that comes from reading that line. I looked at it and had so many questions. Who's Howard Roark? Why's he naked? Is he committing suicide? I just thought it was really eye-catching.
    My super hero serial

    "The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others."
    Van Gogh

  13. #28
    defying description inbetween's Avatar
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    the beginning of "das parfüm" don't feel like translating it right now... but I always loved it... and the beginning of varney the vampire... (love it):
    MIDNIGHT. -- THE HAIL-STORM. -- THE DREADFUL VISITOR. -- THE VAMPYRE.

    The solemn tones of an old cathedral clock have announced midnight -- the air is thick and heavy -- a strange, death like stillness pervades all nature. Like the ominous calm which precedes some more than usually terrific outbreak of the elements, they seem to have paused even in their ordinary fluctuations, to gather a terrific strength for the great effort. A faint peal of thunder now comes from far off. Like a signal gun for the battle of the winds to begin, it appeared to awaken them from their lethargy, and one awful, warring hurricane swept over a whole city, producing more devastation in the four or five minutes it lasted, than would a half century of ordinary phenomena.
    Friends help you move. Good friends help you move bodies.

  14. #29
    www.markbastable.co.uk
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    Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall by Spike Milligan

    September 3rd, 1939. The last minutes of peace ticking away. Father and I were watching Mother digging our air-raid shelter. "She's a great little woman," said Father. "And getting smaller all the time," I added.

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

    Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth

    She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise. As soon as the last bell had sounded, I would rush off for home, wondering if I could possibly make it to our apartment before she had succeeded in transforming herself.

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

    And I agree with the earlier suggestion that the opening of Tristam Shandy is a terrific hook.

  15. #30
    Registered User Emil Miller's Avatar
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    It was Sunday, and, according to his custom on that day, McTeague took his dinner at two in the afternoon at the car conductors' coffee-joint on Polk Street. He had a thick grey soup: heavy, underdone meat, very hot, on a cold plate; two kinds of vegetables; and a sort of suet pudding, full of strong butter and sugar. On his way back to his office, one block above, he stopped at Joe Frenna's saloon and bought a pitcher of beer. It was his habit to leave the pitcher there on his way to dinner.
    Once in his office,or, as he called it on his sign-board, "Dental Parlors," he took off his coat and shoes, unbuttoned his vest, and, having crammed his little stove full of coke, lay back in his operating chair at the bay window, reading the paper, drinking his beer, and smoking his huge porcelain pipe while his food digested; crop-full, stupid, and warm.

    McTeague by Frank Norris.
    "L'art de la statistique est de tirer des conclusions erronèes a partir de chiffres exacts." Napoléon Bonaparte.

    "Je crois que beaucoup de gens sont dans cet état d’esprit: au fond, ils ne sentent pas concernés par l’Histoire. Mais pourtant, de temps à autre, l’Histoire pose sa main sur eux." Michel Houellebecq.

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