Favorite First Lines

[giventofly]

Often, the first line of a story either completely pulls you in or completely puts you off. Crafting a great, attention-grabbing first line can be extremely difficult. What are some of your favorite first lines?

I'll go first. My favorite has to be:

"The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me."

-- Amy Hempel, "The Harvest"

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, ... (Dicken's opening sentence is too long to type it all)
- "A Tale of Two Cities"

"Sweet Auburn! lovliest village of the plain,
Where wealth and plenty cheered the labouring swain,..."
- Oliver Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village"

"Sing o Goddees, the ruinous wrath of Achilles,
Son of Peleus, the terrible curse brought
Unnumbered woes upon the Achaens and hurled..."
- Homer "The Illiad"

Gilliatt

[cgrillo]

"Call me Ishmael."
- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins."
- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

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

[_Shannon_]

"London."
~ Charles Dickens, Bleak House

"This is the saddest story I have ever heard."
~ Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

"A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead."
~Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."
~ Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche

[Lokasenna]

"Oft him ānhaga āre gebīdeð,
Metudes miltse, þēah þe he mōdcearig
geond lagulāde longe sceolde
hreran mid hondum hrīmcealde sǣ,
wadan wræclāstas. wyrd bið ful ārǣd!"

- The Wanderer

Which can probably be rendered something like this:

"Always the one alone longs for mercy,
the Maker's mildness, though troubled in mind,
across the ocean-ways he has long been forced
to stir with his hands the frost-cold sea,
and walk in exile's paths. Fate is fully fixed!"

[Zhu]

"Call me Ishmael."
- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick



I agree.

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

[giventofly]

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Oooo.... nice one. One of my favs 4-sure.

[Aragorn Elessar]

"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that our 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 scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over the globe about their various affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded our earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."

- H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

Those are lines from the first page that I memorized.

[Thom Holliday]

Rather cliché, but I've always been partial to the opening line of Nineteen Eighty-Four:


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

The line is a testament to George Orwell's matter of fact writing philosophy, and it sets forth the novel's vivid descriptions of totalitarianism.

[henslerm]

" A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now." Gravity's Rainbow Thomas Pynchon

[ElanorGamgee]

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."

[Riverrun...]

''The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new''. Murphy by Samuel Beckett.

I also like Finnegans Wake's opening, ''riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.''


Rather cliché, but I've always been partial to the opening line of Nineteen Eighty-Four:



The line is a testament to George Orwell's matter of fact writing philosophy, and it sets forth the novel's vivid descriptions of totalitarianism.


Absolutely! In one sentence he somehow manages to capture the atmosphere of the entire novel; it's hard to describe, but for me it's a sense of claustrophobia and unease.

[minstrelbard]

He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher - the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum.

- Kim, Rudyard Kipling

It befell in the days of Uther Pendragon, when he was king of all England, and so reigned, that there was a mighty duke in Cornwall that held war against him long time.

- Le Morte D'Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory

[Gregory Samsa]

"All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." - Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.

"Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure." The Stranger by Albert Camus.

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin." - The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.

[MarkBastable]

Often, the first line of a story either completely pulls you in or completely puts you off. Crafting a great, attention-grabbing first line can be extremely difficult. What are some of your favorite first lines?

I'll go first. My favorite has to be:

"The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me."

-- Amy Hempel, "The Harvest"


The problem with that line is that it only works in America. Here in the UK, for instance, we'd read it as,

"The year I began to say vahz instead of vahz, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me."

That wouldn't matter a few pages in, because we'd know that it was an American speaking - but as the first line of the novel, it's confusing for Brits.

Also, if I were the editor, I'd suggest cutting 'accidentally'. All those adverbs mess up the rhythm - not because they are adverbs, but because of the repetitive '--ly'.

I was a terrible editor to work for, as you can tell.



I suddenly have weird sense that I've posted this before. If I have, I apologise.

[Lokasenna]

How about C. S. Lewis' Voyage of the Dawn Treader - I've always loved this opening:

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

[MarkBastable]

The first line of Puckoon (from memory)...



I lifted the lid of the dustbin and looked out.

[JuniperWoolf]

Girl Meets Boy, by Ali Smith.

"Let me tell you about when I was a girl," my grandfather says.

[MarkBastable]

She was so deeply embedded 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.


Portnoy's Complaint

[OrphanPip]

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. - Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler

[SAAJID]

Of man's first disobedience, and fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden,

These are the first lines in Paradise Lost by John Milton.

[underthepink]

'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderly again.' Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier.
Actually the whole first chapter is wonderful, dreamy and foreboding all at once.

[breathtest]

i don't remember the exact wording, but i think this is about right.

'He poured a drink and looked at the bedroom suite in his front yard.' - Why Don't You Dance? by Raymond Carver.

[RaoulDuke]

"It is cold at 6:40 in the morning of a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad." - The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth

"Who is John Galt?" - Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

"I am a sick man.... I am an angry man." - Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Also, perhaps unsurprisingly, I would have to agree with Zhu and giventofly about the opening line from Fear and Loathing.

[Emil Miller]

About seven O'clock on a cold February evening, a man in his late sixties with an unkempt beard of dubious grey, was standing on one foot before a shop in the Rue de la Glacière not far from the boulevard Arago, and reading a newspaper by the light of the shop window with the help of a large rectangular philatelists' magnifying glass.

Translated from Les célibataires by Henry de Montherlant.

[Patrick_Bateman]

"Mother died today, or maybe yesterday I don't remember"

The Stranger - Albert Camus

[Sancho]

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

[Armel P]

"Mother died today, or maybe yesterday I don't remember"

The Stranger - Albert Camus



"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin." - The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.

If you had not written these, I was going to do so. I've always loved them.

[Sancho]

Down in a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to recollect, there lived, not long ago, one of those gentlemen who usually kept a lance upon a rack, an old buckler, a lean horse, and a coursing greyhound.

Don Quixote de La Mancha, Miguel Cervantes

En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor.

El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes Saaverdra

[iamnobody]

Rage-Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles-The Illiad

[Carla42]

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

I agree, that line is good, but as I was reading the book I kept thinking that if he said it once more, I wanted to see García Márquez facing a firing squad! The 12th time I read it I understood why the novel was so long :D

"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.