Effective Opening Lines

[AnthonyDavid11]

An opening line of a novel is often effective when it brings up a question. This of course, spurns the reader to keep moving forward to get that question answered. I do, feel, however, that an opening line doesn't have to be memorable. Just because readers aren't walking around the coffee shop quoting an effective first line doesn't mean the opening line is not effective in drawing the reader in. We've all read "It was the best of times. It was the worst of times." However, so many novels draw us in with opening lines that serve their purpose even if we forget them.

"Maman died today." The Stranger, Albert Camus.

This line doesn't raise a question as to who has died, but instead gives us the feeling that the writer has just lost his mother and doesn't feel a whole lot about it. This sets the perfect tone for this existential work.

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

The clocks are striking thirteen? Obviously something is very wrong here. And the fact that it's a cold day in April throws us a bit too. While April can sometimes have cold days, I know that generally I think of April as a warmer, happy month when nature is coming back to life.

These are two very famous lines of course, but I'd like to use this thread for us to all share some opening lines we find effective, even if they are not memorable. After all, this is what makes people read books.

Feel free to share some lines that drew you in and I will do the same. Happy posting!

[AnthonyDavid11]

"You just got out of jail? Seriously?" Shady Cross, James Hankins

This raises curiosity from the outset. Someone just got out of jail but who? What were they in jail for? Is it the protagonist or is the protagonist asking the question? Lots of good questions built into this one.

[Pompey Bum]

"Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John."

--Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

[El Entenado]

"Call me Ishmael." Moby-Dick

I guess it's not as effective if you don't read the next sentence, which is a very big sentence, right after that. But I find this really memorable. Sometimes I get the urge to answer people's questions with "Call me Ishmael".

[Pompey Bum]

"Call me Ishmael." Moby-Dick

I guess it's not as effective if you don't read the next sentence, which is a very big sentence, right after that. But I find this really memorable. Sometimes I get the urge to answer people's questions with "Call me Ishmael".

It's a chummy, disarming, and rather proletarian greeting. At the same time, it could suggest his name isn't really Ishmael, but you may as well call him that. This contributes to his characterization as a rather anonymous working class rambler (since the Biblical Ishmael was also a wanderer). But actually the first line in Moby-Dick is: "The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now." Somehow that one didn't catch on

"Marley was dead to begin with."

--Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

A fantastic first line that launches the action of the ghost story and subtly comments on what Marley was like in life (that is, already dead inside).

[Clopin]

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

I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. - Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (mostly because the advice is actually pretty good)

Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. - Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum

[Pompey Bum]

"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."

--Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Let me save you some time. It turns out to be him.

[Danik 2016]

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."
Kafka, The Metamorphosis

[Pompey Bum]

"A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment."

--Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

A sentimental favorite of Monty Python fans everywhere.

[Pompey Bum]

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

--Jane Austen, Pide and Prejudice

I don't know, women's book clubs seem to like it.

[El Entenado]

It's a chummy, disarming, and rather proletarian greeting. At the same time, it could suggest his name isn't really Ishmael, but you may as well call him that. This contributes to his characterization as a rather anonymous working class rambler (since the Biblical Ishmael was also a wanderer). But actually the first line in Moby-Dick is: "The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now." Somehow that one didn't catch on

"Marley was dead to begin with."

--Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

A fantastic first line that launches the action of the ghost story and subtly comments on what Marley was like in life (that is, already dead inside).

I suppose I didn't consider pages numbered with Roman numerals as part of the book. Ha!

[Red Terror]

An opening line of a novel is often effective when it brings up a question. This of course, spurns the reader to keep moving forward to get that question answered. I do, feel, however, that an opening line doesn't have to be memorable. Just because readers aren't walking around the coffee shop quoting an effective first line doesn't mean the opening line is not effective in drawing the reader in. We've all read "It was the best of times. It was the worst of times." However, so many novels draw us in with opening lines that serve their purpose even if we forget them.

"Maman died today." The Stranger, Albert Camus.

This line doesn't raise a question as to who has died, but instead gives us the feeling that the writer has just lost his mother and doesn't feel a whole lot about it. This sets the perfect tone for this existential work.

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

The clocks are striking thirteen? Obviously something is very wrong here. And the fact that it's a cold day in April throws us a bit too. While April can sometimes have cold days, I know that generally I think of April as a warmer, happy month when nature is coming back to life.

These are two very famous lines of course, but I'd like to use this thread for us to all share some opening lines we find effective, even if they are not memorable. After all, this is what makes people read books.

Feel free to share some lines that drew you in and I will do the same. Happy posting!

Orwell means that the society of Oceania is on military time--- thirteen hundred hours. 13 or 1 o'clock is 1 hour afternoon. Orwell means that Oceania is being run by militarists and not by civilian politicians.

What's it going to be then, eh? --- A Clockwork Orange

This line is repeated in the novel and, of course, is the first line of the book. It evokes the central theme of the novel that human beings have a choice(s) and free will in this world. Interesting ...


(from Richard III, spoken by Gloucester)


Now is the winter of our discontent


Made glorious summer by this sun of York;


And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house


In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.



http://americanbookreview.org/100bestlines.asp

They're out there.
Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them.

(by the Chief -- the paranoid narrator of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest)

[Danik 2016]

“Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.”Clarice Lispector,The Hour Of The Star

[Lokasenna]

"Early one June morning in 1872 I murdered my father - an act which made a deep impression on me at the time." - Ambrose Bierce, An Imperfect Conflagration

This opening line demonstrates everything I love about Bierce - the wry, knowing, cynical misanthropy. It speaks volumes.

[mortalterror]

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
Mother died today. -Albert Camus, The Stranger
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. -Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
In the town they tell the story of the great pearl- how it was found and how it was lost again. -John Steinbeck, The Pearl
Amerigo Bonasera sat in New York Criminal Court Number 3 and waited for justice; vengeance on the men who had so cruelly hurt his daughter, who had tried to dishonor her. -Mario Puzo, The Godfather
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. -Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. -Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
If you really want to hear abot 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. -J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

[mortalterror]

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
Mother died today. -Albert Camus, The Stranger
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. -Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
In the town they tell the story of the great pearl- how it was found and how it was lost again. -John Steinbeck, The Pearl
Amerigo Bonasera sat in New York Criminal Court Number 3 and waited for justice; vengeance on the men who had so cruelly hurt his daughter, who had tried to dishonor her. -Mario Puzo, The Godfather
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. -Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. -Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
If you really want to hear abot 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. -J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
-Shakespeare, Henry V

Arms and the man I sing, who, forced by fate
And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate,
Expelled and exiled, left the Trojan shore.
-Virgil, Aeneid

Anger be now your song, immortal one,
Akhilleus’ anger, doomed and ruinous,
that caused the Akhaians loss on bitter loss
and crowded brave souls into the undergloom,
leaving so many dead men — carrion
for dogs and birds; and the will of Zeus was done.
-Homer, The Iliad

[Jackson Richardson]

Arms and the man I sing, who, forced by fate
And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate,
Expelled and exiled, left the Trojan shore.
-Virgil, Aeneid


In the excellent John Dryden's translation.

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

The Towers of Trebizond Rose Macaulay 1956.

As I remember, the rest of the books isn't as gripping as the opening line.

[Pompey Bum]

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

--Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford

Just in case you were wondering what attributes the night had besides darkness. Some consider this the worst opening line in literature (but judge for yourself). "It was a dark and stormy night" was also the first line of the book Snoopy was perennially typing.

[Ecurb]

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

--Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford

Just in case you were wondering what attributes the night had besides darkness. Some consider this the worst opening line in literature (but judge for yourself). "It was a dark and stormy night" was also the first line of the book Snoopy was perennially typing.

It is also the first line of "A Wrinkle in Time", L'Engle's wink, presumably, at the joke.

[Jackson Richardson]

Thinking of John Dryden, a great poet almost ignored here, as well as his transations of Virgil, he wrote original satires, and Absalom and Achitophel certainly has a memorable opening:

In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin
Before polygamy was made a sin,
When man on many multiplied his kind
Ere one to one was cursedly confined...

The reference is to Dryden's patron, Charles II, here compared to King David. Charles had many children but none by his wife. Dryden's own marriage was believed to be unhappy.

[Red Terror]

Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower by William Blum

This book could be entitled: Serial chain-saw baby killers and the women who love them.

The women don’t really believe that their beloved would do such a thing, even if they’re shown a severed limb or a headless torso. Or if they believe it, they know down to their bone marrow that lover-boy really had the best of intentions; it must have been some kind of very unfortunate accident, a well-meaning blunder; in fact, even more likely, it was an act of humanitarianism.


For 70 years, the United States convinced much of the world that there was an international conspiracy out there. An International Communist Conspiracy, seeking no less than control over the entire planet, for purposes which had no socially redeeming values. And the world was made to believe that it somehow needed the United States to save it from communist darkness. "Just buy our weapons," said Washington, "let our military and our corporations roam freely across your land, and give us veto power over whom your leaders will be, and we'll protect you."

It was the cleverest protection racket since men convinced women that they needed men to protect them -- if all the men vanished overnight, how many women would be afraid to walk the streets?

And if the people of any foreign land were benighted enough to not realize that they needed to be saved, if they failed to appreciate the underlying nobility of American motives, they were warned that they would burn in Communist Hell. Or a CIA facsimile thereof. And they would be saved nonetheless.

A decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, America is still saving countries and peoples from one danger or another. The scorecard reads as follows: From 1945 to the end of the century, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign govemments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements struggling against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair.

[Jackson Richardson]

I do wonder about the 70s feminist thesis that all military violence is male. There have been lots of examples of women encouraging war - too young to remember the Falklands, Red?

Or this World War 1 clip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTJXwOs2_bA

And I hope to God the USA has its first woman president later this year, because of the alternative, but I doubt whether peace will break out all over the world as a result.

[Jackson Richardson]

Or another clip from O What a Lovely War with Maggie Smith camping it up in this frightening recruiting song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x308MIPPUyA

which shows women using their sexuality to advance war.

[Red Terror]

Or another clip from O What a Lovely War with Maggie Smith camping it up in this frightening recruiting song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x308MIPPUyA

which shows women using their sexuality to advance war.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQBWGo7pef8

[Pompey Bum]

Um, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"?

[prendrelemick]

Here are two I remember - so they must be effective.


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

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 by Sylvia Plath

[Pompey Bum]

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

Of course she meant: "Last night I dreamt I went to lay a man again," but you couldn't talk like that in those days.

I always liked "One never knows when the blow will fall" from Graham Greene's The Third Man. It has nothing to do with the rest of the novel, but it is sort of suspenseful.

[Ecurb]

"In the second century of the Christian era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind."

Gibbon's first paragraph is a classic, and the opening line, perhaps, doesn't quite do it justice. But when you read it you know you're in for a wild, but elegant, ride.

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Hmmm. You don't get any better than that.

"WHO does not know Turner’s picture of the Golden Bough? The scene, suffused with the golden glow of imagination in which the divine mind of Turner steeped and transfigured even the fairest natural landscape, is a dream-like vision of the little woodland lake of Nemi— “Diana’s Mirror,” as it was called by the ancients."

OK, Frazer's opening line doesn't quite do justice to his opening paragraph, but it's still good.

p.s. I just realized the OP was about novels -- sorry.

[Jackson Richardson]

Of course she meant: "Last night I dreamt I went to lay a man again," but you couldn't talk like that in those days.


Rubbish. The anonymous narrator is emotionally totally dependent on her husband and spends the entire book jealous of Rebecca his first wife.

Not least of the clever structural points of the novel is how it begins and ends with Mandalay - at the opening as a dream to introduce the story in flashback and at the very close with the fire in the sky at a distance as Mandalay goes up in flames. Rebecca is exorcised but Max is now exiled.

The Gibbon line is good, too.

[Jackson Richardson]

Although Kipling in "The Road to Mandalay" probably did intend that regrettable connotation.

How about the opening of Anthony Burgess' Earthly Powers?

"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."

[Pompey Bum]

Rubbish. The anonymous narrator is emotionally totally dependent on her husband and spends the entire book jealous of Rebecca his first wife.

It was just wordplay, JR. Who took the jam out of your donut?

"The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation."

--Donna Tartt, The Secret History

[Jackson Richardson]

It was just wordplay, JR. Who took the jam out of your donut?

I took it you were making a comment on Rebecca albeit in a frivolous form and I responded.

I've not been short of posting smut on this thread with lines from Dryden and Burgess and a clip of Maggie Smith's double entendre.

[Pompey Bum]

I took it you were making a comment on Rebecca albeit in a frivolous form and I responded.

Your implicit apology is graciously accepted.


I've not been short of posting smut on this thread with lines from Dryden and Burgess and a clip of Maggie Smith's double entendre.

Take it to the Limerick thread, pal.

"My father, unlike so many of the men he served with, knew just what he wanted to do when the war was over. He wanted to drink and whore and play the horses."

--Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

[prendrelemick]

The trouble with some first lines is you have a sense the author (at the publisher's request) is trying too hard to think of something shocking or pithy and never mind if it matches the rest of the story. That's why the second Mrs de Winter's line is so good. It is simple. It hints at her character -dreamy, romantic a bit boring - the sort of woman for whom proper conversation is difficult, so resorts to comparing dreams. It also has unexplained elements, and a hint of wistfulnes so you know a good yarn is in the offing. But what I like the most is the seeming effortlessness with which it seems to have rolled from her pen. It is the right line.

[Pompey Bum]

Well, I like shocking and pithy myself, but to each his own. What is this Mrs. de Winter line? I can't seem to find it.

[Jackson Richardson]

What is this Mrs. de Winter line? I can't seem to find it.


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

[Pompey Bum]

Oh, of course. Never bothered with Rebecca and hated the movie. It's a good first line, I suppose, although "The rats had picked Rebecca's skeleton clean and were eyeing me appraisingly" would have made me care enough to read a bit more.

[Pompey Bum]

My father told me this was his favorite opening line:

"It came down this: if I had not been arrested by the Turkish police, I would have been arrested by the Greek police."

--Eric Ambler, The Light of Day

[Jackson Richardson]

Oh, of course. Never bothered with Rebecca and hated the movie.

Books and movies are different beasts.

I remember LOL at the film when the sinister Mrs Danvers shows the second wife Rebecca's knickers and solemnly intones "Her underwear was all hand stitched by nuns."

Prendrelmick is inspiring me to read the book again.

[prendrelemick]

Oh, of course. Never bothered with Rebecca and hated the movie. It's a good first line, I suppose, although "The rats had picked Rebecca's skeleton clean and were eyeing me appraisingly" would have made me care enough to read a bit more.

Naw, trying too hard. You're starting a book not selling toothpaste.

Mind you, you're not too far off the actual plot there.

[Pompey Bum]

Mind you, you're not too far off the actual plot there.

Heh. Maybe I WILL read it.

"It was Wang Lung's marriage day."

Paralleled by the first line in the last chapter:

"Wang Lung lay dying."

--Pearl Buck, The Good Earth

[Jackson Richardson]

I expect this is more to Ecurb's taste than Pompey's, but I like the opening of Samuel Johnson's only novel Rasselas. There's a poignant contrast between the magisterial balance of the prose style and a sad sense of realism.

Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow, attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.

[prendrelemick]

oops double post

[prendrelemick]

Another of my favourites is this from Lorna Doone.

"If anybody cares to read a simple tale told simply, I, John ____, of the parish of Oare, in the county of Somerset, yeoman and churchwarden, have seen and had a share in some doings of this neighborhood, which I will try to set down in order, God sparing my life and memory."

If only more writers would just do that.

[Pompey Bum]

Another of my favourites is this from Lorna Doone.

"If anybody cares to read a simple tale told simply, I, John ____, of the parish of Oare, in the county of Somerset, yeoman and churchwarden, have seen and had a share in some doings of this neighborhood, which I will try to set down in order, God sparing my life and memory."

If only more writers would just do that.

...they would sell a lot fewer books. :)

Love the cookies, though.

[Ecurb]

"I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane..."

Nabokov, Pale Fire (That's if you discount the "forward", which begins in more prosaic fashion).

"

[Pompey Bum]

See Dick.

--Fun with Dick and Jane

[Pompey Bum]

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

--V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

[Jackson Richardson]

I haven't read Harriette Wilson's Memoirs and they aren't a novel, but she knew how to put over an arresting opening line:

I shall not say why and how I became, at the age of fifteen, the mistress of the Earl of Craven.

[Pompey Bum]

Did she really have to say how? :)

"There is a spectre haunting Europe--the spectre of Communism."

--Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles, The Communist Manifesto