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."
Printable View
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."
The first line of Puckoon (from memory)...
I lifted the lid of the dustbin and looked out.
Girl Meets Boy, by Ali Smith.
"Let me tell you about when I was a girl," my grandfather says.
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
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
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.
'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.
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.
"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.
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.
"Mother died today, or maybe yesterday I don't remember"
The Stranger - Albert Camus
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
Quote:
Originally Posted by Patrick_Bateman
If you had not written these, I was going to do so. I've always loved them.Quote:
Originally Posted by Gregory Samsa
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
Rage-Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles-The Illiad