What's your favorite first line?

There are only two first lines that I can recite from memory: Don Quixote's and García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Don Quixote's I memorized only because I studied hispanic literature and how could you not know that first sentence? The second one, I know because I simply love the book. It is the only book that I have read five times. If I had not read that book, my love for literature would have never been born. So, I did not memorize the line, I know it by heart in both English and Spanish. Oh, and what a last line too! But that's another topic...

"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."

Oh Jeez! Now we all gotta read that book! And what is the last line? (Don't do that to us!)

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Originally Posted by Sitaram

Oh Jeez! Now we all gotta read that book! And what is the last line? (Don't do that to us!)

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Actually, it's not the last line so much as it is the ending...a perfect circle.

i like the first sentence in jane austen's pride and prejudice:it' a truth universally acknoledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune,must be in want of a wife.it is really a clever and rather impressive opening sentence,and it is also a concise summary of the whole plot.

i like first sentence of THE ART OF LIVING by a chines author, it is,
DISCONTENT IS DIVINE.

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Originally Posted by Lara

There are two first lines that stand out in my mind. One comes from a book that, oddly enough, I have never read, but it is famous:

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, starts off, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

and, as simple as it is, I do like Herman Melvilles, "Call me Ishmael."

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I have to agree with you on this one! I loved A Tale of Two Cities! I reccomend that you read it! I just remember a funny line from "3rd Rock from the Sun" when Dick is told to read more, and he picks up this book and he reads this sentence and says, "Well if he can't make up his mind in the first sentence I'm not going to bother reading it!" Was really funny, but this book is really good, definately one of my favourites and it was all thanks to that first paragraph that I kept on reading!

I like the first sentence in Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies: I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all.

Okay, I know, this comes from a poem, but I can never stop loving John Keats' first sentence to Endymion:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

I like the opening sentence to Anna Karenina: All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way..

I find it so beautiful and simple...

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this 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 scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scru- tinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

"This is what happened."

Stephen King's "Mist" from the collection of short stories "Skeleton Crew"

My other favorite that someone else already mentioned is from Catcher in The Rye. Let's you know right from the start this guy's got problems.

:goof: I finally managed to remember and decide two of my faviorate first lines ever
the opening to The Turmoil by Booth Tarkington (1915 and avialable online)

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There is a midland city in the heart of fair, open country, a dirty
and wonderful city nesting dingily in the fog of its own smoke.

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dont you just love that line??
and The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett

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No man knew when the Shuttle began its slow and
heavy weaving from shore to shore, that it was held
and guided by the great hand of Fate.

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also avilable online.

Lara, dickens does it every time for opening sentences. "Jacob Marley was dead to begin with, dead as a dornail." I'm sure we all know which book this is. But what an eiry and somewhat hilariously morbid opening, i don't know if I should be laughing or creeped out at that. Merry Christmas

From Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place:"

It was very late and everyone had left the cafe except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. It was dusty, but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference.

A master of nuance...

The first sentence does set the stage for the rest of the book.

(i.e. in Shelly's Frankenstein)

"You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanies the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings."

Of course, taken out of context, this sentence is really about the whole book. However, it is neither the Monster nor Victor Frankenstein himself who says this, but a sailor, who picked up Victor, writing to his sister, talking about his own supposed disaster. Each circle, in the book, if you will, relates the another story, or circle. As you leave the center of the story (a story trapped in a story trapped in a story), the 'right' and 'wrong' thing to do becomes more and more unclear. Morality becomes unclear. But, I suppose, I've strayed a little off of the original topic of a snatching first sentence. There is no use speaking of DeLacy, Victor, and the Monster, when they haven't even been introduced yet. To be fair, even Walton hasn't been introdueced yet, and he is the current speaker! Oh my.