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"
"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
"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
Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!
"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
"I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult."
~E.B. White
"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!"
"I should only believe in a God that would know how to dance. And when I saw my devil, I found him serious, thorough, profound, solemn: he was the spirit of gravity- through him all things fall. Not by wrath, but by laughter, do we slay. Come, let us slay the spirit of gravity!" - Nietzsche
I agree.Originally Posted by cgrillo
"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.
"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.
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.'It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.'
" A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now." Gravity's Rainbow Thomas Pynchon
"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."
''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.''
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.
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore
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
"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.
There is hope, but not for us.
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.
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