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."
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."
"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
The first line of Puckoon (from memory)...
I lifted the lid of the dustbin and looked out.
Last edited by MarkBastable; 07-21-2010 at 10:36 AM.
Girl Meets Boy, by Ali Smith.
"Let me tell you about when I was a girl," my grandfather says.
__________________
"Personal note: When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six, I did. At first the brightness was overwhelming, but I had seen that before. I kept looking, forcing myself not to blink, and then the brightness began to dissolve. My pupils shrunk to pinholes and everything came into focus and for a moment I understood. The doctors didn't know if my eyes would ever heal."
-Pi
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.
'For sale: baby shoes, never worn'. Hemingway
"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.
"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."
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.
"L'art de la statistique est de tirer des conclusions erronèes a partir de chiffres exacts." Napoléon Bonaparte.
"Je crois que beaucoup de gens sont dans cet état d’esprit: au fond, ils ne sentent pas concernés par l’Histoire. Mais pourtant, de temps à autre, l’Histoire pose sa main sur eux." Michel Houellebecq.
"Mother died today, or maybe yesterday I don't remember"
The Stranger - Albert Camus
Latest Blog: An Impassioned and Immediate Response to Dan Hodges, Political Writer, Daily Telegraph.
http://britishpharaoh.wordpress.com/
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
Uhhhh...
Originally Posted by Patrick_Bateman
If you had not written these, I was going to do so. I've always loved them.
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
Uhhhh...
Rage-Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles-The Illiad
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
