As a reader, it’s always wonderful to see a great opening line in a novel. It gives some assurance that the book you’re delving into will be worth reading. As a wannabe writer, I would like to read some opening lines that have proved memorable to Dopers. I’m particularly interested in anything shocking, profound, weird or just plain interesting.
I would like to limit this to fiction with some literary merit, as opposed to genre fiction. But a good first sentence is a good first sentence, whatever genre it falls under, so let’s not make that an absolute. Please include the title and author of the book, and why you’re fond of it.
Anyway, here’s mine:
“You are hearing the screams of a small, fat man.” - Word Made Flesh by Jack O’Connell
This is my favorite line I’ve read in that it is delivered in first person, to the audience. This novel practically throws the reader into the fray, and this first line not only sets the tone of the novel well, it leaves the reader asking, “Wtf is going on, here?”
Unfortunately, O’Connell dispenses with the first-person narration after the prologue and the first several chapters of the book are lame and cliched by comparison. Word Made Flesh isn’t O’Connell’s best work, but it’s still pretty damn good.
John Shooter accuses Mort Rainey of plagerism. Shooter wakes Rainey up from a nap with this line, and the reader is just as comfused as Rainey is at the start of the story.
This, of course, is from Stephen King’s *Secret Window, Secret Garden[/.] Ibsen it ain’t, but enjoyable.
"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. " 1984 by George Orwell. It seems almost absurd and really helps to twist the readers mind to get ready for the rest of the book.
From Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House:
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”
“Many years later, as he sood facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
The opening lines of *Cien Años de Soledad * by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One sentence in, and you already know you’re in for a few hundred pages of flashback before you find out why Buendia is being executed, but you can’t put it down anymore.
Holy crap! So YOU’RE the one other person on the planet who’s read Jack O’Connell! Wasn’t Wireless amazing?
Me, I’m going to pick the line I always choose for this particular game, from the private eye novel The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley (1978):
“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”
Dangit, I was gonna say this one too. Except I was going to say, “Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo.” The first chapter of that book is one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever run across in literature.
I’m also rather fond of “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” There’s something so delightfully self-assured about it.
