# Favorite opening lines in fiction. **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [May 9, 2005, 3:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/favorite-opening-lines-in-fiction/303070 "2005-05-09T15:52:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Little\_Bird](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/3ec8ea/32.png) [@Little\_Bird](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Bird)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2005, 3:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/favorite-opening-lines-in-fiction/303070/41 "2005-05-10T03:26:56Z")
_ **Little Bird** waits for her appology._ 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Sarah\_Woodruff](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/df788c/32.png) [@Sarah\_Woodruff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sarah_Woodruff)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2005, 4:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/favorite-opening-lines-in-fiction/303070/42 "2005-05-10T04:47:06Z")
> [@Ol'Gaffer](#): > > “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” > > _Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas_ by Hunter Thompson. > “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” > > _The Hobbit_ by Tolkien Aww! They’re my favourites, too! ---
**Author:** ![Hilarity\_N.Suze](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hilarity_n.suze/32/6223_2.png) [@Hilarity\_N.Suze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hilarity_N.Suze)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2005, 4:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/favorite-opening-lines-in-fiction/303070/43 "2005-05-10T04:54:39Z")
“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that comes down through the mountain passes and curls your hair and makes your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husband’s necks.” Okay, more than one line, from _Red Wind_ by Raymond Chandler “They killed the white girl first.” _Paradise_ Toni Morrison ---
**Author:** ![Rilchiam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/2bfe46/32.png) [@Rilchiam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rilchiam)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2005, 4:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/favorite-opening-lines-in-fiction/303070/44 "2005-05-10T04:58:50Z")
Not a **favorite** of mine, but: Sybil Davison has a genius I.Q. and has been laid by at least six different guys. —Judy Blume, _Forever_ Not a _great_ book either, but if there ever was an opening line that grabbed the readers attention and let you know that this ain’t your mama’s boy-meets-girl story, that is it. Okay, on to a real favorite: Scorpio is metaphysics, putrefaction and death, regeneration, passion, lust and violence, insight and profundity; inheritance, loss, occultism, astrology, borrowing and lending, other’s possessions. Scorpians are magicians, astrologers, alchemists, surgeons, bondsmen, and undertakers. The gem for Scorpio is the snakestone, the plant the cactus; eagles and wolves and scorpions are its creatures, its body part is the genitals, its weapon the Obligatory Pain, and its card in the Tarot is Death. —Ruth Rendell, _The Lake of Darkness_ Another one where I just **had** to read on. I started it in the right environment, too: late evening in November, in a house empty except for my babysitting charges. They never knew how many times I dashed upstairs to check on them _just in case_. ---
**Author:** ![Tracy\_Lord](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ec9cab/32.png) [@Tracy\_Lord](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tracy_Lord)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2005, 5:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/favorite-opening-lines-in-fiction/303070/45 "2005-05-10T05:17:27Z")
“If this typewriter can’t do it, then fuck it, it can’t be done.” – Tom Robbins, _Still Life With Woodpecker_. “We are at rest five miles behind the front.” – Erich Maria Remarque, _All Quiet On The Western Front_. Something about the conversational tone does it for me, as if the author’s sitting you down and telling you a story, in whatever words spring to mind. ---
**Author:** ![LissyLou](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/5daacb/32.png) [@LissyLou](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LissyLou)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2005, 6:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/favorite-opening-lines-in-fiction/303070/46 "2005-05-10T06:03:46Z")
I third _Owen Meany_! The part always that wrecks me, though, is the last line. I always cry. Lurker/Newbie ---
**Author:** ![fiddlesticks](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fiddlesticks/32/18129_2.png) [@fiddlesticks](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fiddlesticks)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2005, 6:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/favorite-opening-lines-in-fiction/303070/47 "2005-05-10T06:19:03Z")
My favorite, Marquez’s masterpiece, has already been mentioned, so I’ll mention my 2nd favorite: “He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.” – Don Delillo - _Underworld_ _Underworld_ wins hands down for the greatest opening chapter in history (even warranting its repacking into a standalone book _Pafko at the Wall_). Tom Clancy may have flattened a national forest for too little purpose, but his opener to _Patriot Games_: “Ryan was nearly killed twice in half an hour.” is a winner. ---
**Author:** ![Sarah\_Woodruff](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/df788c/32.png) [@Sarah\_Woodruff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sarah_Woodruff)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2005, 6:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/favorite-opening-lines-in-fiction/303070/48 "2005-05-10T06:19:20Z")
> [@Rilchiam](#): > > Okay, on to a real favorite: > > Scorpio is metaphysics, putrefaction and death, regeneration, passion, lust and violence, insight and profundity; inheritance, loss, occultism, astrology, borrowing and lending, other’s possessions. Scorpians are magicians, astrologers, alchemists, surgeons, bondsmen, and undertakers. The gem for Scorpio is the snakestone, the plant the cactus; eagles and wolves and scorpions are its creatures, its body part is the genitals, its weapon the Obligatory Pain, and its card in the Tarot is Death. > > —Ruth Rendell, _The Lake of Darkness_ Another one where I just **had** to read on. I started it in the right environment, too: late evening in November, in a house empty except for my babysitting charges. They never knew how many times I dashed upstairs to check on them _just in case_. Oh God, thats the freakiest Rendell I’ve read. I picked that book up one day in my last year of High School, in the midst of studying for an Ancient History exam on the Julio-Claudians. The book fell open to the quote on the first page: “Nero is an angler in the Lake of Darkness.” That sucked me right in. I was a bit of a Goth in HS. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Telperien](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/65b543/32.png) [@Telperien](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Telperien)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2005, 6:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/favorite-opening-lines-in-fiction/303070/49 "2005-05-10T06:24:11Z")
Two of my favorites: “The magic in that country was so thick and tenacious that it settled over the land like chalk-dust and over floors and shelves like slightly sticky plaster-dust.”–_Spindle’s End_ by Robin McKinley. Magic dust! I bet I’d be allergic. “I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him.”–_The Beekeeper’s Apprentice_ by Laurie R. King. As a die-hard fan of the Holmes canon, I suppose I should hate this book and its sequels but I just can’t. ---
**Author:** ![Dead\_Alive](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/7993a0/32.png) [@Dead\_Alive](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dead_Alive)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2005, 6:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/favorite-opening-lines-in-fiction/303070/50 "2005-05-10T06:43:13Z")
"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, _If on a winter’s night a traveller_. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, “No! I don’t want to watch TV!” From _If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler_, by Italo Calvino. My other favorites have already been mentioned: _Cien Años de Soledad_ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and _Lord of Light_ by Roger Zelazny. ---
**Author:** ![Larry\_Mudd](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/f14d63/32.png) [@Larry\_Mudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Larry_Mudd)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2005, 6:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/favorite-opening-lines-in-fiction/303070/51 "2005-05-10T06:53:04Z")
No one surpasses Joyce for grabbing the reader from the get-go. I can’t choose between the big two: "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. " 
or the incomparable “riverrun, past Eve’s and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to **H** owth **C** astle and **E** nvirons.” Virginia Woolf’s _Orlando_ begins memorably, too: “He – for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it – was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.” There’s also a special place in my heart for the first line of Jane Austen’s _Sense and Sensibility_: “The family of Dashwood had been long settled in the Sussex.” Mundane enough, but the aliteration is beautiful. And of course Ray Bradbury’s _Fahrenheit 451_: “It was a pleasure to burn.” And
 and
 oh crap, that’s probably too many already. ---
**Author:** ![Dunderman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ecb155/32.png) [@Dunderman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dunderman)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2005, 7:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/favorite-opening-lines-in-fiction/303070/52 "2005-05-10T07:08:13Z")
My all-time favourite is from Ray Bradbury’s _Something Wicked This Way Comes_: “First of all it was October, a good month for boys.” That is pure genius. _First of all_ - OK, sit down, grab a cup of whatever, you’re going to hear a story now. Ready? _it was October_ - Yellow and brown leaves on the trees, cool winds, graying clouds, life in neutral. _a good month_ - Why is it good? What’s so good about October? What are the bad months? _for boys_ - This is a story about boys. Get into the boy mindset immediately, 'cause now we’re going tripping through a world of running home from school and climbing trees. And, of course, Bradbury goes on to explain exactly why October is such a good month for boys, and what the bad months are, and why they’re bad, and what the other good months are and why they’re good. By then, you’re stuck. Another favourite is Selma Lagerlöfs from _Gösta Berlings Saga_: “Äntligen stod prĂ€sten i predikstolen”, or, to put it in a language the majority of you will understand: “Finally, the priest stood in the pulpet”. That is a truly amazing opener. In five words she conveys where we are, what’s going on, and that something weird is going on. Why was the priest late? Where has he been? What is he about to say? Just from reading that sentence, you want to stay and hear what the priest has to say for himself. ---
**Author:** ![Dunderman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ecb155/32.png) [@Dunderman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dunderman)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2005, 8:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/favorite-opening-lines-in-fiction/303070/53 "2005-05-10T08:26:46Z")
If comics count, I’d like to add the opener from the _Preacher_ one-shot Tall in the Saddle: “They were young and carefree and stupid and utterly in love in those days, and everything was going fine until you-know-who dug in his big Texan heels and opened his big Texan mouth and said – I ain’t stealing no horses.” ---
**Author:** ![Abe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f1d935/32.png) [@Abe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Abe)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2005, 9:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/favorite-opening-lines-in-fiction/303070/54 "2005-05-10T09:47:09Z")
From memory, but I think it;s accurate: “The sky was the colour of a dead television set.” William Gibson’s _Neuromancer_, of course. I’m surprised that one hasn’t come up already. “It was a dark and stormy night;” is the beginning of _Paul Clifford_ by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton. The 1830 novel’s beginning sentence has become the de facto trumpet call for bad writing, and it is never even quoted in full. The full quote, just so you get the idea why it is derided so, is: “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.” ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2005, 10:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/favorite-opening-lines-in-fiction/303070/55 "2005-05-10T10:15:55Z")
> [@Abe](#): > > From memory, but I think it;s accurate: > > “The sky was the colour of a dead television set.” > > William Gibson’s _Neuromancer_, of course. I’m surprised that one hasn’t come up already. More like: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel” -pity tech has caught up and now the colour of a dead channel is blue, talk about inversion of meaning. Mine is : “When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton” You read it and then you go “Eleventy-what?”. ---
**Author:** ![mamboman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ecb155/32.png) [@mamboman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mamboman)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2005, 10:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/favorite-opening-lines-in-fiction/303070/56 "2005-05-10T10:52:10Z")
“On the fifteenth of May, in the jungle of Nool, In the heat of the day, in the cool of the pool” - _Horton Hears A Who_. Just beautiful. mm ---
**Author:** ![Scissorjack](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c67d28/32.png) [@Scissorjack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scissorjack)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2005, 10:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/favorite-opening-lines-in-fiction/303070/57 "2005-05-10T10:54:07Z")
“Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.” Albert Camus, _The Outsider {L’Etranger}_ “Hughes got it wrong, in one important detail. You will have read, in _Tom Brown_, how I was expelled from Rugby school for drunkenness, which is true enough, but when Hughes alleges that this was the result of my deliberately pouring beer on top of gin-punch, he is in error. I knew better than to to mix my drinks, even at seventeen.” George MacDonald Fraser, _Flashman_ And, because someone has to: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like and how my parents were occupied and is anyone really reading this and all before they had me, and all that _David Copperfield_ kind of crap, but I don’t feel lke going into it, if you want to know the truth.” Oh, go on, guess. ---
**Author:** ![griffen2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/ce7236/32.png) [@griffen2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffen2)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2005, 12:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/favorite-opening-lines-in-fiction/303070/58 "2005-05-10T12:14:03Z")
My favourite is the opening line to Brighton Rock by Graham Greene. “Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to kill him”. It’s such an amazing hook because it poses five questions in the space of 16 words that the reader is compelled to find the answer to. Who is Hale? Who are “they”? Why do they want to kill him? How did he know? What happened in those three hours? ---
**Author:** ![Abe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f1d935/32.png) [@Abe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Abe)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2005, 3:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/favorite-opening-lines-in-fiction/303070/59 "2005-05-10T15:20:00Z")
Thanks **MrDibble** , you can probably tell my copy of _Neuromancer_ is out at the moment. _Dune_, however, is right here: “In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.” And so much by Ballard is addictive from the first sentence. Here’s one of my favourites, _The Voices of Time_, although pretty much anything else by him will yield interesting beginnings: “Later Powers often thought of Whitby, and the strange grooves the biologist had cut, apparently at random, all over the floor of the empty swimming pool.” ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Krebbs](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5fc32e/32.png) [@Mr.Krebbs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Krebbs)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2005, 3:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/favorite-opening-lines-in-fiction/303070/60 "2005-05-10T15:42:05Z")
**Ukulele Ike** , unfortunately, I’ve only gotten a chance to read O’Connell’s The Skin Palace (my favorite of his), Box Nine, and Word Made Flesh. I will, however, be picking up Wireless sooner instead of later, seeing as you’ve given it a high compliment. It’s too bad you can’t find any of O’Connell’s works in a bookstore; he deserves a better following than two guys on a message board 😉 > [@](#): > > Originally postedby **Case Sensitive** > > “Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.” Not to detract from how excellent Stuart Gilbert’s translation of The Stranger is, but I prefer the Matthew Ward translation which renders the first two sentences to: “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.” In the translator’s note, Ward states the following: > [@](#): > > No sentence in French literature in English translation is better known than the opening sentence of _The Stranger_. It has become a sacred cow of sorts, and I have changed it. In his notebooks Camus recorded the observation that “the curious feeling the son has for his mother constitutes _all_ his sensibility.” And Sartre, in his “Explication de _L’Etranger_,” goes out of his way to point out Meursault’s use of the child’s word “Maman” when speaking of his mother. To use the more removed, adult “Mother” is, I believe, to change the nature of Meursault’s curious feeling for her. It is to change his very sensibility. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/favorite-opening-lines-in-fiction/303070.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/favorite-opening-lines-in-fiction/303070.md?page=4)