“He was one hundred and seventy days dying, and not yet dead.”
First sentence of The Stars My Destination.
I loved that book. I wish I knew what’s become of my copy.
Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex. I think the line is different in the Japanese, which I watched first, but this is still my favorite line in the series, and both versions of it are good. The English is better though
In the first episode, Batou chases down a cyborg and gets him into a headlock. The cyborg smiles, spazzes and then goes limp. Batou looks at the back of his neck to see a device attached there (turns out he wiped his own memory). He looks up at Pazu and Bouma, gives a goofy smile and says “I think he broke”.
The Unexpected Dragon trilogy. The first line was what got me in this book–“My mother was the village whore and I loved her very much.” How can you not read a book with that opening?
And a personal favorite, from Waiting for the Galactic Bus:
Yeshua-“What is this White Jesus nonsense? They’ve spent two thousand years turning me into something out of Oxford or a Tennessee Bible College. Both my parents were Hebrews, I look like an Arab, spent all my life in the desert, and if they let me into of of their nice ‘white’ restaurants at all, I’d get the table by the kitchen door. What do these people want?”
Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora, when the main character says, “Creeping shits, man, don’t *do * that.”
I love creative obscenity. By the way, fantasy readers, if you haven’t read this yet, do. It’s awesome.
It took that long? I was hooked from the first Haiku ending with “tires.”
It took that long. I tried reading it once, and got as far as Lawrence Getting Propositioned by Turing. And it was doing nothing for me.
But I’d heard how great the book was, and how it was right up my geeky alley. So I had to try again. And the start was again rocky (now having read the book twice in full, I appreciate it setting the story, but it’s still not the most interesting to me. Bobby Shaftoe escaping Shanghai through the snow of cheap money printed on newspapers, Lawrence showing a love for church organs and drifting obliviously into brilliant company at college, it was all great, but not great.) I can’t get hooked (though Turing’s fumbling proposition involving penises was rather amusing). However, enter Pearl Harbor, and soon after the brilliant lunacy of Shoen and his naked-assed robe, and the story really starts rolling.