Thread: Great Opening Sentences

Simple, but if you've never heard it before it pulls you in to find out more. And if you have read it before, it gets you excited to start the adventure.

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

-The Hobbit
J.R.R. Tolkien

Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don't know.
-The Stranger, Albert Camus

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

Ulysses
James Joyce

It's translated in various ways, but I like this one:

"Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from fitful dreams to find he had been transformed into a giant beetle."

Kafka, The Metamorphosis

Also:
"In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing."

A River Runs Through It, Norman MacLean

"You boys gonna pull those pistols or whistle Dixie"

I think the best way to tell the story is by starting at the end, briefly, then going back to the beginning, and then periodically returning to the end, maybe giving different characters' perspectives throughout. Just to give it a bit of dynamism, otherwise it's just sort of a linear story.

David Ershon in The Other Guys

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains."

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Jane Austin and Seth Grahame-Smith (2009).

And, my all-time favourite:

Once upon a midnight dreary, as I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

And the next sentence is pretty awesome too:

`'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door -
Only this, and nothing more.'

The Raven Edgar Allen Poe

James.

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.

Cannery Row - John Steinbeck

Originally Posted by possumbelly

The whole book is like that. Snippets of information buried away amongst other details. The "firing squad" business in the first line is just left behind while you move on to other things. Many pages later something adds to it and you gradually piece things together.

I'll have to get the book, sounds excellent.

I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "pay out" the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well--let it get worse!

Notes from the Underground
Feodor Dostoevsky