Thread: Great Opening Sentences

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.

Originally Posted by carlmaloschneider

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

If the mail wasn't so slow I would send you my copy. But maybe that is a good sign, because in my opinion don't waste your time reading it.

Originally Posted by 32t

If the mail wasn't so slow I would send you my copy. But maybe that is a good sign, because in my opinion don't waste your time reading it.

Actually I got a copy (pdf) of the 'net, a Chinese web site I think. I'm reading it now...

John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. First he visited his wife's grave. Then he joined the army.

old man's war
John Scalzi

Originally Posted by grizli

John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. First he visited his wife's grave. Then he joined the army.

old man's war
John Scalzi

Gotta find that. I posted an idea here a while ago that all soldiers should be over 75. I thought it was an original thought, inspired by al the sad photos of young soldiers someone had posted in the old B7w photos thread. I was saddened by the loss of young lives and the lives never lived. I thought if all soldiers had to be 75+ it would slow things down a bit and at least they've already LIVED their lives. I though it was my own thought, but then someone said it was already thought of (There is nothing new under the sun)...

I was a bit sad it wasn't my thought...

The Go Between (LP Hartley)

"The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there"

"Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened. First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. This forest eats itself and lives forever."

The opening lines from The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.

The whole book is that we'll-written. An absolute masterpiece!

PART ONE
. . . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.

Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.

Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

1

A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world. Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas. The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cut-purse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.

The opening paragraphs of Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, his sprawling epic set in my hometown of Asheville, NC

"May the swartz be with you."

"It was a pleasure to burn."

Farenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury