Thread: Great Opening Sentences

Originally Posted by Oakeshott

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

Excellent, I love Kafka. I like this translation, all the commas, bits building and building:

One morning, upon awakening from agitated dreams, Gregor Samsa fund himself, in his bed, transformed into a monstrous vermin.

Some great opening lines there everyone!

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."

HST, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." – William Gibson, Neuromancer.

"When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again." Henry David Thoreau- Walden

PERHAPS the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not YET sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason. Thomas Paine-Common Sense

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instill is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius. Ralph Waldo Emerson- Self Reliance

In a semester full of Marxist, Left Wing Indoctrination and Post-Modernist, nihilist panther piss, these guys (along with John Locke, Adam Smith, Nietzsche and Mark Levin) literally talked me off the ledge. Without the brief respite of rational thought I would have most certainly turned into a tower sniper. There's probably guys that spent 7 years in the Hanoi Hilton that got less Communist propaganda than I've received this semester. Damn hippies are taking over the world! No worries though, Summer semester is a teaching class and a creative writing-poetry class so the fun stuff is on the way.

Amazing Revalation: I just referred to Nietzsche as a respite in rational thought. Just goes to show how absolutely off the chain the rest of this garbage I've been reading is. Anyway, Freddy is a cool cat and he had a boomin moustache too.

Fiskadoro
Denis Johnson

“Here, and also south of us, the beaches have a yellow tint, but along the Keys of Florida the sand is like shattered ivory. In the shallows the white of it turns the water such an ideal sea-blue that looking at it you think you must be dead, and the rice paddies, in some seasons, are profoundly emerald. The people who inhabit these colors, thanked be the compassion and mercy of Allah, having nothing much to trouble them. It’s true that starting a little ways north of them the bodies still just go on and on, and the Lord, as foretold, has crushed the mountains; but it’s hard to imagine that such things ever went on in the same universe that holds up the Keys of Florida. It strains all belief to think that these are the places the god Quetzalcoatl, the god Bob Marley, the god Jesus, promised to come back to and build their kingdoms. On island after island, except for the fields of cane popping in the wind, everything seems to be asleep.”

This is the first novel that really captivated me. Though I appreciate Johnson's other works this one will always be my favorite.

Originally Posted by Cangooner

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."

HST, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Wait till he sees those goddamn bats

"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 all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower.
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour."

William Blake-"Auguries of Innocence"

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.

The Old Man And The Sea
Ernest Hemingway

I think I could turn and live with the animals, they are so placid and self contained;

Okay so that's the opener. The rest of Walt Whitman's quote is below just in case your interested.



I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition;
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins;
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;
Not one is dissatisfied-not one is demented with the mania of owning things;
Not one kneels to another, nor his kind that lived thousands of years ago;
Not one is responsible or industrious over the whole earth.”