Thread: Great Opening Sentences

Originally Posted by Cangooner

Sorry Matt - I completely missed your post and didn't mean to steal your opening line!

Great minds think alike!

Originally Posted by carlmaloschneider

There's some excellent stuff here, I'm really glad I posted this. I think I'll have to read The Catcher in the Rye again...

IMO, opinion it's one of those books that cannot be read too often. I am an avid reader, and ther are 3 or 4 books that I find myself going back to multiple times per year, year after year-- The Catcher in the Rye is one of those.

"Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness Positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher."
Thomas Paine, Common Sense.

"And then, after walking all day through a golden haze of humid warmth that gathered about him like fine wet fleece, Valentine came to a great ridge of outcropping white stone overlooking the city of Pidruid.”

Lord Valentine's Castle by Robert Silverberg. The main character has no memory from before the first line of the novel. I think it's one of the greatest ever opening lines, because at that moment, you're right there with the character, unknowing of anything that happened before that moment.

It's a great book, really great.

Until the time of the button and the sock he remained unsure. All his doubts had hinged on ownership. Had he made them and were they, therefore, his? Or did they live from their first morning separate from him and consequently, like him, alone? These were questions which, for a long time, he could not settle. Then, only partly by accident, he resolved to begin from the beginning. He heard the first button fall almost without noise. Then he knew. Thomas Peechum "The Watcher And The Watched"

When Mother found out she was pregnant with me she took an overdose. Father gave her the pills. She needed a drama from time to time to remind her that she was still alive. Had she known I would turn out like this she would have taken cyanide. Sebastian Horsley "Dandy In The Underworld"

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him." - George Orwell - "Nineteen Eighty Four"

"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