OT: Favorite opening line from a novel

[connie]

Authors use many variations of this technique

Indeed; e.g., Defoe's preface to Robinson Crusoe (the earliest application in English fiction?).

In general I do not approve of this method.

Okay.

 

[connie]

Nice idea. Start the thread

Thanks. Let's give things another day or so; see what other OT topics surface in the meantime.

 

[mhshuskies]

“Camelot-Camelot,” said I to myself. “I don’t seem to remember hearing of it before. Name of the asylum, likely.”

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Mark Twain

 

[Aluminny69]

“The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years – if it ever did end – began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.”

What else would you expect from the beginning of one of Stephen King's most well known novels? This is the book that inspired thousands of children to have a lifelong fear of clowns (and also sewers and possibly balloons).

 

[nwhoopfan]

Just starting to read Pierce Brown's Red Rising trilogy for the second time. First line (forward, whatever) caught my attention.

"I would have lived in peace. But my enemies brought me war."

 

[Jackcatscal]

An earlier reader quoted the opening line from James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist." Here are two more Joyce opening lines that definitely deserve discussion.

First, Joyce's Ulysses: "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” Sounds a little pedestrian, no? Not so quick. Joyce insisted that the publisher print the opening "S" in VERY VERY LARGE type. In my early edition of the book, the letter "S" takes up an entire page.

Here's a second example, from the most unreadable and possibly funniest English-language novel ever written, Finnegans Wake. "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs." Again, what's so special? Well, for one thing, the sentence begins with a small letter. And it's not a sentence at all--it's a fragment. So, where's the rest of it? Go to the very last line of the book: "A way a lone a last a loved a long the". And there you go, the beginning of the fragmentary first line of the novel is the fragmentary last line of the novel. One big, nearly happy circle.

(Joyce junkies may recognize a theme from Finnegans Wake in my earlier phrase, "definitely deserve discussion.")

 

[BigBird]

Only the Brits could call that a sentence.

Dickens was paid by the word. This goes a long way in explaining his writing style.

 

[BigBird]

"I'm sleepy."
"Me too"
"Let's go to bed."

From "Sleepy Time," by Gyo Fujikawa

 

[tomcat]

"Do your neighbors burn one another alive?"
Opening line from Anathem, by Neal Stephenson. He is not paid by the word, but still deliberately writes incredibly detailed prose, averaging maybe 1,200 pages per novel.

 

[JordyG]

"Do your neighbors burn one another alive?"
Opening line from Anathem, by Neal Stephenson. He is not paid by the word, but still deliberately writes incredibly detailed prose, averaging maybe 1,200 pages per novel.

One of my very favorite modern novels of speculative fiction. I tried Cryptonomicon but found it so discursive and digressing that I threw up my hands. It all seemed to be some sort of inside joke.

 

[jimazee]

“All this happened, more or less.” Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut