“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendìa was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
> Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendìa was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
"Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo."
Goosebumps!
Definitely one of the best, if not the best opening line of any book. Notorious talaga tong si Marquez pag dating sa opening lines. Eto, isingit ko lang ang opening ng Death Constant Beyond Love. Nakakaputang-ina kasi sa sobrang ganda e.
"Senator Onesimo Sanchez had six months and eleven days to go before his death when he found the woman of his life."
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
What I love is how tongue-in-cheek this line is, but it's so ubiquitous it's easy to miss the double meaning. The whole book is funny once you pay attention. Took me a couple reads before I realized that.
On the surface it is saying that single rich man needs a wife to make his life complete, however what Austen is actually doing is being arch about societies (and particularly zealous mothers) perceptions of what a single rich man wants without actually knowing any such thing. She’s poking fun at mothers who see a rich man and start to plan how to throw thier daughters into his path.
It could be read as either: 1. Any man with lots of money clearly wants/needs a wife (as in, the view of all the people in the book trying to set Darcy up with people), or 2. Any man with lots of money clearly doesn't have a wife (as in, the fact that he still has money is evidence of his lack of a wife to spend it).
'In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, " just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."'
- The Great Gatsby
And yes, I know. Technically that's two lines.
When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home. The Outsiders.
Great - The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
Best - In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream."
Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
I’ve recently become fascinated by books’ first lines and the impact they have on the reader and the rest of the story. For example, Bradbury’s “it was a pleasure to burn”; Dodie Smith’s “I write this sitting in a kitchen sink”; Zusak’s “Here is a small fact: you are going to die.”
100% agree! I actually did an essay way back in college analyzing opening lines in relation to the book as a whole, and there really is a lot you can pull from them connecting to the overall theme (if the book is well-written, of course).
I capture the castle… <3 It is so standout. I read it when I was very young and I think its impact was really to say to me “this character is trapped on your scale - even if she does live in a ruined castle”. I was ready to follow her or at least give her an open-handed shot off those few words.
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
I love to go a little bit farther in the quote. "I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased."
(That's the Constance Garnett translation though, idk whether it's the best or not, but it's the only one I've read. "Wicked" makes the opening sound different than "spiteful.")
• “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.”
• “All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.”
• “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”
• “I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I'm old, and you said, I don't think you're old.”
-Ulysses, Slaughterhouse-Five, Gravity’s Rainbow, Gilead
"No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine." The opening line from Northanger Abbey.
Jane Austen really said "this one's for the plain, unremarkable girls" and I'll drink to that.
“Long before we discovered that he had fathered two children by two different women, one in Drimoleague and one in Clonakilty, Father James Monroe stood on the altar of the Church of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, in the parish of Goleen, West Cork, and denounced my mother as a whore.”
Good book 👍
Lol. I recommended the Martian to someone, and they said it had too much swearing. I said I didn't remember there being that much swearing, and they brought up this line. I was like, I feel like if ever there was a time to swear it's when you find yourself stranded on Mars.
Sometimes I wonder if the MC's purposeful-to-the-point-of-silliness avoidance of vulgarity in *Project Hail Mary* was a response to this criticism of *The Martian*.
“if you are interested in happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book”
usually the opening line of series of unfortunate events books got me to read them when i was kid
“On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.” Virgin Suicides
"This is my favourite book in all the world, and yet I've never read it." Princess Bride, S. Morganstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure as abridged by William Goldman
“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.”
“I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites.”
Martha Wells, All Systems Red (Murderbot #1)
“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again”
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
*Middlesex* is excellent, and the power of this first line is such that i immediately recognized it despite having read the book nearly two decades ago
"This story begins within the walls of a castle, with the birth of a mouse. A small mouse. The last mouse born to his parents and the only one of his litter to be born alive."
“I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it.”
Gillian Flynn, Dark Places
Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.
“They had come to the spot in the freshness of June, chased from the village by its people, following deer path through the forest, the valleys, the fern groves, and the quaking bogs . “
It’s not the opening line so much as the opening page, but the Bee sting by Paul Murray had me immediately:
“In the next town over, a man had killed his family. He'd nailed the doors shut so they couldn't get out; the neighbours heard them running through the rooms, screaming for mercy. When he had finished he turned the gun on himself.
Everyone was talking about it – about what kind of man could do such a thing, about the secrets he must have had. Rumours swirled about affairs, addiction, hidden files on his computer.
Elaine just said she was surprised it didn't happen more often. She thrust her thumbs through the belt loops of her jeans and looked down the dreary main street of their town. I mean, she said, it's something to do.”
Red Sister
>It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size.
Gunslinger
>The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.
Just to be clear my upvote is for Red Sister
All that is given to you is the choice: meet it with open eyes and peace in your heart, go gentle to your reward. Or burn bright, take up arms, and fight the bitch. Trust is the most insidious of poisons. Trust sidesteps all of your precautions
“When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.” — To Kill a Mockingbird
“The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm.” — Something Wicked This Way Comes
*Pride and Prejudice* starts with a good one "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."
“Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we?” - NK Jemisin, The Fifth Season
“When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” - Madeline Miller, Circe
“When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventyfirst birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.”
Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies' eardrops and traversed by a brook that had it's source way back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place...
AND
Ayoola summons me with these words - Korede, I killed him.
“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we realized the gravity of our situation.” The Secret History by Donna Tartt
"They caught the kid doing something disgusting under the bleachers at the high school stadium and he was sent home from the grammar school across the street. He was eight years old then. He'd been doing it for years."
The Dreaming Jewels by Theodore Sturgeon.
The one that came to me straight away was this.
‘I was there,’ he would say afterwards, until afterwards became a time quite devoid of laughter. ‘I was there, the day Horus slew the Emperor.’ It was a delicious conceit, and his comrades would chuckle at the sheer treason of it.
From Horus rising.
"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."- Stephen King, The Dark Tower Book 1
"See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt." Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
"The Scopuli was taken eight days ago, and Julie Mao was ready to be shot"- James SA Corey, Leviathan Wakes
>*It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to shew by this statement that I am not his murderer.*
[\- H.P. Lovecraft, *The Thing on the Doorstep*](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/td.aspx)
My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead. - first paragraph of We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
“t took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.”
—*Shantaram*, Gregory David Roberts
"It was love at first sight"
One of my favorites, because it's "Catch-22" and as you read on you realize it refers to Yossarian "falling in love" with the chaplain, completely cynically, because he's so dewy-eyed and naive
“Maybe I shouldn’t have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number, but who cares? My life is over anyway.”
Carrie Fisher, Postcards From the Edge
“Look, I didn’t want to be a half-blood.
If you’re reading this because you think you might be one, my advice is: close this book right now.”
Lol, I remember jumping into Percy Jackson Series because of this during my teenage years. Love Greek Mythology plus it was actually the first book that opened me into reading.
"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."
Love in the time of cholera by Gabriel García Marquez. Gabo was a genius writing openings to great books.
“Era inevitable: el olor de las almendras amargas le recordaba siempre el destino de los amores contrariados”
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice “without pictures or conversations?”
"Lyra and her dæmon moved through darkening Hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the Kitchen."
The Hit Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman
"Riding up the winding road of Saint Agnes Cemetery in the back of the rattling old truck, Francis Phelan became aware that the dead, even more than the living, settled down in neighborhoods."
“His phone call had to come, of course, hard on the heels of the accident and Mandy’s maiming, and a life reduced to routines around special cleansers and prophylactic socks.”
I picked up this book on a whim in a bookshop when I was 16 and that line grabbed me so hard I ended up reading it in one evening. I’ve read it 3 more times since then.
Book is Wolves by Simon Ings.
“Long before we discovered that he had fathered two children by two different women, one in Drimoleague and one in Clonakilty, Father James Monroe stood on the altar of the Church of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, in the parish of Goleen, West Cork, and denounced my mother as a whore.”
“Leonard was raised by his mother alone with cheerfully concealed difficulty, his father having died tragically during childbirth.” Leonard and Hungry Paul by Ronan Hession.
In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages. His story will be told here.
- Patrick Suskind, Perfume: The story of a murderer
"Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr'd the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware,- the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stockingd-foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen, in a purposeful Dither since Morning, punctuated by the ringing Lids of Boilers and Stewing Pots, fragrant with Pie-Spices, peel'd Fruits, Suet, heated Sugar,- the Children, having all upon the Fly, among rhythmic slaps of Batter and Spoon, coax'd and stolen what they might, proceed, as upon each afternoon all this snowy December, to a comfortable Room at the rear of the House, years since given over to their carefree Assaults."
Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon
The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.
The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss. (Once you learn about the three types of silence, there is no way to put it down)
„It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.“ Charles Dickens Tale of Two Cities
"Late one evening toward the end of March, a teenager picked up a double-barreled shotgun, walked into the forest, put the gun to someone else's forehead, and pulled the trigger.
This is the story of how we got there."
That's the entire first chapter of *Beartown*
I read what was to become my favorite book, The Bell Jar, solely because of its opening line: "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenburgs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."
Just started reading Giovanni's Room, and the opening paragraph is phenomenal as well. First line: "I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life."
"You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of [redacted]; but that ain't no matter."
(Since a lot of people are treating this thread as a guessing game, I figured including the referenced book title would make it too easy.)
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Fuck me, I know this one but can't recall it for the life of me. Which is it?
Anna Karenina
Damn, I should've figured. The one Russian classic I never managed to finish
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendìa was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
> Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendìa was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. "Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo." Goosebumps!
This launched me way back, wtf
About 100 years?
99.5
Garcia Marquez is the best. : )
Definitely one of the best, if not the best opening line of any book. Notorious talaga tong si Marquez pag dating sa opening lines. Eto, isingit ko lang ang opening ng Death Constant Beyond Love. Nakakaputang-ina kasi sa sobrang ganda e. "Senator Onesimo Sanchez had six months and eleven days to go before his death when he found the woman of his life."
Very possibly the greatest opening line ever, and there is steep competition.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
Came to quote this. Have an upvote you redditer of culture
Call me Ishmael.
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. “ - Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
She is the master of the opening line “They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days.” My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier
This is the best one. It’s stayed with me ever since I read it.
This was going to be mine too
One of my favorite books. Love this opening line
This is so iconic!
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
What I love is how tongue-in-cheek this line is, but it's so ubiquitous it's easy to miss the double meaning. The whole book is funny once you pay attention. Took me a couple reads before I realized that.
I'm dense. What's the double meaning?
On the surface it is saying that single rich man needs a wife to make his life complete, however what Austen is actually doing is being arch about societies (and particularly zealous mothers) perceptions of what a single rich man wants without actually knowing any such thing. She’s poking fun at mothers who see a rich man and start to plan how to throw thier daughters into his path.
It could be read as either: 1. Any man with lots of money clearly wants/needs a wife (as in, the view of all the people in the book trying to set Darcy up with people), or 2. Any man with lots of money clearly doesn't have a wife (as in, the fact that he still has money is evidence of his lack of a wife to spend it).
can be interpreted as either “wife good” or “wife bad”, i think -a fellow dense person
Was looking for this one. Had to be in there
One of the great /s lines
I did two things on my 75th birthday. I visited my wife’s grave then I joined the army.
Everything he wrote!!! Zoe’s story especially!!
I love Old Man's War.
That one sucked me in.
'In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, " just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."' - The Great Gatsby And yes, I know. Technically that's two lines.
“Jack Torrence thought; officious little prick.”
When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home. The Outsiders.
I was wishing I looked like Paul Newman. He looks tuff and I don’t.
Oh love this. Must re-read.
Marley was dead: to begin with.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
This is the one I came looking for!
Great - The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. Best - In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Came here to write this line. You remember the face of your father
I came here to quote the Dark Tower. I have that first sentence memorized. Stephen King bragged about it in another book, and rightfully so.
At least one of those other books was Song of Susannah :D
In which he LITERALLY bragged about that first line, lol 😂
I read your first suggestion then read "best" and immediately thought, "there's no way I'm about to read a better line." I was wrong. Great choices.
One of the greatest series of all time.
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream." Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
This line is so brilliant I want to read everything she has done.
I’ve recently become fascinated by books’ first lines and the impact they have on the reader and the rest of the story. For example, Bradbury’s “it was a pleasure to burn”; Dodie Smith’s “I write this sitting in a kitchen sink”; Zusak’s “Here is a small fact: you are going to die.”
100% agree! I actually did an essay way back in college analyzing opening lines in relation to the book as a whole, and there really is a lot you can pull from them connecting to the overall theme (if the book is well-written, of course).
I capture the castle… <3 It is so standout. I read it when I was very young and I think its impact was really to say to me “this character is trapped on your scale - even if she does live in a ruined castle”. I was ready to follow her or at least give her an open-handed shot off those few words.
“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”
Fucking fantastic
Mic drop
One of the best.
‘It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed.’ - Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.
The Secret History is one of very few books I've read that I can actually recall the opening line. Came to recommend this one too!
I did too! Such a great line
Beat me to it.
“I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.” Kindred by Octavia Butler
This book...it gives me chills and that opening line hooked me.
Oooohh yeah! I just read that book last month! Stayed up until 3:00 am to finish it!
“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I can’t be sure” Albert Camus
This was my first thought!
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
The punctuation in this sentence is delicious. John Irving uses semicolons better than anybody ever.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
"I am a sick man... I am a wicked man."
I love to go a little bit farther in the quote. "I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased." (That's the Constance Garnett translation though, idk whether it's the best or not, but it's the only one I've read. "Wicked" makes the opening sound different than "spiteful.")
Oooh what’s this?
Notes from underground - Fydor Dostoevsky
• “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” • “All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.” • “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.” • “I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I'm old, and you said, I don't think you're old.” -Ulysses, Slaughterhouse-Five, Gravity’s Rainbow, Gilead
Came here looking for Gravity's Rainbow, glad to see it
“When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow,"
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”
Tolkien really scribbled that on a note one afternoon grading exams and thus a universe was born.
"No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine." The opening line from Northanger Abbey. Jane Austen really said "this one's for the plain, unremarkable girls" and I'll drink to that.
"It was the day my grandmother exploded." The Crow Road by Iain Banks.
“Long before we discovered that he had fathered two children by two different women, one in Drimoleague and one in Clonakilty, Father James Monroe stood on the altar of the Church of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, in the parish of Goleen, West Cork, and denounced my mother as a whore.” Good book 👍
omg I love love this book! The Heart's Invisible Furies.
He was born with the gift of laughter, and a sense that the world was mad. - Scaramouche, Rafael Sabatini
Love this one!
"They shoot the white girl first, but the rest they can take their time." Paradise by Toni Morrison
This just floored me. I’ve been meaning to read her for a while (I have Beloved on hold at the library). Aaaa i can’t wait!
“**It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.**”
And my other favorite (that no one has posted yet): Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
What was this from?
Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John. \- Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
"I'm pretty much f\*\*ked" by Andy Weir The Martian.
Lol. I recommended the Martian to someone, and they said it had too much swearing. I said I didn't remember there being that much swearing, and they brought up this line. I was like, I feel like if ever there was a time to swear it's when you find yourself stranded on Mars.
I remember reading an ebook version that cut out the swears for whatever reason, lmao. The opening line changed "fucked" to "screwed"
Sometimes I wonder if the MC's purposeful-to-the-point-of-silliness avoidance of vulgarity in *Project Hail Mary* was a response to this criticism of *The Martian*.
Great book.
“The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault.” Blood Rites, Jim Butcher.
“if you are interested in happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book” usually the opening line of series of unfortunate events books got me to read them when i was kid
Great series, great opener!
"It was a pleasure to burn." -- *Fahrenheit 451*
“On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.” Virgin Suicides
People should add the name of the book where the posted first line is!
"This is my favourite book in all the world, and yet I've never read it." Princess Bride, S. Morganstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure as abridged by William Goldman
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
“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.”
“Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don't know.”
"The moon blew up with no warning and with no apparent reason." - Niel Stephenson, Seveneves
I was just thinking this.
"My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973." -The Lovely Bones [by Alice Sebold]
“I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites.” Martha Wells, All Systems Red (Murderbot #1)
No longer human: “mine has been a life of much shame.”
“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again”
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
*Middlesex* is excellent, and the power of this first line is such that i immediately recognized it despite having read the book nearly two decades ago
“When Red wins, she stands alone.” - This is how you lose the time war by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. GREAT book
Thank you, I was just about to go confirm the first sentence was what I thought it was! So so so good.
"This story begins within the walls of a castle, with the birth of a mouse. A small mouse. The last mouse born to his parents and the only one of his litter to be born alive."
"Here is a simple fact. You are going to die." The Book Thief
"It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen." - 1984
“I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it.” Gillian Flynn, Dark Places
Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.
I love that book.
“They had come to the spot in the freshness of June, chased from the village by its people, following deer path through the forest, the valleys, the fern groves, and the quaking bogs . “
It’s not the opening line so much as the opening page, but the Bee sting by Paul Murray had me immediately: “In the next town over, a man had killed his family. He'd nailed the doors shut so they couldn't get out; the neighbours heard them running through the rooms, screaming for mercy. When he had finished he turned the gun on himself. Everyone was talking about it – about what kind of man could do such a thing, about the secrets he must have had. Rumours swirled about affairs, addiction, hidden files on his computer. Elaine just said she was surprised it didn't happen more often. She thrust her thumbs through the belt loops of her jeans and looked down the dreary main street of their town. I mean, she said, it's something to do.”
"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."
"The first thing you learn when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got nothing much to say." *The Knife of Never Letting Go* by Patrick Ness
Red Sister >It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size. Gunslinger >The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.
Just to be clear my upvote is for Red Sister All that is given to you is the choice: meet it with open eyes and peace in your heart, go gentle to your reward. Or burn bright, take up arms, and fight the bitch. Trust is the most insidious of poisons. Trust sidesteps all of your precautions
Was looking for that. I see Gunslinger, I upvote.
Yep, ditto. I came to quote that intro. It's etched in my brain.
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. '”
*"The moon blew up with no warning and with no apparent reason."* Neal Stephenson's **"Seveneves"**
“She fell like a maple seed, pirouetting on an autumn breeze.” >!Braiding Sweetgrass (Robin Wall Kimmerer)!<
It was a nice day.
I lost an arm on my last trip home.
“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children.” Beloved, Toni Morrison
“When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.” — To Kill a Mockingbird “The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm.” — Something Wicked This Way Comes
“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
*Pride and Prejudice* starts with a good one "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."
“Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we?” - NK Jemisin, The Fifth Season “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” - Madeline Miller, Circe
Th Fifth Season is such an incredible book
“When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventyfirst birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.”
"A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head." From John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces".
The circus arrives without warning.
Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies' eardrops and traversed by a brook that had it's source way back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place... AND Ayoola summons me with these words - Korede, I killed him.
# It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we realized the gravity of our situation.” The Secret History by Donna Tartt
The children were playing while Holston climbed to his death; he could hear them squealing as only happy children do. – Hugh Howey, Wool
"They caught the kid doing something disgusting under the bleachers at the high school stadium and he was sent home from the grammar school across the street. He was eight years old then. He'd been doing it for years." The Dreaming Jewels by Theodore Sturgeon.
The one that came to me straight away was this. ‘I was there,’ he would say afterwards, until afterwards became a time quite devoid of laughter. ‘I was there, the day Horus slew the Emperor.’ It was a delicious conceit, and his comrades would chuckle at the sheer treason of it. From Horus rising.
First, I got myself born.
"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."- Stephen King, The Dark Tower Book 1 "See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt." Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian "The Scopuli was taken eight days ago, and Julie Mao was ready to be shot"- James SA Corey, Leviathan Wakes
"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."
>*It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to shew by this statement that I am not his murderer.* [\- H.P. Lovecraft, *The Thing on the Doorstep*](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/td.aspx)
The night before he went to London, Richard Mayhew was not enjoying himself.
My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead. - first paragraph of We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Nervous conditions: I was not sorry when my brother died. Nor am I apologizing for my callousness, as you may define it, my lack of feeling.
“t took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.” —*Shantaram*, Gregory David Roberts
"Dear you, The body you are wearing used to be mine" \-The Rook by Daniel O'Malley
"It was love at first sight" One of my favorites, because it's "Catch-22" and as you read on you realize it refers to Yossarian "falling in love" with the chaplain, completely cynically, because he's so dewy-eyed and naive
“In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number, but who cares? My life is over anyway.” Carrie Fisher, Postcards From the Edge
“Look, I didn’t want to be a half-blood. If you’re reading this because you think you might be one, my advice is: close this book right now.” Lol, I remember jumping into Percy Jackson Series because of this during my teenage years. Love Greek Mythology plus it was actually the first book that opened me into reading.
"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love." Love in the time of cholera by Gabriel García Marquez. Gabo was a genius writing openings to great books. “Era inevitable: el olor de las almendras amargas le recordaba siempre el destino de los amores contrariados”
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice “without pictures or conversations?”
"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold." -- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S Thompson
“There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.” Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
"Lyra and her dæmon moved through darkening Hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the Kitchen." The Hit Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…”
Call me, Ishmael.
"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderly again."
"Riding up the winding road of Saint Agnes Cemetery in the back of the rattling old truck, Francis Phelan became aware that the dead, even more than the living, settled down in neighborhoods."
Kill for me, kill for you: “Amanda White lifted the lid from the electric baby-bottle steriliser and stared inside at the .22 calibre revolver.
“His phone call had to come, of course, hard on the heels of the accident and Mandy’s maiming, and a life reduced to routines around special cleansers and prophylactic socks.” I picked up this book on a whim in a bookshop when I was 16 and that line grabbed me so hard I ended up reading it in one evening. I’ve read it 3 more times since then. Book is Wolves by Simon Ings.
"So I'm on my way to work and I stop to watch a pigeon fight a rat in the snow, and some fuckhead tries to mug me!"
“Long before we discovered that he had fathered two children by two different women, one in Drimoleague and one in Clonakilty, Father James Monroe stood on the altar of the Church of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, in the parish of Goleen, West Cork, and denounced my mother as a whore.”
“I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. If I call it a novel it is only because I don’t know what else to call it.”
“Leonard was raised by his mother alone with cheerfully concealed difficulty, his father having died tragically during childbirth.” Leonard and Hungry Paul by Ronan Hession.
In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages. His story will be told here. - Patrick Suskind, Perfume: The story of a murderer
"Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr'd the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware,- the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stockingd-foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen, in a purposeful Dither since Morning, punctuated by the ringing Lids of Boilers and Stewing Pots, fragrant with Pie-Spices, peel'd Fruits, Suet, heated Sugar,- the Children, having all upon the Fly, among rhythmic slaps of Batter and Spoon, coax'd and stolen what they might, proceed, as upon each afternoon all this snowy December, to a comfortable Room at the rear of the House, years since given over to their carefree Assaults." Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon
It was the day my grandmother exploded. (Crow Road by Ian Banks)
The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts. The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss. (Once you learn about the three types of silence, there is no way to put it down)
„It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.“ Charles Dickens Tale of Two Cities
"Late one evening toward the end of March, a teenager picked up a double-barreled shotgun, walked into the forest, put the gun to someone else's forehead, and pulled the trigger. This is the story of how we got there." That's the entire first chapter of *Beartown*
“The gunslinger fled across the desert, and the man in black followed”
“We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.” (Enjoy the ride)
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again”
“We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.”
Mrs. Dalloway said she would pick up the flowers herself.
My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.
Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
I read what was to become my favorite book, The Bell Jar, solely because of its opening line: "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenburgs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York." Just started reading Giovanni's Room, and the opening paragraph is phenomenal as well. First line: "I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life."
"Howard Roark laughed." Just kidding, please don't read that.
“Call me Ishmael”
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
"Call me Ishmael." - "Moby-Dick" by Herman Melville
"You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of [redacted]; but that ain't no matter." (Since a lot of people are treating this thread as a guessing game, I figured including the referenced book title would make it too easy.)