Greatest opening lines in literature

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Ooh, just remembered this one:

"Three greasy brother crows wheel, beak to heel, cutting a circle into the bruised and troubled sky, making fast, dark rings through the thicksome bloats of smoke."

- Nick Cave, And The Ass Saw The Angel.
 

John Doe

Well-known member
Three faves from Faulkner:

'Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.'
- The Sound and the Fury

"From a little after two o'clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that - a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them."
- Absalom, Absalom

"Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file."
- As I Lay Dying
 

John Doe

Well-known member
Oh - and of course:

"Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning."
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
'Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.'
- The Sound and the Fury
Read that last week and thought about mentioning it, but is it an especially good first line or merely the first line of a good book?
At the moment Tropic of Cancer is sitting on my desk and flicking to the front reveals a good first line (although not one I'd remembered)

"I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead."

Lots of other good quotes in that which don't really fit here but I'm going to put one anyway:

"..and people are straggling back to their rooms with that weary, dejected air which comes from earning a living honestly"
 

vimothy

yurp
Read that last week and thought about mentioning it, but is it an especially good first line or merely the first line of a good book?
At the moment Tropic of Cancer is sitting on my desk and flicking to the front reveals a good first line (although not one I'd remembered)

Best lines are deep in the book though - what's that one about an inhuman race of artists, ripping open their guts and spilling them all over the page? Also when he describes his relationship to his typewriter and says "between the machine and me there is no difference".

What a great rant.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"Best lines are deep in the book though"
In Tropic of Cancer? Yeah I reckon so. In fact just reading it there at lunch-time there were several other bits that I would have liked to quote but I didn't want to mess the thread up too much. In general the best lines are inside books and presumably the whole point of the thread is to celebrate those special few that aren't.
 

John Doe

Well-known member
Read that last week and thought about mentioning it, but is it an especially good first line or merely the first line of a good book?
:

Was just thinking that this lunchtime, actually... But I think there's some beauty in it, as well as the grammatical shock of its ending.

Perhaps we could consider fine novels that have indifferent/unremarakable opening lines?
 

vimothy

yurp
In Tropic of Cancer? Yeah I reckon so. In fact just reading it there at lunch-time there were several other bits that I would have liked to quote but I didn't want to mess the thread up too much. In general the best lines are inside books and presumably the whole point of the thread is to celebrate those special few that aren't.

Well, yes - off topic but I was kind of hoping that you'd remind me of them properly.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"Well, yes - off topic but I was kind of hoping that you'd remind me of them properly."
Dunno if I can find the two you mention while I'm pretending to work but here are some I like:

"All I ask from life is a bunch of books, a bunch of dreams, and a bunch of cunt"

"The wallpaper with which the men of science have covered the world of reality is falling to tatters. the grand whorehouse which they have made of life requires no decoration; it is essential only that the drains function adequately."

Actually, this seems related to what you're on about:

"Perhaps it is because the book has begun to grow inside me. I am carrying it around with me everywhere. I walk through the streets big with child and the cops escort me across the street. Women get up to offer me their seats. Nobody pushes me rudely any more. I am pregnant. I waddle awkwardly, my big stomach pressed against the weight of the world."
The whole book is pretty much one great rant though - interspersed with a few slightly smaller ones. I remember starting it years ago and thinking it was boring but now giving it another chance it seems totally different from how it did before. It's great.
 

vimothy

yurp
Great quotes!

Here's one (I think it's right) that I was thinking of:

Between me and the machine there is no estrangement. I am the machine
 

vimothy

yurp
Big quote, but totally, brilliantly mad:

Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. Today I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity - I belong to the earth! I say that lying on my pillow and I can feel the horns sprouting from my temples. I can see about me all those cracked forebears of mine dancing around the bed, consoling me, egging me on, lashing me with their serpent tongues, grinning and leering at me with their skulking skulls. I am inhuman! I say it with a mad, hallucinated grin, and I will keep on saying it though it rain crocodiles. Behind my words are all those grinning, leering, skulking skulls, some dead and grinning a long time, some grinning as if they had lockjaw, some grinning with the grimace of a grin, the foretaste and aftermath of what is always going on. Clearer than all I see my own grinning skull, see the skeleton dancing in the wind, serpents issuing from the rotted tongue and the bloated pages of ecstasy slimed with excrement. And I join my slime, my excrement, my madness; my ecstasy to the great circuit which flows through the subterranean vaults of the flesh. All this unbidden, unwanted, drunken vomit will flow on endlessly through the minds of those to come in the inexhaustible vessel that contains the history of the race. Side by side with the human race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by unknown impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song. Out of the dead compost and the inert slag they breed a song that contaminates. I see this other race of individuals ransacking the universe, turning everything upside down, their feet always moving in blood and tears, their hands always empty, always clutching and grasping for the beyond, for the god out of reach: slaying everything within reach in order to quiet the monster that gnaws at their vitals. I see that when they tear their hair with the effort to comprehend, to seize this forever unattainable, I see that when they bellow like crazed beasts and rip and gore, I see that this is right, that there is no other path to pursue. A man who belongs to this race must stand up on the high place with gibberish in his mouth and rip out his entrails. It is right and just, because he must! And anything that falls short of this frightening spectacle, anything less shuddering, less terrifying, less mad, less intoxicated, less contaminating, is not art. The rest is counterfeit. The rest is human. The rest belongs to life and lifelessness.​

:D
 

dHarry

Well-known member
Houellebecq's Platform:
Father died last year. I don't subscribe to the theory by which we only become truly adult when our parents die; we never become truly adult…As I stood before the old man's coffin, unpleasant thoughts came to me. He had made the most of life, the old bastard; he was a clever cunt. 'You had kids, you fucker…' I said spiritedly, 'you shoved your fat cock in my mother's cunt.' Well, I was a bit tense, I have to admit; it's not everyday you have a death in the family.

Which of course refers to this (Camus' L'Etranger):
Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know. I had a telegram from the home: ‘Mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Yours sincerely.’ That doesn’t mean anything. It may have been yesterday.

And has no-one really posted this (Kafka's The Metamorphosis) yet?
When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect.

Or this (Beckett's Waiting For Godot):
Nothing to be done

Or this (Joyce's A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man):
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Ooh, love that Joyce quote. Just that intro alone is such a landmark in modern literature...



Timely.

[Though this thread is beginning to resemble all too closely a Grauniad one from a few months ago. Oh dear, internet forums beginning to fall behind, getting a bit slow as they busily replicate the establishment media ... very dissensian]

Ha! Hadn't seen that Guardian piece before when I started this thread, but I guess its a pretty obvious idea. Its almost inane, but luckily you can rely on dissensians to dredge up some interesting stuff :)
 

dHarry

Well-known member
weird Kafka translation of "dungbeetle" to "insect"
Dungbeetle? *googles* Actually it seems that the original German word is Ungeziefer =vermin, which really should be used, but it rarely. This seems criminal, and makes you realise what gets lost in translation. Even the discussion below makes ludicrous assumptions like "[vermin] isn't commonly used in English, so some translators prefer to use words like bug or insect which will be more easily understood by their readers". And worse - "using [vermin] doesn't describe exactly what Gregor has become" - so what? It's the original text! Who asked the translator to describe what Gregor has become, misquoting as s/he goes - dreadful, patronising behaviour (and dangerous, if applied to history or politics).

The original German word -- Ungeziefer -- is literally translated as vermin. However, this word isn't commonly used in English, so some translators prefer to use words like bug or insect which will be more easily understood by their readers. Also, since the word vermin can describe any loathsome creature, not just an insect, using this word doesn't describe exactly what Gregor has become. The disadvantage of words like bug or insect, however, is that they don't convey the sense of disgust that's implicit in the word vermin. A bug or insect can be harmless, perhaps even beautiful like a butterfly. Certainly this meaning doesn't apply to Gregor Samsa, but the reader has no way of knowing this at the beginning of the story. And this kind of misunderstanding is even more likely to occur since the word metamorphosis in the story's title is often associated with a butterfly.

An added complication familiar to most translators is that the word vermin has particular historical significance lacking in the words bug and insect. In the region where Kafka lived, Jewish people were often referred to, in times of persecution by anti-Semites, as Ungeziefer, or vermin. Since Kafka was himself Jewish, he was undoubtedly aware of this derogatory meaning of the word Ungeziefer -- but there's no way of knowing if he intended this meaning to apply to Gregor Samsa. Translators who feel he did intend to suggest it are more likely to use the word vermin in their translations; those who feel it's not an intended meaning may choose more easily-understood words like bug or insect. There's no way of deciding conclusively which is the better choice.
http://www.nvcc.edu/home/vpoulakis/Translation/kafkatr1.htm

[edit] hmm, maybe dungbeetle was someone's attempt to combine vermin and insect...
 
Last edited:

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Isn't he meant to have turned into a cockroach? A pretty obvious verminous insect.

Also, I guess 'vermin' must come from vermis, 'worm'...
 

dHarry

Well-known member
The first line says Ungeziefer (vermin), and it becomes clear that he's become an - unspecified - insect as the story progresses.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Fair enough, maybe it was rendered as 'cockroach' in the translation I read.

Or maybe I'm thinking of that '80s comedy film about the suburban family of shapeshifting cockroaches, because one of the characters was called 'Greg Samson'? :slanted:
 
Top