Greatest opening lines in literature

Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made.

(JRRT, ripping off religious texts of various kinds since 1917)
 
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crackerjack

Well-known member
Mr. Tea said:
There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made.
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That's about as far as my dad got with my 5-year-old self before I screamed 'make it stop'.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
crackerjack said:
That's about as far as my dad got with my 5-year-old self before I screamed 'make it stop'.
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Ahh, you're missing out, bit time! Then again, I read and enjoyed Paradise Lost (although I wasn't 5 at the time.)
 
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viktorvaughn

Well-known member
Surprised nobody has mentioned

'I was laying in my bed with my catamite when the bishop rang the door'

or what ever it is from Anthony Burgess' Earthly Powers.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Or the all-time classic "It was a dark and stormy night...", which has apparently inspired an annual event where people compete to write the worst first line of a (non-existent) novel. Some of the ones I've read have been quite funny, might dig around for it a bit later.
 
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jed_

Well-known member
"Our story is only as sad as others allow it to be, our rights to sympathy circumscribed by the class to which we belonged and the way in which our lives together were to end."

Malcolm Knox "summerland" - so elegant, like fitzgerald.
 
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ripley

Well-known member
I am a sick man, I am an angry man, I am an unnattractive man. I think there's something wrong with my liver.
 
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nomadologist

Guest
In Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith (when
Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolent improvisation
engineered by defective angels), Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a
singular intellectual passion, one of the Gnostic conventicles.
 
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ripley

Well-known member
Benny B said:
Weird, just started reading this book yesterday. It's great, so full of bile...
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yeah isn't it? I think it's hilarious. If you get into that you might like _Envy_ by Yuri Olesha, as well.. it's a novella that is similar in tone. Also kind of hilarious.

I wish I could remember the russian sci-fi short story that sort of recreates that reclusive bitterness so well. It's about an alien living in Russia disguised as a dwarf, but he's actually a sentient plant! his description of human's breakfasts from the point of view of a sentient plant is great.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
ripley said:
yeah isn't it? I think it's hilarious. If you get into that you might like _Envy_ by Yuri Olesha, as well.. it's a novella that is similar in tone. Also kind of hilarious.

I wish I could remember the russian sci-fi short story that sort of recreates that reclusive bitterness so well. It's about an alien living in Russia disguised as a dwarf, but he's actually a sentient plant! his description of human's breakfasts from the point of view of a sentient plant is great.
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That sounds absolutely mental! Let me know if you remember what its called.

The Dostoyevsky actually reminds me of 'Hunger' by Knut Hamsun, that same curious mixture of arrogance and self-loathing.

Billy Childish's novels are also heavily influenced by these books, particularly his 'Notebooks of a Naked Youth' which begins;

I still thieve and I still lie, and I admire myself and admonish myself pitilessly​
 
emmyhennings

emmyhennings

New member
Two of my faves:

All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion

(Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenin)

Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls.

(Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan)
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
Benny B said:
That sounds absolutely mental! Let me know if you remember what its called.

The Dostoyevsky actually reminds me of 'Hunger' by Knut Hamsun, that same curious mixture of arrogance and self-loathing.

Billy Childish's novels are also heavily influenced by these books, particularly his 'Notebooks of a Naked Youth' which begins;

I still thieve and I still lie, and I admire myself and admonish myself pitilessly​
Click to expand...

See also: the work of Eric Bogossian and Moscow to the End of the Line
 
J

John Doe

Well-known member
"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there..."

[The Go-Between, LP Hartley]

"On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben
the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadn’t ben none for a long time befor
him nor I aint looking to see none agen."

[Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker]

"The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus"

[Don DeLillo, White Noise - in fact the whole, short opening chapter is one of my favourites]

"Later than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof."

[Pynchon, Vineland]
 
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