Best opening lines of a book.

Gabriall

Egbert Ramasaran kept cows.


Recurring nightmares of English Literature

allisonsdaddy

In the beginning...

:flowerforyou:

aliciagetshealthy

"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."

LittleMiss_WillLoseIt

"I am Sam. I am Sam. Sam I am. That Sam I am. That Sam I am. I do not like that Sam I am."

drmerc

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.

trulabfloyd

Rage, Sing Godess, Achilles rage, Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls, Of heroes into Hades dark, And left their bodies to rot as feasts For dogs and birds, as Zeus will was done. Homers Iliad

wolverine66

"Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense."




?

HurricaneElaine

Merwinna's nightmare commenced as ever before, with the sound of great sails snapping in a tumultuous wind. Her own voice, small as a bairn's (as she had been) was vainly crying out for surcease, for mercy. Answered only by the savage roaring laugh of a man, her tiny frame bent near to breaking, as the pain and tears and blood began to flow...

Merwinna (unpublished - so far)

EvgeniZyntx

In English,

"For sale, baby shoes, never worn." DeGroot

In French

" Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. Parfois, à peine ma bougie éteinte, mes yeux se fermaient si vite que je n'avais pas le temps de me dire : « Je m'endors. » Et, une demi-heure après, la pensée qu'il était temps de chercher le sommeil m'éveillait ; je voulais poser le volume que je croyais avoir dans les mains et souffler ma lumière ; je n'avais pas cessé en dormant de faire des réflexions sur ce que je venais de lire, mais ces réflexions avaient pris un tour particulier ; il me semblait que j'étais moi-même ce dont parlait l'ouvrage : une église, un quatuor, la rivalité de François Ier et de Charles-Quint. Cette croyance survivait pendant quelques secondes à mon réveil ; elle ne choquait pas ma raison, mais pesait comme des écailles sur mes yeux et les empêchait de se rendre compte que le bougeoir n'était plus allumé. "

headoverhills

Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called True Stories from Nature, about the primeval forest. It was a picture of a boa constrictor in the act of swallowing an animal.

Le petit prince.

de Saint-Exupery rules!!! My favourite childhood book.

headoverhills

'Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice...'

100 Years of Solitude...

Wow, I didn't think anyone else read Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. Love in the Time of Cholera is also superb - I hope that's how the title translates into English....

PottsvilleCurse1925

Soil mechanics involves a combination of engineering mechanics, soil behavior, and the properties of soils. This description is broad and can encompass a wide range of soil types. These soils could either be saturated with water or have other fluids in the voids (e.g. air). The development of classical soil mechanics has led to an emphasis on particular types of soils. The common soil types are saturated sands, silts and clays, and dry sands. These materials have formed the primary emphasis in numerous soil mechanics textbooks. More and more, it is realized that attention must be given to a broader spectrum of soils...

F*CKING CLASSIC BABY!

gmallan

'When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.'

Angela's Ashes - Frank McCourt

quixoteQ

'Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice...'

100 Years of Solitude...

Wow, I didn't think anyone else read Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. Love in the Time of Cholera is also superb - I hope that's how the title translates into English....

Yep - best first line.

andeehrdz

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita."

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

the_journeyman

He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.

Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.

Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

JM

riveraphx

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

Pride & Prejudice ~ Jane Austen

RunDoozer

In English,

"For sale, baby shoes, never worn." DeGroot

In French

" Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. Parfois, à peine ma bougie éteinte, mes yeux se fermaient si vite que je n'avais pas le temps de me dire : « Je m'endors. » Et, une demi-heure après, la pensée qu'il était temps de chercher le sommeil m'éveillait ; je voulais poser le volume que je croyais avoir dans les mains et souffler ma lumière ; je n'avais pas cessé en dormant de faire des réflexions sur ce que je venais de lire, mais ces réflexions avaient pris un tour particulier ; il me semblait que j'étais moi-même ce dont parlait l'ouvrage : une église, un quatuor, la rivalité de François Ier et de Charles-Quint. Cette croyance survivait pendant quelques secondes à mon réveil ; elle ne choquait pas ma raison, mais pesait comme des écailles sur mes yeux et les empêchait de se rendre compte que le bougeoir n'était plus allumé. "

Wow, that's a lot of words for half a sentence in English. :P

Jaulen

'Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice...'

100 Years of Solitude...

Wow, I didn't think anyone else read Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. Love in the Time of Cholera is also superb - I hope that's how the title translates into English....

both excellent books!

sjmitchner

" It was a nice day. All the days had been nice. There had been rather more than seven of them so far, and rain hadn't been invented yet."
-Good Omens: The nice and accurate prophecies of Agnes Nutter, witch BY Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

gmallan

"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

KatherineSLim

"I planned my death carefully; unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it. My life had a tendency to spread, get flabby, to scroll and festoon life the frame of a baroque mirror, which came from following the line of least resistance. I wanted my death, by contrast, to be neat and simple, understated, even a little severe, like a Quaker church or the basic black dress with a single strand of pearls…”

Lady Oracle, Margaret Atwood

zorbaru

"The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed." - The Gunslinger, The Dark Tower 1

its taking me forever to get through this book. however, im being told the rest of the series is excellent but the first book is soooo slow.

gr8pillock

"If you give a mouse a cookie..."

kelp99

"In a distant and second-hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part....See...Great A'Tuin the turtle comes, swimming slowly through the interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, his huge and ancient shell pocked with meteor craters."

eml48341

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

"Anna Karenina", Leo Tolstoy

Agree with Tolstoy. One of the best. I have so many that it is hard to narrow it down to "The Best", but a few other favorites of mine are:

“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.” A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

"I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story." Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

hearthemelody

"I scowl with frustration at myself in the mirror. Damn my hair – it just won’t behave, and damn Katherine Kavanagh for being ill and subjecting me to this ordeal. I should be studying for my final exams, which are next week, yet here I am trying to brush my hair into submission."

:laugh:

bananapancakebella

The first page of Lolita.

AJennaM

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore--

The Raven - Poe

leehgee89

“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.”