Best opening lines of a book.

124

Replies

  • E_H9
    E_H9 Posts: 23
    A lot of Dark Tower fans here. :glasses:
    "Judas Coyne bought a ghost on the internet. It arrived in a heart-shaped box, attached to a dead man's suit. If you think that that probably isn't going to end well, you'd be right."

    Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill

    I like this one too. I'm a big fan of both Stephen King and his son.
  • zaph0d
    zaph0d Posts: 1,172 Member
    Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

    This planet has, or rather had, a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

    And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

    Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

    And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything. Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.

    This is not her story.
  • sarahz5
    sarahz5 Posts: 1,363 Member
    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.

    Joyce
  • taso42
    taso42 Posts: 8,980 Member
    The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

    from Neuromancer by William Gibson
  • Jelenamiia
    Jelenamiia Posts: 21
    "Alexey Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district in his own day (and still remembered among us) owing to his tragic and obscure death, which happened exactly thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place."
  • autovatic
    autovatic Posts: 99 Member
    "Halfway along the road we have to go, I found myself obscured in a great forest, bewildered, and I knew I had lost the way."

    Not my favorite book, but it's hard to beat the beginning of Inferno for opening lines...
  • PetulantOne
    PetulantOne Posts: 2,131 Member
    "Who is John Galt?"
  • PetulantOne
    PetulantOne Posts: 2,131 Member
    "It was a pleasure to burn."
    Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

    "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."
    Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

    :heart: :heart: :heart: :heart:
  • PetulantOne
    PetulantOne Posts: 2,131 Member
    Who is John Galt?
    YES.

    Damnit, I was so excited I missed this.
  • firstsip
    firstsip Posts: 8,399 Member
    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.

    Joyce

    I love Finnegan's Wake.
  • xSveltex
    xSveltex Posts: 18 Member
    "My father is a son-of-a-bit#h from Eastern Europe."

    - The Education of Robert Nifkin, Daniel Pinkwater
  • Oishii
    Oishii Posts: 2,675 Member
    'Barabas came to us by sea.'

    This is the only opening line that has stuck in my head, though I remember lots of the ones I'm reading here. The opening of Catcher in the Rye just blew me away when I first read it.

    It makes me happy to see so much Hitchhiker's and Discworld, and I feel very old thinking that some of you read Holes at school. I helped TEACH Holes at a Pupil Referral Unit (where kids who are expelled are sent while they look for a new school) and the kids loved reading about other kids who were in trouble.
  • trackercasey76
    trackercasey76 Posts: 781 Member
    Who is John Galt?

    Reading it now!!
  • HurricaneElaine
    HurricaneElaine Posts: 984 Member
    "The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam, but rather the color of falling snow on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea."

    The Last Unicorn, Peter S Beagle

    YESSS!
  • jayche
    jayche Posts: 1,128 Member
    If you're going to read this, don't bother.
    Sounds like Series of Unfortunate Events, I never did finish that series (series wasn't complete when I read it).
  • p1xelate
    p1xelate Posts: 141 Member
    "I do not want ten million dollars. I do not want to visit Ireland. I do not want to end a Tobin family feud. And, above all, I do not want to court my eighth cousin, once removed."

    Angel Light by Andrew Greely

    Read it when I was 12 or 13 but this line never went away just so much WTH lol
  • artemis222
    artemis222 Posts: 390 Member
    It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport." Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only exception of this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.

    -The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
    Douglas Adams
  • Ekng
    Ekng Posts: 24 Member
    How do people get To this clandestine Archipelago? Hour by hour planes fly there, ships steer their course there and trains thunder off to it-but nary a mark on them to tell of their destination.

    Gulag Archipelago
    Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  • stepherzzzzz
    stepherzzzzz Posts: 469 Member
    If you're going to read this, don't bother.
    Sounds like Series of Unfortunate Events, I never did finish that series (series wasn't complete when I read it).

    It's from Choke by Chuck Palahniuk.
  • Leigh_b
    Leigh_b Posts: 576 Member
    k
  • jayche
    jayche Posts: 1,128 Member
    If you're going to read this, don't bother.
    Sounds like Series of Unfortunate Events, I never did finish that series (series wasn't complete when I read it).

    It's from Choke by Chuck Palahniuk.
    Still sounds like Series of Unfortunate Events
  • veggieshark
    veggieshark Posts: 153 Member
    “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 by Jeffrey Eugenides
  • emyishardcore
    emyishardcore Posts: 352 Member
    If you're going to read this, don't bother.
    Sounds like Series of Unfortunate Events, I never did finish that series (series wasn't complete when I read it).

    It's from Choke by Chuck Palahniuk.
    Still sounds like Series of Unfortunate Events
    Yah I thought it was from Series of Unfortunate Events
  • rosesigil
    rosesigil Posts: 105 Member
    It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport." Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only exception of this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.

    -The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
    Douglas Adams


    Excellent! Best Adams book---if you can, get the book on audio read by the author. His own rendition of the book is superb.
  • rosesigil
    rosesigil Posts: 105 Member
    The primroses were over.

    Watership Down
  • nuemmedigg
    nuemmedigg Posts: 220 Member
    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.

    :heart: this.

    Saint Exupery, my favorite too. When I looked at the picture for the first time, I thought it was a black hat :)
  • nuemmedigg
    nuemmedigg Posts: 220 Member
    "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."




    ?
    Brilliant!

    Truly is... it got millions of kids (and many grown ups) to read all seven HP's.
  • MichaelYoung1976
    MichaelYoung1976 Posts: 307
    Once upon a time...

    Beat me to it :~)
  • stepherzzzzz
    stepherzzzzz Posts: 469 Member
    If you're going to read this, don't bother.
    Sounds like Series of Unfortunate Events, I never did finish that series (series wasn't complete when I read it).

    It's from Choke by Chuck Palahniuk.
    Still sounds like Series of Unfortunate Events
    Yah I thought it was from Series of Unfortunate Events

    Well I can't say for certain that line wasn't used in that book because I've never read it, nor have I seen the movie. I can, however, say with confidence that it is the opening line of Choke. I've read it five times and have it sitting next to me on my night stand right now.

    See? Seventh one under "C"

    http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Opening_lines#C
  • Admiral_Derp
    Admiral_Derp Posts: 866 Member
    "The shell is a command interpreter. More than just the insulating layer between the operating system kernel and the user, it's also a fairly powerful programming language." ~The Advanced Bash Scripting Guide

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