Best opening lines of a book.

jayche

There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.

Holes....love that book

Yeah me too, I've read it so many times in my childhood that the first sentence is engraved in my memory lol
I might have to pick it up and read it again sometime...

GiddyupTim

"The Polish general suffered severe gastric distress during the entire return flight from Moscow. Not because he had drunk too much vodka -- he was used to that; and not because he was helping the Soviets oppress Poland -- he was used to that, too -- but because of a secret he'd been told."
Well, they are not the best opening lines. But the book is great !
The general has found out that the Russians intend to send a poet to the moon as a public relations stunt.
Zero Gravity, by Richard Lourie.

mbryanlpc

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

This

reddi2roll

"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, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other wayin short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only." ~ Charles ****ens Tale Of Two Cities

My favorite!

stepherzzzzz

If you're going to read this, don't bother.

vickilm1976

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

Well done!
Beat me to it!

Those are my favourite books! Just started reading them all again.

herky

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort." LOVE Tolkien.

E_H9

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

Yes! I thought of this line too.

wigglypeaches

"So I'm on my way to work and I stop to watch a pigeon fight a rat in the snow, and some ****head tries to mug me!" -Beat the Reaper, Josh Bazell

anifani4

"Born mute, speaking only in sign, Edgar Sawtelle leads an idyllic life with his parents on their farm in remote Northern Wisconsin." opening line from: The Story of Edgar Sawelle by David Wroblewski.

E_H9

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

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

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

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

from Neuromancer by William Gibson

Jelenamiia

"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

"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

"Who is John Galt?"

PetulantOne

"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

PetulantOne

Who is John Galt?

YES.

Damnit, I was so excited I missed this.

firstsip

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.