Best opening lines of a book.

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  • headoverhills
    headoverhills Posts: 70
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    '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
    PottsvilleCurse1925 Posts: 354 Member
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    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
    gmallan Posts: 2,099 Member
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    '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
    quixoteQ Posts: 484
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    '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
    andeehrdz Posts: 59 Member
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    "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

    :heart: :heart:
  • the_journeyman
    the_journeyman Posts: 1,877 Member
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    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
    riveraphx Posts: 380 Member
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    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
    RunDoozer Posts: 1,699 Member
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    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
    Jaulen Posts: 468 Member
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    '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
    sjmitchner Posts: 121 Member
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    " 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
    gmallan Posts: 2,099 Member
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    "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
    KatherineSLim Posts: 18 Member
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    "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
    zorbaru Posts: 1,077 Member
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    "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
    gr8pillock Posts: 374 Member
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    "If you give a mouse a cookie..."
  • kelp99
    kelp99 Posts: 101 Member
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    "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
    eml48341 Posts: 88 Member
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    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
    hearthemelody Posts: 1,025 Member
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    "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
    bananapancakebella Posts: 178
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    The first page of Lolita.
  • AJennaM
    AJennaM Posts: 5 Member
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    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
    leehgee89 Posts: 22 Member
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    “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.”

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