Literature's Best Opening Lines (2 Viewers)

[Joe Bryant]

I like words.

The 13 Best Opening Lines in Literature

A perfect opening sentence immediately draws the reader in, provoking curiosity while setting the story's tone.

www.inspiringquotes.com

 

[Joe Bryant]

What are your favorites?

And please note the book or source they're from.

 

[BlackCrowes]

"The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail"

 

[Joe Bryant]

"The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail"

What is that from?

 

[gianmarco]

"The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play, so we sat in the house all that cold, cold wet day."

 

[Joe Bryant]

"The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play, so we sat in the house all that cold, cold wet day."

Thanks. What is that from?

 

[rockaction]

"Year of Glad

I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies" - Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

The Year of Glad is the memorable part for me, because it was 1997 before everything had a corporate sponsor, and here was Wallace foreseeing the day where even time and the calendar was subsidized.

 

[Sullie]

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move." Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

I'm an unwavering, church attending Catholic still in good standing with a strong belief in God for whatever it's worth.

 

[rockaction]

If you type "first lines" into Google Gravity's Rainbow is one of the searches.

"A screaming comes across the sky"

It is a book I've never read, yet whose first line I can recite in my head for some reason.

 

[Joe Bryant]

See the child.
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

 

[Joe Bryant]

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.

J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

 

[CletiusMaximus]

I take my family to the Christmas Carol every December and love hearing Dickens’ opening line of my favorite story. “Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.”

 

[Encyclopedia Brown]

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.

 

[Jayrod]

I know it is cliche and the article includes it, but I've always loved A Tale of Two Cities:
"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 way—in 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."

 

[Don Quixote]

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

- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

 

[Joe Bryant]

All this happened, more or less.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

 

[Joe Bryant]

One of my favorite books this year.

It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel.
—Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad

 

[Sleestak]

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

 

[timschochet]

The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years- if it ever did end- began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.

 

[BLOCKED_PUNT]

Well that's disappointing. My favorite book is Of Mice and Men but the opening line isn't exactly memorable.

 

[Eephus]

"Thundershowers hit just before midnight, drowning out the horn honks and noisemaker blare that usually signalled New Year's on the Strip, bringing 1950 to the West Hollywood Substation in a wave of hot squeals with meat wagon backup."

The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy

 

[Don Quixote]

Well that's disappointing. My favorite book is Of Mice and Men but the opening line isn't exactly memorable.

The one that comes to mind for Steinbeck for me is Cannery Row:

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gambler and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen” and he would have meant the same thing.

 

[gianmarco]

"The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play, so we sat in the house all that cold, cold wet day."

Thanks. What is that from?

The Cat in the Hat

 

[Hastur]

Good sense is mankind's most equitably divided endowment, for everyone thinks that he is so abundantly provided with it that even those with the most insatiable appetites and most difficult to please in other ways do not usually want more than they have of this.

-Discourse on Method and Meditations by Descartes

 

[Hastur]

"The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play, so we sat in the house all that cold, cold wet day."

Thanks. What is that from?

The Cat in the Hat

Author please?

 

[Chaos34]

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

Metamorphosis - Kafka

 

[Eephus]

It's funny how people remember the opening lines of books and the final lines of movies. Maybe it's because they start books they never finish and come into the movie halfway through.

That's just an observation, not the first sentence of a book.

 

[gianmarco]

"The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play, so we sat in the house all that cold, cold wet day."

Thanks. What is that from?

The Cat in the Hat

Author please?

Theodor Geisel

 

[Nipsey]

I am an invisible man.

 

[BrutalPenguin]

I'm pretty much ****ed. That's my considered opinion. ****ed

The Martian by Andy Weir

 

[Don Quixote]

It's funny how people remember the opening lines of books and the final lines of movies. Maybe it's because they start books they never finish and come into the movie halfway through.

That's just an observation, not the first sentence of a book.

I think part of it is different set of things trying to do. The first line of a book intended to grab you when browsing a bookstore (at least when bookstores were still the primary medium for shopping for books) and make you want to buy it.

Movies - They’ve already got that butt that paid for that seat. Don’t need a good opening line to entice. A satisfying end so that leave recommending it to others is important though.

 

[BlackCrowes]

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.

J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

was trying to remember that one.

 

[dkp993]

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”

The Gunslinger: Dark Tower
Stephen King

 

[MTskibum]

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”

The Gunslinger: Dark Tower
Stephen King

I was going to post that one.

That single line is how you would describe those 7 books if your goal was to describe 7 long books in the shortest sentence possible.

 

[uwillbsoon]

"In the next town over, a man had killed his family."

The Bee Sting
By Paul Murray

Clearly foreshadowing the ambiguous ending.

 

[MTskibum]

Sam vines sighed when he heard the scream, but he finished shaving before he did anything about it.

Nightwatch
Terry Pratchett


He was the mel brooks of the fantasy literature world.

 

[Sand]

The Gunslinger is at the top. Next, of course, is

"It Was a Dark and Stormy Night."

 

[James Bond]

"The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling -- a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension -- becomes unbearable, and senses awake and revolt from it."

Ian Fleming, Casino Royale

 

[shuke]

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."

 

[shuke]

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."

Seem to be a bit late on this one.

 

[El Floppo]

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

100 years of solitude, Garcia Marquez

Call me Ishmael was the first one I thought of... Followed by the metamorphosis.

"From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that – a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them."

F-ing Faulkner, Absalom Absalom

 

[dkp993]

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”

The Gunslinger: Dark Tower
Stephen King

I was going to post that one.

That single line is how you would describe those 7 books if your goal was to describe 7 long books in the shortest sentence possible.

For sure. It’s nearly impossible to read that line and not be all in on what happens next.

 

[Northern Voice]

So.

In the beginning, there was nothing. Just the water.

Coyote was there, but Coyote was asleep. That Coyote was asleep and that Coyote was dreaming. When that Coyote dreams, anything can happen.

I can tell you that.

So, that Coyote is dreaming and pretty soon, one of those dreams gets loose and runs around. Makes a lot of noise.

Hooray, says that silly Dream, Coyote dream. I’m in charge of the world. And then that dream sees all that water.

 

[El Floppo]

So.

In the beginning, there was nothing. Just the water.

Coyote was there, but Coyote was asleep. That Coyote was asleep and that Coyote was dreaming. When that Coyote dreams, anything can happen.

I can tell you that.

So, that Coyote is dreaming and pretty soon, one of those dreams gets loose and runs around. Makes a lot of noise.

Hooray, says that silly Dream, Coyote dream. I’m in charge of the world. And then that dream sees all that water.

Peter Coyotes autobiography?

 

[BLOCKED_PUNT]

If poems count then I think The Raven should be in contention.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary

 

[Eephus]

I'm feeling very well read tonight because I've just started 30 new books.

 

[Riffraff]

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy.
-Homer (Odyssey)


You better not never tell nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy.
-Alice Walker (The Color Purple)


I must be in hell. It was the only logical explanation.
-John Douglas (Mindhunter)


This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.
-William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

 

[Chaos34]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.

 

[Dr. Octopus]

"The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail"

What is that from?

Jaws

 

[Joe Bryant]

So.

In the beginning, there was nothing. Just the water.

Coyote was there, but Coyote was asleep. That Coyote was asleep and that Coyote was dreaming. When that Coyote dreams, anything can happen.

I can tell you that.

So, that Coyote is dreaming and pretty soon, one of those dreams gets loose and runs around. Makes a lot of noise.

Hooray, says that silly Dream, Coyote dream. I’m in charge of the world. And then that dream sees all that water.

What is that from?