Comments on: Favorite first line?

By: New Kid on the Hallway

New Kid on the Hallway — Fri, 10 Sep 2004 11:58:51 +0000

It may be overly romantic and Gothic, but the one first line I can remember from the moment of reading it is: “Last night I dreamt I dwelt at Manderley again.”—Daphne DuMaurier, Rebecca.

By: George

George — Thu, 09 Sep 2004 21:06:10 +0000

First sentence of Love in the Time of Cholera (one of my favorite first lines, in one of my favorite books): “It was inevitable.” First word of Finnegans Wake is also memorable, if only because none of the rest of the book is: “riverrun”

By: Stu

Stu — Thu, 09 Sep 2004 19:42:30 +0000

Kind of middlebrow, but I’ve always loved, “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” from Stephen King’s “The Gunslinger.” Simple, and yet really evocative. And not a non sequitur. Too many opening sentences seem to grab your attention and then lack payoff. And then “Slaughterhouse 5,” which starts with “All this happened, more or less,” and then continues with something like “Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.” Catcher in the Rye: “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 in to it, if you want to know the truth.” Good stuff.

By: fatwhiteduke

fatwhiteduke — Thu, 09 Sep 2004 16:05:10 +0000

Paul Auster does particularly compelling first paragraphs. Try reading the first paragraphs of The New York Trilogy or Moon Palace and then putting them down.

By: fatwhiteduke

fatwhiteduke — Thu, 09 Sep 2004 16:04:58 +0000

Paul Auster does particularly compelling first paragraphs. Try reading the first paragraphs of The New York Trilogy or Moon Palace and then putting them down.

By: Robert Johnson

Robert Johnson — Thu, 09 Sep 2004 13:04:36 +0000

This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night. Raymond Carver, “Cathedral”

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Thu, 09 Sep 2004 04:12:34 +0000

Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers: bq. It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.

By: spacetoast

spacetoast — Thu, 09 Sep 2004 02:12:29 +0000

I’ve just read Giles Goat-Boy, so I’m thinking of the first line in the fake publisher’s disclaimer, which is something like “The reader must begin this book with an act of faith, and end it with an act of charity.” Both “hookish,” and, in a way, pretty deflationary of what novels in general will propose to do…and, particularly, coming before page 1 of a 700 some page shaggy-dog story. So that’s pretty cool and hookish, and, I think, pretty damn ballsy. Also in the ‘60s weirdness, I don’t remember the specific lines, but I think that some of Terry Southern’s novels have a pretty elegant and pretty hookish first scene / first couple of paragraphs or so, particularly the opening bit in Flash and Filigree, which describes in this incredibly tidy and deadpan language a scene between two people who are behaving completely psychotically. The way the things are held against each other makes for a very high degree of hookishness, I found.

By: benjamin

benjamin — Thu, 09 Sep 2004 02:03:23 +0000

“Either forswear fucking others or the affair is over.” —Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater

By: jdw

jdw — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 22:57:57 +0000

“Can I say that I’m glad that no-one has mentioned “Call me Ishmael”?” I was going to say that I thought “Call me Ishmael” was more famous than good, but the huge list of whaling quotes pre-beginning is a weirdly brilliant opening.

By: Doug

Doug — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 22:26:20 +0000

Phooey on me for having forgotten “Scanners” when there’s at least two copies on the shelf in front of me. Cordwainer Smith’s great on both titles and beginnings. And what about knock-out last lines? I’ll put in a kopeck for the final two sentences of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

By: Doug

Doug — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 22:19:28 +0000

Was it the bourbon or the dye fumes that made the pink walls quiver like vaginal lips? — Suicide Blonde by Darcey Steinke. (Sadly, the book doesn’t live up to the promise, but just try stopping after that first sentence.) The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. – Ask Henry about this one. On a certain day in June, 19—, a young man was making his way on foot northward from the great City to a town or place called Edgewood, that he had been told of but had never visited. His name was Smoky Barnable, and he was going to Edgewood to get married; the fact that he walked and didn’t ride was one of the conditions placed on his coming there at all. – Better ask Henry about this one, too; it does live up to its promise. It’s only fair that Lenin’s Tomb has two terrific starts; the book is an embarrassment of riches: Preface – “Long before anyone had a reason to predict the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, Nadezhda filled her notebooks with the accents of hope.” and Chapter 1 – “On a dreary summer’s day, Colonel Aleksandr Tretetsky of the Soviet Military Prosecutor’s Office arrived at his latest work site: a series of mass graves in a birch forest twenty miles outside the city of Kalinin. He and his assistants began the morning digging, searching the earth for artifacts of the totalitarian regime—bullet-shattered skulls, worm-eaten boots, scraps of Polish military uniforms.” In a different vein: “If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things happen in the middle. This is because not many happy things happened in the lives of the three Baudelaire youngsters. Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire were intelligent children, and they were charming, and resourceful, and had pleasant facial features, but they were extremely unlucky, and most everything that happened to them was rife with misfortune, misery, and despait. I’m sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes.” – The Bad Beginning, Lemony Snicket

By: EKR

EKR — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 22:02:56 +0000

“Martel was angry. He did not even adjust his blood away from anger.”—Cordwainer Smith, “Scanners Live in Vain” “Horselover Fat’s nervous breakdown began the day he got the phonecall from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals. He asked her why she wanted them and she said that she intended to kill herself. She was calling everyone she knew. By now she had fifty of them, but she needed thirty or forty more to be on the safe side.” —Philip K. Dick, “Valis”

By: Arthur D. Hlavaty

Arthur D. Hlavaty — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 21:40:47 +0000

“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.”—J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

By: Doug Turnbull

Doug Turnbull — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 21:37:53 +0000

Well, I can’t say it’s the best hook, since the book’s been sitting unread on my shelf for several years now, but Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward starts: “On top of everything else, the cancer ward was number 13.”