Opening Lines

[BenG]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Some more obscure stories, but well worth one's time.

#1 - She was a girlygirl and they were true men, the lords of creation, but she pitted her wits against them and she won.

#2 - If I had cared to live, I would have died.

#3 - When the office door opened suddenly I knew the game was up. It had been a money-maker - but it was over.

#4 - Gallegher played by ear, which would have been all right if he had been a musician - but he was a scientist.

#5 - I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker called Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte.

I wouldn't call #5 obscure. It's Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, the inspiration for the movies Yojimbo and For A Few Dollars More.
"Poisonville" gives it away.

[BenG]

1. I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.


2. When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.


3. Matty Telemachus left his body for the first time in the summer of 1995, when he was fourteen years old. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that his body expelled him, sending his consciousness flying on a geyser of lust and shame.


4. It was my father who called the city the Mansion on the River.
He was talking about Charleston, South Carolina, and he was a native son, peacock proud of a town so pretty it makes your eyes ache with pleasure just to walk down its spellbinding, narrow streets. Charleston was my father’s ministry, his hobbyhorse, his quiet obsession, and the great love of his life. His bloodstream lit up my own with a passion for the city that I’ve never lost nor ever will. I’m Charleston-born, and bred. The city’s two rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper, have flooded and shaped all the days of my life on this storied peninsula.

[astrangerhere]

Originally Posted by BenG

1. I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.

Out of Africa by Isak Denison (aka Karen Blixen)

[astrangerhere]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

2 - "ON THE MORNING after the Feds burned down her house and took her father, Havaa woke from dreams of sea anemones."

4 - "The writer, an old man with a white mustache, had some difficulty in getting into bed. The windows of the house in which he lived were high and he wanted to look at the trees when he awoke in the morning."

No takers on 2 or 4?

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by BenG

I wouldn't call #5 obscure. It's Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, the inspiration for the movies Yojimbo and For A Few Dollars More.
"Poisonville" gives it away.

I included that for a "gimme".

Any idea about #2 - If I had cared to live, I would have died..

[BenG]

I overlooked that one. It's from Silverlock by John Myers Myers.

[Greg Anos]

Well done! The book about reading books. . .

And I have drunk the three drinks from the Hippocrene. . .