Opening Lines

[DNSB]

Another favourite opening line.

The first thing the boy Garion remembered was the kitchen at Faldor’s farm. For all the rest of his life he had a special warm feeling for kitchens and those peculiar sounds and smells that seemed somehow to combine into a bustling seriousness that had to do with love and food and comfort and security and, above all, home.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Another favourite opening line.

The first thing the boy Garion remembered was the kitchen at Faldor’s farm. For all the rest of his life he had a special warm feeling for kitchens and those peculiar sounds and smells that seemed somehow to combine into a bustling seriousness that had to do with love and food and comfort and security and, above all, home.

The first book of The Belgariad: Pawn of Prophecy

[Pulpmeister]

The third and fourth of my last batch:

3: Bonjour Tristesse. (I thought of including the whole opening para which has "sorrow" in it about six times, a translation of "tristesse" from the French, but thought one was enough. I don't read French but it would be interesting to know what the original French looked like. Lots of tristesses, I guess.)
4: Glitz, Elmore Leonard

The Agatha Christie was from Appointment With Death, 1938.

The opening lines I collect are ones that stick in my mid as "sucking me into the book" rather than spitting me out.

afterthought: found the opening para online:

Sur ce sentiment inconnu dont l'ennui, la douceur m'obsèdent, j'hésite à apposer le nom, le beau nom grave de tristesse. C'est un sentiment si complet, si égoïste que j'en ai presque honte alors que la tristesse m'a toujours paru honorable. Je ne la connaissais pas, elle, mais l'ennui, le regret, plus rarement le remords. Aujourd'hui, quelque chose se replie sur moi comme une soie, énervante et douce, et me sépare des autres.

[BenG]

Originally Posted by BenG

1. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology.

2. I am a watchdog. My name is Snuff.

3. Daddy said it was a bedsheet, a fitted bedsheet, and he said she was wearing it up on her shoulders like a cape with two of the corners knotted around her neck. She was standing barefoot on an oak stump, he said, standing on the one nearest the front walk where there was ordinarily a clay pot of geraniums, and he said her hair was mostly braided and bunned up in the back but for some few squirrel-colored strands of it that had worked their way loose and hung kind of wild and scraggly down across her forehead and almost to her nose. She was talking, he said. Then he stopped himself and creased the newspaper twice and put it in his lap, and he changed it to ranting, full-fledged bad-planking-in-the-attic ranting. It was something about Creon, he said, something about Creon and the stink of corpses.

4. There were five of us—Carruthers and the new recruit and myself, and Mr. Spivens and the verger. It was late afternoon on November the fifteenth, and we were in what was left of Coventry Cathedral, looking for the bishop’s bird stump.


5. There were no lions any more. There had been lions once. Sometimes in the shimmer of the heat on the plains the motion of their running still flickered on the dry wind — tawny, great, and quickly gone. Sometimes the honey-colored moon shivered to the silence of a ghost-roar on the rising air.

There were no chariots any more. The chariots, wind-bereft and roadless in the night, slept with their tall wheels hushed in the tomb of the last king.


6. 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...

2 is from A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny
3 is from A Short History of a Small Place by T. R. Pearson
5 is from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz by Russell Hoban

[astrangerhere]

1 - "I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods."

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

3 - "IN LATER YEARS, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini."

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."

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

1 - "I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods."

Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's. Was Holly a prostitute or an American geisha?

[issybird]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

3 - "IN LATER YEARS, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini."

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. What you call low-hanging fruit.

[astrangerhere]

Originally Posted by issybird

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. What you call low-hanging fruit.

Still waiting for someone to get the one from my favorite book that no one else besides my wife has read...

[DNSB]

Another of my favourites.

There were four of us—George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency. We were sitting in my room, smoking, and talking about how bad we were—bad from a medical point of view I mean, of course.

[BelleZora]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Another of my favourites.

There were four of us—George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency. We were sitting in my room, smoking, and talking about how bad we were—bad from a medical point of view I mean, of course.

Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome

[Greg Anos]

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.

[DNSB]

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.

1. The Ballad of Lost C'Mell, Cordwainer Smith

3. The Stainless Steel Rat, Harry Harrison

4. Time Locker, Henry Kuttner writing as Lewis Padgett. I think I have it in a book called Robots Have No Tails but not about to venture into the basement to locate it.

[Greg Anos]

Good shooting!!!

#5 is not S/F. . .

[Jozawun]

Originally Posted by BelleZora

Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome

Don't forget the rest
Not to Mention the Dog.
Connie Willis didn't.

[drofgnal]

The Martian by Andy Weir

"I'm pretty much f...ed."