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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Favourite first line

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14:28 / 02.07.01

Inspired by the recent thread which got y’all up and jumping to create first lines of imaginary novels...

First lines may not tell you what the book will be like. Sometimes you take one, two, even three chapters to get a feel for someone’s writing. But sometimes you don't. Sometimes that first line explodes in your forebrain and you know you’re going to like this book. So... what is your favourite first line from a book or story?

Here are a couple to whet your appetite:

‘Noise/Information: Then it rained for a month. I started smoking again.’

- Just fucking cool, Rudy Rucker opens up White Light.

‘As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into a giant insect.’

- Had to be mentioned. Franz Kafka – Metamorphosis.

‘It was a pleasure to burn.’

- Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury.

‘This is my favourite book in all the world, though I have never read it.’

- William Goldman pulls a magical ontological riff as his intro to The Princess Bride.

Come my pretties; bring on ze vurds!

11:08 / 03.07.01

He – for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it – was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.
–Virginia Woolf, Orlando

There was a party to celebrate Deirdre's return from her abortion in Bristol.
Brendan Behan, The Catacombs

16:42 / 03.07.01

My copy keeps getting nicked, so I'm afraid it's a paraphrase, but beating "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold

"from Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as a primer for the rest of the book takes some beating...
Rather obvious, given, but at least I didn't choose "all that David Copperfield crap" from Catcher in the Rye as well....

13:42 / 04.07.01

It was the day my grandmother exploded.

- Iain Banks, The Crow Road.

So, canny first lines, is this just some backwater literary equivalent of train-spotting? Or do they have any relevance to the book, the style of book or the quality of the book?

19:25 / 04.07.01

Here's what John Lanchester has to say on the subject (talking about the Burgess sentence I quoted in the other thread):
'It is... designed to ensnare the reader from the moment he or she plunges into Burgess' imaginative world... it also encapsulates the fundamental tension at the heart of the novel - between the introversion of the spirit an the extroversion of the flesh... it conveys the protagonist's age, his sexual orientation (and, for that matter, his undimmed sexual vigour), his social status (he has a servant) and... its geographical location (the servant is called Ali). All that in just twenty-eight words.

So the opening sentence should entice and seduce the reader, while providing an introduction which yet does not flaunt itself

20:54 / 04.07.01

In other words, 'In a hole in the ground lived a Hobbit' doesn't really fit the bill - so why does everyone remember it?

12:28 / 05.07.01

Possibly my favourite opening line is:

"Horselover Fat's nervous breakdown began the day he got the phonecall from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals."
- Philip K. Dick, Valis

I also feel it is my duty to remind all present of HP Lovecraft's undisputed position as the KING of the horror story opening paragraph:

"In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and a faint distant baying as of some gigantic hound."
-The Hound

"I HATE the moon - I am afraid of it - for when it shines on certain scenes familiar and loved it sometimes makes them unfamiliar and hideous."
-What the Noon Brings

"It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer."
-The Thing on the Doorstep

"It's midnight. Before dawn they will find me and take me to a black cell where I shall languish interminably, while insatiable desires gnaw at my vitals and wither up my heart, till at last I become one with the dead I so love."
-The Loved Dead

and my personal favourite:

"I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below."
- Dagon

The Return Of Rothkoid

12:38 / 05.07.01

Nicely whetting my appetite, Riz; there's a collected Lovecraft in my bag, awaiting perusal after I've finished the Tibor Fischer I'm reading.

Hmm.

I'd also put Poe up there, somewhat: I'm always quite fond of the first line from The Fall of the House of Usher, if only because it goes on so much - t othe point of overstatement:

quote: During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.

When I recall my absolute favourite, I'll whack it up.

01:28 / 10.07.01

The sky was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

-Neuromancer by William Gibson

My vote for the best first line of all time.

01:28 / 10.07.01

"Listen:
Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time."

Not REALLY the first line, but kind of is in principle... Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse 5

But then there's the old classic that completely floored me when I read it - the first line of Camus' Stranger. Like a punch in the stomach.

Ellis

01:28 / 10.07.01

"Mother died today.
Or maybe yesterday. I dont know."- The Outsider.

08:50 / 12.07.01

"It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not." --Paul Auster, City of Glass

01:34 / 13.07.01

In M-, an important town in northern Italy, the widowed Marquise of O-, a lady of unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-brought-up children, inserted the following announcement in the newspapers: that she had, without knowledge of the cause, come to find herself in a certain situation; that she would like the father of the child she was expecting to disclose his identity to her; and that she was resolved, out of consideration for her family, to marry him.

Heinrich von Kleist, The Marquise von O

gentleman loser

17:41 / 15.07.01

The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Douglas Adams

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

OK, so it's two lines.

Regrettable Juvenilia

18:28 / 15.07.01

"People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles."

- Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

"ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn't seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, "Be My Baby" on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so."

- Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

[ 15-07-2001: Message edited by: The Flyboy ]

21:24 / 15.07.01

The only two Bret Easton Ellis books necessary to read.

Also love the way that American Psycho starts with 'ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE' and finishes with the words 'THIS IS NOT AN EXIT'.

Um, not that I'm easily impressed or anything...

Regrettable Juvenilia

12:50 / 03.09.01

"They set a slamhound on Turner's tail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the colour of his hair."

- you can tell Count Zero is a William Gibson novel from the get-go, because he's stuck two words together to make a new one...

13:18 / 03.09.01

'My father lost me to The Beast at cards.'

Angela Carter, 'The Tiger's Bride'

'At last the revenants became so troublesome the peasants abandoned the village and it fell solely into the possession of subtle and vindictive inhabitants who manifest their presences by shadows that fall almost imperceptibly awry, too many shadows, even at midday, shadows that have no source in anything visible; ...'

Angela Carter, 'The Lady of the House of Love'

deletia

13:30 / 03.09.01

1. I began recording my wife's telephone calls without her knowledge the Moday after the third weekend in April 1993.

Rick Moody, "The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven"

07:40 / 09.09.01

quote:Originally posted by Macavity:
In other words, 'In a hole in the ground lived a Hobbit' doesn't really fit the bill - so why does everyone remember it?

Um. Nice rhythm, short words. Cosy feeling: orients you immediately to a bedtime-story kind of frame of mind. 'Hobbit' sounds a bit like 'rabbit' so you can probably guess it's a nice creature, and the fact it's a made-up word means you instantly know there's a whole new world waiting for you in the book: but unlike, say, the William Gibson line, it's sucking you in thru familiarity/ simplicity, rather than shouting "Look! It's the future! Get used to it!" and chucking you in at the deep end.

Can't think of a favourite first line for myself. It would probably be from fanfic if I did, since those serve a similar purpose to the 'hobbit' one - orienting you comfortably and offering you something new as a hook in.

20:14 / 19.09.01

A few from the "popular lit." drawer

"I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save my soul and my vision" - H.P. Lovecraft, "He"

"In the raucous cathedral square the crowd prepared to hang a pig" - Mary Gentle, "Rats and Gargoyles

More will come to my mind as soon as I post this....

20:30 / 19.09.01

"Lamar Pye had the biggest penis in the enitre Arkansaw state prison system. It was a long veiny thing.."

Dirty White Boys by Steven Hunter

I can't remember exactly what prison he was supposed to be in but you get the idea.

09:57 / 22.09.01

Brevman knows a girl named Shell whose ears were pierced so she could wear long filigree earrings. The punctured festered and now she has a tiny scar in each earlobe. He discovered them behind her hair.

Leonard Cohen ~ The Favorite game

08:56 / 23.09.01

Two from Damon Runyon short stories -

That Ever-Loving Wife of Hymie's
If anybody ever tells me that I will wake up some morning to find myself sleeping with a horse, I will consider them very daffy indeed, especially if they tell me it will be with such a horse as old Mahogany, for Mahogany is really not much horse.

A Light in France
In the summer of 1936, a personality by the name of Blond Maurice is found buried in a pit of quicklime up in Sullivan County, or, anyway, what is found is all that is left of Maury, consisting of a few odds and ends in the way of bones, and a pair of shoes which have Brown the shoemaker's name in them, and which Brown identifies as a pair of shoes he makes for Maury some months before, when Maury is in the money and is able to have his shoes made to order.

20:12 / 23.09.01

A few from Cordwainer Smith....

quote:The story ran - how did the story run?
From "The Lady who sailed the Soul"

quote: I tell you, it is sad it is more than sad, it is fearful - for it is a dreadful thing to go into the up-and-out, to fly without flying, to move between the stars as a moth may drift among the leaves on a summer night
From "The Burning of the Brain"

quote: You already know the end - the immense drama of Lord Jestocost, seventh of his line, and how the cat-girl C'mell initiated the vast conspiracy
from "The Dead Lady of Clown Town"

And sure as hell he knew how to invent titles, too.

Krister Kjellin

07:36 / 24.09.01

I always liked the beginning of Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange". It's weird, cold and rambling in a youthful, letter-to-penpal-like way. Sets the tone, really. And the rhythm is wonderful.

quote:'What's it going to be then, eh?'
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.

00:10 / 04.10.01

What about

"A screaming comes across the sky."

?

Gravity's Rainbow.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

11:17 / 05.10.01

Bastard! You got "Orange" in before me! "flip dark chill winter bastard"- pure fucking genius.

Gonna have to aim a little lower then- "Bad Wisdom" by Bill Drummond and Mark Manning- "I am shit scared. Scared of almost everything."
(Also has the best line EVER- "we were gonna free Willy, fuck chicks and slay dragons. We are Zen Masters and know what the fucke we are talking about."

Lovecraft sure does have some killer openings... it's his LAST lines that really mark him out, though. (Won't post any as I gather someone- can't remember who- is about to start reading him, and I don't wanna spoil it.)

Oh yeah, and-

"the nightclub/ a stonecold zombie with a look of shock on its face, the kind that happens when nocturnals get caught in the daylight/ chack that feeling/ something about turned-off neon always does is for me, turns on the sadness, gets me thinking about where all the shine goes to/ like it should've been raining, like it should've always been raining"- Jeff Noon, "Needle in the Groove"

or

"Three greasy brother crows wheel, beak to heel, cutting a circle into the bruised and troubled sky, making fast, dark rings through the thicksome bloats of smoke."- Nick Cave, "And The Ass Saw The Angel".

12:07 / 05.10.01

The beauty of that Cave line is that you can just hear him saying it in that cod-Southern drawl of his (best heard on "Until the End of the World").

12:48 / 05.10.01

"Call me Ishmael" The short sharp and eternally cool beginning to Moby Dick

18:01 / 08.10.01

"The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed sub-category."

from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash

That and the next 20 or so pages really make you wanna be a hi-tech pizza delivery guy...

01:24 / 09.10.01

It was a bright, defrosted, pussy-willow day at the onset of spring, and the newlyweds were driving cross-country in a large roast turkey.
- Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All

(okay, so there's technically a prelude before that line opens up chapter one, but the first line of the prelude is "This is the room of the wolfmother wallpaper", which ain't so bad either)

02:37 / 09.10.01

my high school made us read one flew over the cocou's nest and the copy i had had much of the first chapet torn out and the 1rst line i read in my copy (unknowing that i was missing stuf) was "i'm a habitual hassler" that in my mind is STILL the best EVER open book line and was un-intnetional

11:12 / 12.10.01

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York"
Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar

"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love"
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Love in the Time of Cholera

And all the others I know have already been quoted! <sulks>

11:25 / 12.10.01

quote:Originally posted by Ma'at:

"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love"
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Love in the Time of Cholera

A book would be so out of the window if i opened it to the first page and read that!

Or is it s'posed to be a joke? I don't know..

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