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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Favourite first line

  
  

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Jackie Susann
11:28 / 12.10.01
Ugh, that Plath is giving me teen angst flashbacks.

Not necessarily my favourite opening, but a great opening anyway, from my favourite book, Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz:

So my heritage is a calculated fuck on some faraway sun-filled bed while the curtains are being sucked in and out of an open window by a passing breeze. I'd be lying if I were to tell you I could remember the smell of sweat as I hadn't even been born yet.
 
 
Ma'at
14:05 / 12.10.01
[QUOTE]Originally posted by Crunchy Mr Bananapants:
[QB]Ugh, that Plath is giving me teen angst flashbacks.

You must have been a very happy teenager!
 
 
Ma'at
14:07 / 12.10.01
quote:Originally posted by Rizla Year Zero:


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..

Tell you what. I'll go ask the author shall I
 
 
Jackie Susann
04:30 / 13.10.01
Best first line in a book of philosophy, from Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (which follows their Anti-Oedipus):

"The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd."
 
 
Jack The Bodiless
18:50 / 21.10.01
"The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up."

G.K. Chesterton, The Napoleon Of Notting Hill
 
 
Seth
22:09 / 21.10.01
He thought of death in all its infinite groanings, of Aztecs ripping out living hearts and of cancer and three-year olds buried alive and he wondered whether God was alien and cruel; but then remembered Beethoven and the dappling of things and the lark and 'Hurrah for Karamazov' and kindness. - William Peter Blatty, Legion

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. - The Gospel According to John
 
 
Elijah, Freelance Rabbi
15:53 / 22.10.01
"I knew it would be a bad day when i found the dead snake on my doorsetep."

Some random cyber novel by some random author
 
 
Mordant Carnival
19:19 / 22.10.01
"It was already Thursday when Deidre rose from her grave...." Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. (The rest of the story, whislt fun, is nowhere near as good as that line suggests)

"Today I put ground glass in my wife's eyes. She didn't mind; she never does..." Dennis Etchison. (Rest of story is just plain fucked up.)
 
 
Imaginary Mongoose Solutions
19:38 / 22.10.01
"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."
"She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita."


Lolita, Nabikov
 
 
adamswish
13:24 / 24.10.01
I know fucking well there's a God because I kill vampires for a living.

John Steakley, Vampire$

and apparantly he thought (or dreamt, I forget) that line then decided he had to put a book on to it.
 
 
cnwbieg
09:44 / 26.10.01
From 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', by Gabriel Garcia Marquez :

"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”
 
 
captain piss
12:31 / 26.10.01
"Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous"

From 'Arthur Jermyn' by (you got it) HP Lovecraft
 
 
Gus
19:07 / 30.10.01
"The night Harry Reynolds was abducted by the aliens, he was sitting on his toilet with a copy of the Weekly World News and a bad case of constipation..."
-Abduction, the UFO Conspiracy by David Bischoff

yeah, the book's crap.
 
 
Rose
07:01 / 18.11.01
Flatland
- Edwin A. Abbott
quote:I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.

  
 
gergsnickle
01:52 / 13.11.02
"There was a young man who was invariably spurned by the girls, not because he smelt at all bad, but because he happened to be as ugly as a monkey" - from John Collier's story "The Devil George and Rosie"
 
 
Tezcatlipoca
06:35 / 13.11.02
Damnit. JtB beat me to it with Chesterton. My back-up favourite is not an opening line as such, but within the opening paragraph:

"This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven."
Mervyn Peake - Titus Groan
 
 
LucasCorso
06:42 / 13.11.02
"It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars."

That's from Raymond Chandler's "The Big Sleep", and I think it's one of the best incipit in modern literature...
 
 
Harhoo
07:13 / 13.11.02
My favourite opening line is from my favourite book of all time, The Thought Gang by Tibor Fischer:

"The only advice I can offer, should you wake up vertiginously in a strange flat, with a thoroughly installed hangover, without any of your clothing, without any recollection of how you got there, with the police sledgehammering down your door to the accompaniment of excited dogs, while you are surrounded by bales of lavishly-produced magazines featuring children in adult acts, the only advice I can offer is to try to be good-humoured and polite."

As well as being wise, funny blah blah blah, the book contains more good lines per square inch than any novel ever published. FACT. And it's got a philosopher as its hero.
 
 
LucasCorso
07:17 / 13.11.02
How right you are Harhoo....I loved "The tought gang";I bought it without knowing the writer and I laughed alone during the whole time I was reading it...People at the airport stare at me like I was mad, and,actually,Fischer makes me mad...
 
 
Pepsi Max
07:22 / 13.11.02
damn you cnwbieg. But there's always this.
 
 
bjacques
13:27 / 13.11.02
It was a bright cold day in April, and all the clocks were striking thirteen.
- 1984

Merdre! - Ubu Roi

Now everybody... - last line of Gravity's Rainbow
 
 
gergsnickle
15:49 / 13.11.02
"Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is bettter to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar."

-The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
 
 
ill tonic
17:20 / 14.11.02
"Officious prick."

SK's THE SHINNING
 
 
Van Plague?
05:47 / 17.11.02
"Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.
So you see, my keeper can't be an enemy."

The Tin Drum - Gunther Grass
 
 
bio k9
08:37 / 17.11.02
Listen to my last words anywhere.
-Burroughs, Nova Express.

and

I didn't know that afternoon that the ground was waiting to become another grave in just a few short days.
-Brautigan, So the Wind Woln't Blow It All Away.
 
 
rakehell
23:33 / 17.11.02
Please, nobody hit me, but some cyberpunk pendant part of the seventeen-year-old me has to correct the opening line of Neuromancer to:

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
 
 
garythegnome
04:52 / 18.11.02
"The magician's underwear has just been found in a cardboard suitcase floating in a stagnent pond on the outskirts of Miami."

-Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins
 
 
John Adlin
18:36 / 21.11.02
"I guess if it hadn't been for that poker game , I'd have never really gotten to know my brother. That puts the whole thing into the realm of pure chance right at the outset."

David Eddings - High Hunt

"The Time Traveller (for so it will be convinent to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his unusally plale face was flushed and animated."

H G Wells -The Time Machine (One of a few books, where the centrall character is never identified by name.)
 
 
ephemerat
13:03 / 22.11.02
Ear and attend and listen; for this befell and behappened and became and was, O my Best Beloved, when the Tame animals were wild.

First line of The Cat that Walked by Himself from Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories.

Wonderful title, wonderful opening line, wonderful story.
 
 
01
07:03 / 23.11.02
"Saigon...Shit."

Apocalypse Now. I know, not a book but whatever.
 
 
Elijah, Freelance Rabbi
22:32 / 23.11.02
"my first thought was he lied with every word"
Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came
 
 
matthew.
00:40 / 12.01.06
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

For numerous reasons. First of all, the placement of the comma is important to how you read/say it aloud. It seems to me that only Joyce would do something like this.
Secondly, in context, this first line is part of a whole section in which Buck Mulligan ('that cad' -Simon Dedalus) creates a parody of a Mass (see "bearing" and "crossed" for the evidence).
Thirdly, it sets the tone for the entire novel: universal beauty within the most mundane of details.
That's just three things. From an endless and ever-fruitful novel.
 
 
Keith, like a scientist
02:03 / 12.01.06
ooh, I've never seen this thread before.

"I have lost count of the days that have passed since I fled the horrors of Vasco Miranda's mad fortress in the Andalusian mountain-village of Benengeli; ran from death under cover of darkness and left a message nailed to the door."
-Salman Rushdie, Moor's Last Sigh

Just a marvelously constructed sentence, it flows so beautifully and opens with such grandness and mystery.
 
 
Benny the Ball
09:20 / 12.01.06
Damn, all mine have already been used.

Clockwork Orange - for the hint of something sinister hiden amongst something seemingly so friendly, and also for droogs.

1984 - again, hiding the fact that something is out of the ordinary amongst something seemingly so bog standard.

Lolita - sums up the obsession totally.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
12:14 / 12.01.06
Samuel R Delany's Dhalgren (are you sensing a theme?): to wound the autmnal city. So howled out for the world to give him a name.

Lovecraft again: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. (The Call Of Cthulhu)

David Peace: 'All we ever get is Lord fucking Lucan and wingless bloody crows,' smiled Gilman, like this was the best day of our lives: Friday 13th December, 1974. (Nineteen Seventy Four)

(The last one obviously has the required effect on me, cos just digging out the book to quote it and reading it again has made me want to read the whole book again).
 
  

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