The Millions recently posted the very Shteyngart-y opening passage of Gary Shteyngart’s forthcoming novel, Super Sad True Love Story
“Today I’ve made a major decision: I am never going to die. Others will die around me. They will be nullified. Nothing of their personality will remain. The light switch will be turned off.”
It got us thinking about our own favorite beginnings, both recent and classic. Below are some favorites from our bookshelf. Feel free to add your own picks in the comments section.
1. Slumberland
Best commentary on “post-blackness” considering Obama wasn’t even president when the book was written:
“You would think they’d be used to me by now. I mean don’t they know that after fourteen hundred years the charade of blackness is over? That we blacks, the once eternally hip, the people who were as right now as Greenwich Mean Time, are, as of today, as yesterday as stone tools, the velocipede, and the paper straw all rolled into one? The Negro is now officially human. Everyone, even the British, says so.”
2. “Me and Miss Mandible” by Donald Barthelme (from Sixty Stories
Best opening to a story about sexual tension between a schoolteacher and her student who the teacher thinks is a little kid, but is actually an adult who, for some bizarre reason, has been re-assigned to elementary school.
“Miss Mandible wants to make love to me but she hesitates because I am officially a child.”
3. “Sororally” by Gary Lutz (from Stories in the Worst Way
Most depressing opening to an equally depressing story from an equally depressing book, whose bleak worldview is made palatable only by its triumphantly unique and beautiful sentences:
“What could be worse than having to be seen resorting to your own life.”
4. The Ask
Best opening passage that’s been excerpted in a zillion places over the past few weeks because the book’s just out (and amazing!) but what the hell, let’s hear it one more time, it’s that good:
“America, said Horace, the office temp, was a run-down and demented pimp. Our republic’s whoremaster days were through. Whither that frost-nerved, diamond-fanged hustler who’d stormed Normandy, dick-smacked the Soviets, turned out such firm emerging market flesh? Now our nation slumped in the corner of the pool hall, some gummy coot with a pint of mad dog and soggy yellow eyes, just another mark for the juvenile wolves.”
5. “Old Souls” by Sam Lipsyte (from Venus Drive
Best (and only) opening of same author’s first book, a story collection, the first story of which begins in a strip club, and ends with the narrator committing quasi-sexual acts on his coma’d sister before grabbing a beer with his bud and a crack-whore, no big deal:
“You could touch for a couple of bucks. The window of the booth went up and you stuck out the bills. They might tell you not to pinch, but I was a stroke type anyway. Some guys, I guess they want to leave a mark. Me, I just like the feel.”
6. “You Drive” by Christine Schutt (from Nightwork
Best opening sentence about incest that doesn’t explicitly mention incest, but is, like, totally about incest:
“She brought him what she had promised and they did it in his car, on the top floor of the car park, looking down onto the black flat roofs of buildings, and she said, or she thought she said, ‘I like your skin,’ when what she really liked was the color of her father’s skin, the mottled white of his arms, and the clay color at the roots of the hairs along his arms.”
7. Franny and Zooey
Best opening to a Salinger book that isn’t the one you’d expect, but is a pretty excellent — if a bit snotty — description of snotty rich college kids:
“Though brilliantly sunny, Saturday morning was overcoat weather again, not just topcoat weather, as it had been all week and as everyone hoped it would stay for the big weekend — the weekend of the Yale game. Of the twenty-some young men who were waiting at the station for their dates to arrive on the ten-fifty-two, no more than six or seven were out on the cold, open platform. The rest were standing around in hatless, smoky little groups of twos and threes and fours inside the heated waiting room, talking in voices that, almost without exception, sounded collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident, conversational turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue, one that the outside, non-matriculating world had been bungling, provocatively or not, for centuries.”
8. Memories of My Melancholy Whores
Best idea for a birthday gift:
“The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.”
9. Murphy
Most Beckettian opening to a Beckett novel:
“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
10. Then We Came to the End
Best opening written in the first-person plural other than The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark, which we can’t find our copy of, but which we remember as having a pretty great opening:
“We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen.”
11. Suicide Blonde
Most impressive use of labia in a simile:
“Was it the bourbon or the dye fumes that made the pink walls quiver like vaginal lips?”
12. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Most post-modern opening before the coining of the term “post-modern”:
“You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by a Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.”
13. Still Holding
Best opening sentence that references Drew Barrymore:
“As a girl, Becca hadn’t resembled Drew Barrymore at all. But now, at twenty-five, especially after gaining a few pounds, she had grown used to comments from bartenders and store clerks, and the half-startled looks from passerby.”
14. Sabbath’s Theater
Best ultimatum as opening sentence:
“Either forswear fucking others or the affair is over.”
15. Anna Karenina
Best opening sentence that’s been basically stripped of meaning by everyone always quoting it, mangling it, using variations on it as voice-over intros to their indie films, but is still pretty great, you’ve got to admit (note: this translation is from a really old Penguin edition):
“All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion.”
16. Bright Lights, Big City
Best opening to a book written in the second person:
“You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.”
17. Ablutions
Best opening to a book written in the second person that’s not by Jay McInerney, and that, even if it’s not the best, is still great, and you should read it because this book only came out last year, and no one paid attention to it to the point that you can buy it for like three bucks on Amazon:
“Discuss the regulars. They sit in a line like ugly, huddled birds, eyes wet with alcohol.”
18. The Stranger
Most exciting first sentence for twelfth grade existentialists, pissed off at those jerks in gym class, or the cute boy who won’t look at her, but at least there’s solace to be found in the writings of dead Frenchmen (and French Algerians):
“Mother died today.”
19. Platform
Best variation on Camus’ opening line:
“Father died last year. I don’t subscribe to the theory by which we only become truly adult when our parents die; we never become truly adult.”
20. Herzog
Best opening to an epistolary novel:
“If I am out of my mind, it’s alright with me, thought Moses Herzog.”
21. Letters to Wendy’s
Best opening to an epistolary novel that’s not Herzog:
“July 1, 1996
I had such a wonderful meal in every sense of the word. I especially liked the ordering of the food. IT asserts an altogether proper dominance. And how do you manage to hire such attractive people!! Often I visit Wendy’s just to take a gander at your employees. Thank you! (for being there)”
22. Motherless Brooklyn
Best opening narration by a character with Tourette’s syndrome:
“Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I’m a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. I’ve got Tourette’s. My mouth won’t quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I’m reading aloud, my Adam’s apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghosts of themselves, husks of empty breath and tone.”
23. Why Did I Ever
Least annoying/best dream sequence opening:
“I have a dream of working a combination lock that is engraved on its back with the combination. Left 85, right 12, left 66. “Well shit, man,” I say in the dream.”
24. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Best opening description of a drug experience:
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive….” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”
25. “Wants” by Grace Paley (from Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
Most perfectly economical first lines of a perfectly economical short story:
“I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library.
Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified.
He said, What? What life? No life of mine.”
26. What’s Not to Love?
Most TMI opening to a non-fiction book because we see the author wandering around Brooklyn all the time, and have to fight the urge to ask about the late ascension of his left ball:
“I started puberty very late. I was nearly sixteen. And for complicated reasons this late arrival of my puberty caused me to stop playing competitive tennis. But before my puberty problem, I had trouble with my lower back and with my left testicle.”
27. Gravity’s Rainbow
Best one sentence description of the beginning of blitz bomb apocalypse:
“A screaming comes across the sky.”
28. Moby-Dick
Opening sentence that could be a stray piece of dialogue from a disturbingly Iraq War-themed porn film:
“Call me Ishmael.”
29. Lolita
Best opening that everyone knows is the best opening, so much so that it’s basically become a cliché to put it in a list of best openings, but so what, because it’s actually the best, and we dare you to come up with a better one:
“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 palette to tap, at three, 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.”
30. The Adventures of Augie March
Personal favorite:
“I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”
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Best opening about suicide: “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.” – Love in the Time of Cholera
[...] Read the Full List at Flavorwire [...]
Best creeper opening: “I am a sick man. I am a wicked man.” -Notes From Underground, Dostoevsky
Pride and Prejudice:
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” – One Hundred Years of Solitude
” It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.” George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
“Someone must have made a false accusation against Josef K., for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong” – The Trial, Kafka
“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
“When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.
The man who’d introduced them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.”
— Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace
[...] Our 30 Favourite Opening Lines In Literature. [Flavorwire] var addthis_pub = ''; var addthis_language = 'en';var addthis_options = 'facebook, twitter, [...]
“My desert-island, all-time, top five most memorable split-ups in chronological order” – High fidelity, Nick Hornby
amazed that Love in the Time of Cholera didn’t make the cut! p.s. #10 is in first-person plural, not third-.
I think that the Camus quote loses a bit without the followup line: “Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday”
“Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with a spade; but first it is better 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.” Flann O Brien – The Third Policeman
And you’re right about the Camus.
[...] And by “hits” I mean he picks the 30 best opening lines in literature. [...]
Two favorites: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” (everybody knows who wrote THAT)
and
“This gun is not a gun” John le Carre “Single and Single”…still the best living writer in English, although he lost a bit off his fastball when the Evil Empire did itself in
The first time I heard Personville called Poisonville was by a red-haired mucker named Hicky Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. — The Red Harcest by Dashiell Hammett
“Although I’d often been told that a college education would prove useful regardless of whatever else I did in my life, my bachelor’s degree was of no help whatsoever in making up my mind to shoot someone.”
Michael A. Lucas, Devil Born Without Horns
Or there is always Peter De Vries in The Vale of Laughter:
“Call me, Ishmael.”
“For a long time, I used to go to bed early.” – Proust, via Moncrieff
“I wear The Ring. I wear The Ring and I return often to the city of Charleston, South Carolina, to study the history of my becoming a man.”
- Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline
“Early in 1880, in spite of a well-founded suspicion as to the advisability of perpetuating that race which has the sanction of the Lord and the disapproval of the people, Hedvig Volkbein, a Viennese woman of great strength and military beauty, lying upon a canopied bed, of a rich spectacular crimson, the valance stamped with the bifurcated wings of the House of Hapsburg, the feather coverlet an envelope of satin on which, in massive and tarnished gold threads, stood the Volkbein arms, – gave birth, at the age of forty-five, to an only child, a son, seven days after her physician predicted that she would be taken.”
The first sentence of “Nightwood” by Djuna Barnes.
Delillo–Libra
That was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, 200 miles of track. He liked to stand at the front of the first car, hands flat against the glass. The train smashed through the dark. People stood on local platforms staring, a nowhere look they’d been practicing for years. He kind of wondered, speeding past, who they really were. His body fluttered in the fastest stretches. They went so fast sometimes he thought they wer on the edge of no-control. The noise was pitched to a level he absorbed as a personal test. Another crazy-ass curve. there was so much iron in the sound of those curves he could almost taste ii, like a toy you put in your mouth when you are little.
And who could forget the opening of Ronald Firbank’s “The Flower Beneath the Foot:”
“Neither her Gaudiness the Mistress of the Robes nor her Dreaminess the Queen were feeling quite themselves.”
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that
station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. – David Copperfield by Dickins
“When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing. ‘Spread your lips, sweet Lil,’ they’d cluck, ‘and show us your choppers!’”
–Geek Love, Katherine Dunn
Ambrose Bierce’s “An Imperfect Conflagration”:
Early one June morning in 1872 I murdered my father—an act which made a deep impression on me at the time.
“To get there you follow Highway 58, and it is a good highway and new. Or was new, that day we went up it. You look up the highway and it is straight for miles, coming at you, with the black line down the center coming at and at you, black and slick and tarry-shining against the white of the slab, and the heat dazzles up from the white slab so that only the black line is clear, coming at you with the whine of the tires, and if you don’t quit staring at that line and don’t take a few deep breaths and slap yourself hard on the back of the neck you’ll hypnotize yourself and you’ll come to just at the moment when the right front wheel hooks over into the black dirt shoulder off the slab and you’ll try to jerk her back on but you can’t because the slab is high like a curb, and maybe you’ll try to reach to turn off the ignition just as she starts the the dive. But you won’t make it, of course.”
- All The King’s Men (Robert Penn Warren)
Most evocatively hypnotic (especially when you speak it aloud to yourself in your best Louisiana accent – then it becomes apparent you’re reading the prose of a poet).
Kafka – the Metamorphosis – One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.
Although my favorite is Marquez One Hundred Years of Solitude, already mentioned. Here is an interesting article which discusses his incredible opening lines — http://www.cjr.org/second_read/the_hack_1.php?page=all
I quote 2 from memory with some trepidation: Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche, “He was born with the gift of memory and a sense that the world was mad,” and Max Schulman’s Barefoot Boy with Cheek,”Bang, Bang, Bang, three shotes ripped through my gut and I was off on the greatest adventure of my life.”
Best opening, purple prose division:
When I was seventeen, and in full obedience to my heart’s most urgent commands, I stepped far from the pathway of normal life and in a moment’s time ruined everything I loved–I loved so deeply, and when the love was interrupted, when the incorporeal body of love shrank back in terror and my own body was locked away, it was hard for others to believe that a life so new could suffer so irrevocably. But now, years have passed, and the night of August 12, 1967, still divides my life.
–Endless Love (1979), Scott Spencer
Second-best opening (after One Hundred Years of Solitude)for whupping the reader upside the head and dragging him into the story:
It was the summer that men first walked on the moon. I was very young back then, but I did not believe there would ever be a future. I wanted to live dangerously, to push myself as far as I could go, and then see what happened to me when I got there. As it turned out, I nearly did not make it. Little by little, I saw my money dwindle to zero; I lost my apartment; I would up living in the streets. If not for a girl named Kitty Wu, I probably would have starved to death. I had met her by chance only a short time before, but eventually I came to see that chance as a form of readiness, a way of saving myself through the minds of others. That was the first part. From then on, strange things happened to me. I took the job with the old man in the wheelchair. I found out who my father was. I walked across the desert from Utah to California. That was a long time ago, of course, but I remember those days well, I remember them as the beginning of my life.
–Moon Palace (1989), Paul Auster
(I see we have no “preview” function, so just take those tags to represent italics if it doesn’t work out)
Steven King, The Gunslinger
“The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed.”
Dickens, A Christmas Carol:
Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Another entry to prove that Dickens really was one of hte greatest English writers:
Chapter 1 — In Chancery
LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
From Bleak House. I find the sentence fragments especially interesting because the Victorians have such a reputation for involuted grammar.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.–William Gibson, Neuromancer
All Kafka
Can’t forget openings of The Illiad & The Odyssey. Hard to pick a favorite translation, though! “Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles…”
http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/homer.htm
Whenever Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead is brought up, my brother Mark (our beloved Flavorpill founder) always says in a mocking tone, “Howard Roark laughed.”
For a long time I stayed away from the Acropolis.
- Don DeLillo, “The Names.”
(From memory): ‘I was in bed with my catamite when the Archbishop called.’
Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers
On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.
Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
D’Arcy McNickle’s Wind From an Enemy Sky has not only a great first line, but a great last line too.
The first:
“The Indian named Bull and his grandson took a walk into the mountains to look at a dam built in a cleft of rock, and what began as a walk became a journey into the world.”
The last:
“That day, the cry of the plover was heard everywhere… Ke-ree, ke-ree, ke-ree. No meadowlarks sang, and the world fell apart.”
Another favorite: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five:
“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” (This is technically the opening to Chapter 2, but Chapter 1 is effectively a prologue. It starts, “All this happened, more or less.” which is pretty good too, but not as good as the start of the actual story.)
Then, of course, there’s Joyce:
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo…”
And then, what isn’t really a sentence from what some say isn’t really a novel, Finnegan’s Wake:
“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”
“I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.”
–Henry Miller, “Tropic of Cancer”
“I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old.”
-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
“On Sunday, the eleventh of November, 196-, while sitting at the bar of the New Parrot restaurant in my home town, Watertown, New York, awaiting the telecast of the New York Giants-Dallas Cowboys football game, I had what, at the time, I took to be a heart attack. It wasn’t. It–the ‘seizure’ or whatever one chooses to call it–was brought on by the high and delicious anxiety I always experienced just prior to a Giants game, and by a weekend of foodless, nearly heroic drinking. For me it was a common enough drinking; but the amounts consumed had been intensified by the news, received by mail from Scarsdale two days before, that my wife intended to divorce me and to have custody of my two-year-old twin sons.”
Oops. That’s from Frederick Exley’s “A Fan’s Notes” (1968)
“On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.” Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey,
and
“This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier.
Finally, the first chapter of Moby Dick is the best first chapter ever written; the first line, however, not so great.
Hey, I just wanted to point out a small correction. In the Lolita quotation, it should be “palate,” as in, “the upper part of the mouth,” not “palette,” as in “something to keep paint on.”
Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers’ first sentence is:
‘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.’
Also how about Tolkien’s:
‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’
“There was a time (time out of mind) in the sempiternal progress of divadienst, at that suspensory pause in its career just prior to the advent of what was to be known as “Mawrdolatry,” when the cult of Morgana Neri flourished in the hothouse ambiance of the Crossroads Café, in the shadow of the old Times building, across Broadway from the very hotel (a ghostly renovated ruin) where Caruso had sojourned in the great days, whose palmy lobby, once ormolu and velvet, had been transformed into a vast drugstore, and in Caruso’s suite a podiatrist had been installed.” -James McCourt (Mawrdew Czgowchwz)
Two classics and one recent memorable opening line from science fiction:
The sky above then port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel
- William Gibson, Neuromancer
“In five years the penls will be obsolete,” said the salesman.
- John Varley, Steel Beach
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife’s grave. Then I joined the army.
- John Scalzi, Old Man’s War
I always get the shakes before a jump. I’ve had the injections, of course, and hypnotic preparation, and it stands to reason that I can’t really be afraid. The ship’s psychiatrist has checked my brain waves and asked me silly questions while I was asleep and he tells me that it isn’t fear, it isn’t anything important — it’s just like the trembling of an eager race horse in the starting gate.
I couldn’t say about that; I’ve never been a race horse. But the fact is: I’m scared silly every time.
- Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers
John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany
“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; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”
In the beginning, Bartholomew Cubbins didn’t have 500 hats.
“All of this happened while I was walking around starving in Christiania–that strange city no one escapes from until it has left its mark on him…”
-Knut Hamsun, Hunger (All right, he was a bastard, but that’s a good line.)
“It began as a mistake.”
Charles Bukowski, Post Office
BobKat: can’t trust the language of those translations. The first word in the Odyssey, for instance, is “man”. This is critical to understanding the book, yet there’s no way to adequately capture the grammar of that sentence in English. It’s something along the lines of “man who is skilled in all the ways of contending sing in me of”.
[...] Sullivan’s pointed to this: First Impressions: Our 30 Favorite Opening Lines in Literature on [...]
Your all wrong. See Homer’s Iliad: “Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, murderous, doomed that cost the Achaens countless losses, hurling down to the House of Death…”
There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name. It stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish, which were so miserable that they made people belch with melancholy even though the skies were blue.
- Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Salinger? Really? you’ve got about 6 decent books in the lot here. An opening line might be a graber, but you haven’t even captured that here. Twain, Camus, Lethem, Pynchon, Nabokov- I’ll give you those. You had 20 decent Roths to pick from and you picked a lame. I take back Bellow because Chicago is a shit town, the second opening is a shit opening. You couldn’t find 30 better openers? You’re a twat.
oh shut up ben. not even the fourth best Rushdie.
“Begin with beauty.”
- Chet Raymo, The Dork of Cork
I’ll bet no one else here has read it, much less heard of it. Pity that. It is one of the greatest novels I have ever read, no less so for having been written by a man who is not actually a novelist. If you ever have occasion to read, do yourself a favor: read it. Just do.
“Lest anyone should suppose I am a son of nobody, sold off by some peasant father in a drought year, I may say our line is an old one, though it ends with me.”
“The Persian Boy,” Mary Renault
“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 mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.”
“Out of Africa,” Isak Dinesen
“I do not love mankind. People think they’re interesting. That’s their first mistake.” The Giant’s House, Elizabeth McCracken
“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.” — The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley
“Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driver would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake.” — Drive by James Sallis
The story I am about to tell you is how I, Red Baker, lost my job, my pride, my family and came damned close to losing my home and life, but through an act of ingenuity got them all (for the time being) back again. — Red Baker by Robert Ward
“I first me dean not long after my first wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and the feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road.”
On The Road – Kerouac
Yes, yes, I know it’s a cliche. But the first paragraph already has the cadence and the flavour of the book. It grips you and never lets up.
“It was the day my grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium, listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach’s Mass in B Minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach”.
The Crow Road – Iain Banks.
I recommended the book as a wonderful read to a friend, who proudly told me he had sent a copy, unread, to his grandmother for her birthday. Beautiful.
Sorry gents, the greatest literary beginning came from the pen of an otherwise terrible writer and is, if I remember correctly:
“She was a blond. The kind of blond that would make a bishop kick in a stained glass window.” – Mickey Spillane
Some of the commenters are confusing the first line of a memorable book with a memorable line. They’re not the same thing. The Proust? The Wilder? Not in themselves particularly interesting. The Banks delightful.
My entrant:
“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.” – James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss
[...] The other 29 Adam Wilson’s Favorite Opening Lines in Literature are here [...]
The Meaning Of Night by Michael Cox
After killing the red haired man, I took myself off to Quinn’s for an oyster supper.
“Deep is the well of the past. Shall we not say it is bottomless?”–Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers
Best self-deprecating book opener:
“My name is Charles Highway, though you wouldn’t know it to look at me. It’s such a rangy, well-travelled, big-cocked name, and, to look at, I am none of these.”
-Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers
“We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody threw the girl off the bridge.” — John D. MacDonald, DARKER THAN AMBER
I’ve always liked Richard Stark:
“When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man.”
Awesome list. I have so many favorite opening lines and add to it all the time. Which is why I started a blog about the opening lines that I loved.
I think the opening of The Crying of Lot 49 is better than Gravitys Rainbow, really. A syntactical maze that previews what’s to come: http://is.gd/9YgR7
Also, no one’s mentioned Faulkner yet at all? Really? I mean, i guess they’re not the best first lines, but Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury are pretty damn good….
[...] On Twitter a little while ago, someone (I forget who, argh) linked to this list at Flavorwire of their thirty favorite opening lines in literature. As usual, I liked some of them and boggled at others, and there are few lines I’d add to any [...]
“Harry locked his mother in the closet. Harold. Please. Not again the TV.” Hubert Selby, Jr, Requiem for a Dream
“People are afraid to merge in LA” Less THan Zero
Bret Easton Ellis.
Succinct yet panoramic
[...] Flavorpill chooses their favorite thirty opening lines in literature. [...]
[...] A fun article on opening lines in literature: http://flavorwire.com/75066/first-impressions-our-30-favorite-opening-lines-in-literature [...]
So glad to see Nabakov’s Lolita on there. One of my favorite books. :)
[...] Swoon Posted in book porn by Lauren Leto on March 10, 2010 Flavorwire is so awesome. 30 Favorite Opening Lines in Literature. [...]
“This is not for you.”
House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewksi
“High summer and Friendship’s quiet.”
Stewart O’Nan, A Prayer for the Dying
“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” – The Bell Jar, Sylvia PLath
“Looking back on it later it could only have happened because Budai had gone through the wrong door in the confusion at the transit lounge and, having mistaken an exit sign, found himself on a plane bound elsewhere without the airport staff having noticed the change. After that it was impossible to say how far or for how long he had flown…”
The opening of the terrifying METROPOLE, by Ferenc Karinthy.
P.S. Bellow would not have spelled “all right” “alright.”
Unforgettable first sentence of an unforgettable novel (“It happened in Boston?”, by Russell Greenan):
“Lately I have come to think that the pigeons are spying on me.”
From “Mr. Vertigo” by Paul Auster…
“I was twelve years old the first time I walked on water”.
Richard Guido She was a blonde The kind of blonde that would make a bishop kick out a stained glass window.That’s written by the wonderful Raymond Chandler! I don’t remember that being an opening line, but his opening lines are quite remarkable.
Now one of my faves:
“In our family there was no clear line between religion and flyfishing”. Norman Maclean A River Runs Through it.
#1. Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward Angel
A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world. Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.
This list seems pretty arbitrary, like a bunch of people just picked up the books closest to them on the bookshelf. Meh.
“I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. My posture is consciously congruent to the shape of my hard chair. This is a cold room in University Administration, wood-walled, Remington-hung, double-windowed against the November heat, insulated from Administrative sounds by the reception area outside, at which Uncle Charles, Mr. deLint and I were lately received. I am in here.”
–Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
“They’re out there.” -One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
You forgot the opening line of Stephen King’s The Gunslinger:
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
You have forgotten the face of your father. Tsk, tsk. (;
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.” Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” – Stephen King, The Gunslinger (Dark Tower Series).
“I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.”
Henry Miller – Tropic of Cancer
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” – LP Hartley, “The Go-Between”
“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” – Charles Dickens, “David Copperfield”
Oh – can’t forget this one!!
“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.” – Dodie Smith, “I Capture the Castle”
A one I’ve always loved..
‘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.’
e.a.Poe
Best understatement of extraordinary things to come:
When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.
“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” – Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
In my younger and more vunerable years, my father gave me some advice that I have been turning over in my head ever since. No?
also I remember As I lay dying starting off Strong, Auster has to be up there. Also agree w Vonnegut and Irving, in the comments
Speaking of Saunders:
“I never could stomach Adams and then one day he’s standing in my kitchen, in his underwear. Facing the direction of my kids’ room! So I wonk him in the back of the head and down he goes.”
Adams, George Saunders
The best opening line that paints a thumbnail of what is to come:
“Maybe I shouldn’t have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number, but who cares? My life is over anyway.”
Postcards From The Edge, Carrie Fisher
Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last. Ahab’s Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
How about pairing openings:Poe’s beauty with this: When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean’s Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road…(more good stuff but I need to end) without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or ….. “The Dunwich Horror H.P. Lovecraft.
It was love at first sight. As soon as Yossarian saw the chaplain, he fell madly in love with him.
–Joseph Heller, Catch 22
27. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Best one sentence description of the beginning of blitz bomb apocalypse:
“A screaming comes across the sky.”
I guess this would be good if it wasn’t in obnoxious present tense. That fad needs to go away.
It was inevitable. The smell of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me… Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy,1759
Khaled stood in the third heaven, which is the heaven of precious stones, and of Asrael, the angel of Death. F.Marion Crawford, Khaled
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 are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker. Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl
Wait–”Nothing of their personality will remain”?? (from the Gary Shteyngart opening.) Shouldn’t that be “personalities”?
The opening of “The Ask” (Number 4) sounds like it’s trying too hard. Like a 20 year old college student who pretends that he spends a lot of time at the track because he wants to be Bukowski.
Dear Flavorwire: We’re not sure why you put your commentary about the first lines. Its distracting and sort of insulting. Really, this is a nice idea, but it’s about best first lines — and your commentaries ain’t it.
At the risk of sounding like my 12 year old self:
“When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home”
SE Hinton, The Outsiders, of course.
It was the first time in the show’s extraordinary history that a certified public accountant was asked to host “Saturday Night Live”.
Wonderful list and addenda — idiosyncratic, as all lists must be. A few additions:
“When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands.” WALDEN, Henry David Thoreau
“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff — and I
Lived on, flew on, in the refected sky.”
PALE FIRE, V. Nabokov
(Arguably not the first line, that being the opening of Kinbote’s forward, but it’s more fun this way.)
“Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea, why we are having all this trouble with our republic . . . ” — NINETY-TWO IN THE SHADE, Thomas McGuane
“I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.” — TLON, UQBAR, ORBIS TERTIUS, Jorge Luis Borgesr
“Love weaves its own tapestry, spins its own golden thread, with its own sweet breath breathes into being its mysteries — bucolic, lusty, gentle as the eyes of daisies or thick with pain.” — THE BLOOD ORANGES, John Hawkes
[...] March 10, 2010 tags: Books, first lines by Matt Compton Flavorpill runs through 30 great examples. Personally, I’m a big fan of the opening to Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris: We [...]
I’m disappointed you chose not to include “A Tale of Two Cities” and “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” both of which other readers have mentioned.
“In my younger more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said, ‘I’ve known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.’” The Lover by Marguerite Duras
“What about a teakettle?” Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey.” Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
“Everything within takes place after Jack died and before my mom and I drowned in a burning ferry in the cool tannin-tinted Guaviare River, in East-Central Colombia, with forty-two locals we hadn’t yet met.” Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!
“They were hitting.” The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner
“Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.”
Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bilbe
All this happened, more or less.
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
THE SNOW in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.
- The Secret History
“Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents’ divorce” (The Easter Parade).
They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles.
– The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“Anna Halsey was about two hundred and forty pounds of middle-aged putty-faced woman in a black tailor-made suit. Her eyes were shiny black shoe-buttons, her cheeks were as soft as suet and about the same colour. She was sitting behind a black glass desk that looked like Napoleon’s tomb and she was smoking a cigarette in a black holder that was not quite as long as a rolled umbrella. She said: ‘I need a man.’”
Trouble is my business, by Raymond Chandler. I find that perfectly wonderful.
Time is a blind guide.
Bog-boy, I surfaced into the miry streets of the drowned city.
Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvellous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it.
H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
“This is the room of the wolfmother wallpaper.”
Tom Robbins is The Best.
“Unemployed at last!” — Such is Life (1903) by Tom Collins
“The sunlight dripped over the house like golden paint over an art jar, and the freckling shadows here and there only intensified the rigor of the bath of light. The Butterworth and Larkin houses flanking were intrenched behind great stodgy trees; only the Happer house took the full sun, and all day long faced the dusty road-street with a tolerant kindly patience. This was the city of Tarleton in southernmost Georgia, September afternoon.”
The Ice Palace – F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I must be dead for there is nothing but blue snow and the furious silence of a gunshot. Two birds crash blindly against the glass surface of a lake. I’m cold, religiously cold. The birds burst from the water, their wings like silver. One has a fish twisting in its grip. The other dives again and now I hold my breath. Now the snow has stopped and the sky is endless and white and I’m so cold I must have left my body.”
Will Christopher Baer, Kiss Me Judas
Best opening lines, ever:
“It is a pity there are getting to be so many places that I can never go back to, but all the same, I do not think it is much fun a man being respectable all his life.”
From “Don’t Call Me a Crook! A Scotsman’s Tale of World Travel, Whisky, and Crime” by Bob Moore.
“None of them knew the color of the sky.”
Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat”
“For this relief, much thanks!”
“Hamlet”
Once upon a time when the world was young there was a Martian named Smith.
–Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
-V.S. Naipaul, “A Bend in The River”
[...] so for those of us not lucky enough to have a book section, i did find a lovely post with 30 great opening lines from literature, including a favorite of mine from then we came to the end by joshua [...]
[...] something fun to do over the weekend: an opportunity to add your favorite first lines to this fabulous compendium of … favorite first [...]
I’m sorry but if I put my mind to it I could find 30 far better openings. The person who compiled this didn’t put any effort into it. They also read too much American Literature. 2 out of 10. Must try harder.
Grandfather said:
-William Faulkner, The Reivers
[...] Flavorwire’s 30 favorite opening lines in literature, thanks to Largehearted Boy. [...]
[...] [Via @ciadasletras] As 30 melhores aberturas da literatura mundial [FlavorWire]. [...]
“I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn’t think anything of what he had done to the city’s name. Later I heard men who could manage their r’s give it the same pronunciation. I still didn’t see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves’ word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better.” – Dashiell Hammet, Red Harvest
“Javier Marias / Tomorrow in battle think on me” has a great opening passage.
Her gynecologist recommended him to me.
-John Irving, “The Water-Method Man”
How about favorite last lines?
“I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all.”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, “This Side of Paradise”
The past is a foreignn country; they do things differently there.
L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between
Howard Roark laughed.
-Ayn Rand, “The Fountainhead”
[...] 6. A list of favorite opening lines in literature. A few favorites are missing, but this is a good list. Who is there? [...]
Agreed with “Howard Roark laughed.” from the Fountainhead.
I also like the post-prologue opening in Robert Jordan’s Eye of the World:
“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend.”
[...] mania continues: Jump to Comments Flavorwire compiles a list of their favorite opening lines, notably without any business about the best of times, Gregor Samsa [...]
“The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often
perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?” (Milan Kundera, The Unbearable of Lightness)
[...] 6, 2010 · Leave a Comment Earlier this morning I was reading this awesome post on Flavorwire “First Impressions: our 30 favorite opening lines in Literature” and I got inspired to [...]
The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of spring. (Lawrence Durrell, “Justine”)