best opening sentence

As they travelled through the paicific unaware of what awaited them- marist in the Panpacific.

 

I can help you out there:

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", Charles Dickens)

 

"It was a dark , blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried out bed of the old north sea."

Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve.

I got this book out of the library to read to my children because of its' first line

 

'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times'


A Tale of Two Cities. Charles Dickens.

 

I also love this one:

"Tom!"

from Tom Sawyer...

 

And the nominations are;

"Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case"

(Arthur Conan Doyle The Sign of Four)

"Sam Vimes sighed when he heard the scream, but he finished shaving before he did anything about it"

(Terry Pratchett Night Watch)

"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"

(Raymond Chandler The Big Sleep)

"Dr Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients died or got any worse."

(Louis De Bernieres Captain Corelli's Mandolin)

"I, Moominpappa, am sitting tonight by my window gazing into my garden, where the fireflies embroider their mysterious signs on the velvet dark"

(Tove Jansson The Exploits of Moominpappa)

"Several and a half miles North East of Sligo, split by a cascading stream, her body on earth, her feet in water, dwells the microcephalic community of Puckoon"

(Spike Milligan Puckoon)

"It was a pleasure to burn"

(Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451)

"This is where the dragons go"

(Terry Pratchett Guards, Guards)

"Studio B was the snakebite studio at WLT, the tomb of the radio mummy, and bad things happened to people who went in there"

(Garrison Keillor Radio Romance)


There, don't you want to read them just to find out what the authors were on!

 

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."

-JD Salinger, "The Catcher in the Rye", the greatest book ever written.

 

Errrr Moominpappa....you rule breaker you...didn't you read the OPENING LINE of this thread......."One per post please!"........tut tut tut......

 

"He hung his head and considered himself soundly spanked"

The Private Diary of Moominpappa

 

"This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast."

 

any one who mentions Fear and Loathing, Tale of Two cities, i agree.

"Harry locked his mother in the closet. Harold. Please. Not again the TV."

Requiem for a Dream
the power stems more from having read to the conclusion, as ae most opening quotes, but i love that book very much

 

one of the best is from the dark tower books: the gunslinger


"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."

actually i'm not sure if that's exactly how it goes, but i think you get the idea

 

I was going to say the first sentence of Metamorphosis. I think that will always be my favorite opening sentence.

 

On "The Simpsons," Mr. Burns had 1000 monkeys working at 1000 typewriters. He told Homer that soon they'll have come up with the works of Shakespeare.

He tears a sheet off the typewriter of one harried monkey and reads it:

" 'It was the best of times, it was the ...blurst of times'?! You stupid monkey!!"

LOL I think that's the best opening line!

-Jeffrey

 

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz.

The opening of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"

 

I like that! I also like Heinlein a LOT, but I haven't read all that much of him yet.


How about this one, a favorite by H.P. Lovecraft:

"From a private hospital for the insane near Providence, Rhode Island, there recently disappeared an exceedingly singular person."

-"The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" by H.P. Lovecraft



Excellent book!

-Jeffrey

 

Ursula K. LeGuin wrote prose that reads like poetry.
The opening line of A Wizard of Earthsea:

"The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards."

I want to share the entire first paragraph of this book, because it is written so beautifully and I hope you will enjoy it as much as I do.

"The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards. From the towns in its high valleys and the ports on its dark narrow bays many a Gontishman has gone forth to serve the Lords of the Archipelago in their cities as wizard or mage, or, looking for adventure, to wander working magic from isle to isle of all Earthsea. Of these some say the greatest, and surely the greatest voyager, was the man called Sparrowhawk, who in his day became both dragonlord and Archmage. His life is told of in the Deed of Ged and in many songs, but this is a tale of the time before his fame, before the songs were made."


I just love that. It gives me chills.

-Jeffrey

 

"The year is 2024 and the bank owns everything" DC Poyer 'Stepfather Bank'.

 

"It was starting to end, after what had seemed most of eternity to me."
--Roger Zelazny, Nine Princes in Amber

Once the author and his publisher realized these Amber yarns were selling, he ended up writing about a half-million words of them...

 

Well i also agree with Kafka's metamorphosis....but also (seeing as im studying it)... "Mrs Dalloway said that she would buy the flowers herself" Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.
Roly,xxx