#opening lines
I remember the first time I got a letter that said “After Five Days Return To” on the envelope, and I thought that after I had kept the letter for five days I was supposed to return it to the sender.
- I Remember (1970), J. Brainard
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Up from the skeleton stone walls, up from the rotting floor boards and the solid hand-hewn beams of oak of the pre-war cotton factory, dusk came.
- “Blood-Burning Moon,” from Cane (1923), J. Toomer
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An ordinary young man was on his way from his hometown of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Canton of Graubünden.
-The Magic Mountain, (1927) T. Mann
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Nobody ever walked across the bridge, not on a night like this. The rain was misty enough to be almost foglike, a cold gray curtain that separated me from the pale ovals of white that were faces locked behind the steamed-up windows of the cars that hissed by. Even the brilliance that was Manhattan by night was reduced to a few sleepy, yellow lights off in the distance.
- One Lonely Night (1951), M. Spillane
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It was now lunch time and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had happened.
- The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber (1936), E. Hemingway
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This is being written in another seaside cottage on another coast. Gin and whiskey have bitten rings in the table where I sit.
-A Vision of the World (short story, The Stories of John Cheever 1978), J. Cheever
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It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs Shears’ house. Its eyes were closed.
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime (2003), Mark Haddon
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- Nineteen Eighty-Four - Orwell
- Beloved - Morrison
- The Old Man and the Sea - Hemingway
- Infinite Jest - Foster Wallace
- One Hundred Years of Solitude - Garcia Marquez
- Moby-Dick - Melville
- Wittgenstein’s Mistress - Markson
- Fahrenheit 451 - Bradbury
- The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald
- Gravity’s Rainbow - Pynchon
- The Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck
- Lolita - Nabokov
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Thompson
- Pride and Prejudice - Austen
- The Big Sleep - Chandler
- The Bell Jar - Plath
- Don Quixote - Cervantes
- The Metamorphosis - Kafka
- The Time Machine - Wells
- Slaughterhouse-Five - Vonnegut
- The Road - McCarthy
- Peter Pan - Barrie
- Anna Karenina - Tolstoy
21/03/2014 source
- Middlemarch - Eliot
- Anna Karenina - Tolstoy
- The Metamorphosis - Kafka
- Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - Joyce
- Nineteen Eighty-Four - Orwell
- The Bell Jar - Plath
- Wide Sargasso Sea - Rhys
- One Hundred Years of Solitude - Garcia Marquez
- Beloved - Morrison
- The Crow Road - Banks
- Ulysses- Joyce. This is the classic third-person opening to the 20th-century novel that has shaped modern fiction, pro and anti, for almost a hundred years. As a sentence, it is possibly outdone by the strange and lyrical beginning of Joyce’s final and even more experimental novel, Finnegans Wake
- Pride and Prejudice - Austen. The one everyone knows (and quotes). Parodied, spoofed, and misremembered, Austen’s celebrated zinger remains the archetypal First Line for an archetypal tale. Only Dickens comes close, with the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities
- Jane Eyre - C. Brontë. The polar opposite to Austen and Dickens, this line plunges the reader into the narrative, but in a low-key tone of disappointed expectations that captures Jane Eyre’s dismal circumstances. Brontë nails Jane’s hopeless prospects in 10 words. At the same time, the reader can hardly resist turning the first page. There’s also the intriguing contrast in tone with her sister Emily's Wuthering Heights opening.
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Twain. The influence of this opening reverberates throughout the 20th century, and nowhere more so than in JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye
- Luck of the Bodkins - Wodehouse. A classic English comic opening, perfectly constructed to deliver the joke in the final phrase, this virtuoso line also illustrates its author’s uncanny ear for the music of English. Contrast the haunting brevity of Daphne du Maurier in Rebecca, partly situated in the south of France, and also published in the 1930s
- Earthly Powers - Burgess. This is one of the supreme show-off first-person openings. Burgess challenges the reader (and himself) to step on to the roller coaster of a very tall tale (loosely based on the life of Somerset Maugham). It is matched by Rose Macaulay’s famous opening to The Towers of Trebizond
- I Capture the Castle - D. Smith. A brilliant beginning to a much-loved English classic, which tells us almost all we need to know about the narrator Cassandra Mortmain. Quirky and high-spirited, Dodie Smith’s novel is really an exercise in nostalgia. Smith (subsequently famous for The Hundred and One Dalmatians) was living in 1940s California, and wrote this story, in a sustained fever of nostalgia, to remind her of home. Perhaps only an English writer could extract so much resonance from that offbeat reference to “the kitchen sink.”
- The Bell Jar - Plat. Postwar American first lines don’t come much more angsty or zeitgeisty than this. Compare Saul Bellow’s Herzog. First published under the pseudonym “Victoria Lucas”, this first novel seems to parallel Sylvia Plath’s own descent into suicide. In fact, The Bell Jar was published only a month after its author’s tragic death in the bleak winter of 1963
- The Secret History - Tartt. In this spooky opening, Tartt plunges the reader into the middle of a crime whose consequences will reverberate throughout the ensuing pages. Like all the best beginnings, the sentence also tells us something about the narrator, Richard Papen. He’s the outsider in a group of worldly students at Hampden College in rural Vermont. He was expecting a break from his bland suburban Californian life, but he doesn’t quite understand what he’s got himself into
- Treasure Island - Stevenson. Among the most brilliant and enthralling opening lines in the English language
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 (1992), D. Tartt
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She always said that Hope was rather a nice colour on her, but I had always found that darkness suited her just as well.
Ooh, guess who isn’t studying. Anyways, quote inspiration! Feel free to use however you’d like. (Of course, please source or tag me if you do.)
