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Opening lines have to be good, but sometimes they almost seem immortal.
It was a pleasure to burn.
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-Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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.
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-Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
-George Orwell,1984
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.
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-Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
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-Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
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 how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
-J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
-William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
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-William Gibson, Neuromancer
All this happened, more or less.
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-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.
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-Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
-C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?
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-Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things
You better not never tell nobody but God.
-Alice Walker, The Color Purple
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.
-Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
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-Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
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These are some of my picks.Ttime for you to weigh in: what is your favorite opening line from a novel? What makes a great opening line?
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15 Comments... join the discussion!
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The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was my favorite part of the Chronicles, good choices!
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I always liked this one:
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip fo the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” – Vladimir Nabakov
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I want to read all of them now, which, I guess, is the point 8-).
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“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” Out of Africa, Karen Blixen
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“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to treat it tragically.” Lady Chatterly’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence
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Sweet piece…
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Since Katie’s already added my favourite to the list, how about, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” – A tale of two cities, Charles Dickens,
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“Nothing to be done”
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot.
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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
“In the middle of the journey of my life, I found myself astray in a dark wood, where the straight road had been lost.”
“The secret is how to die”
- The Lost Symbol, Dan BrownGreat memories of my 9th grade composition teacher asking us to compose what the opening line to our novels would be, and nothing else.
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“I read a book one day and my whole life was changed”
Orhan Pamuk, New Life
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Years ago, the discovery of that Gabriel Garcia Marquez line made me want to write. So, so many….
“He was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken.” — For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemmingway
“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday. I don’t know.” – The Stranger, Albert Camus
“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.” – Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
“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
“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.” — A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
“It is a sin to write this.” Ayn Rand, Anthem
“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
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“Once when I was six years old I saw a beautiful picture in a book about the primeval forest called True Stories. It showed a boa constrictor swallowing an animal. Here is a copy of the drawing.”
Le Petit Prince.
Just sayin’.
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“It is probable with the exception of the Krakatoa explosion, in all of history no human ears had ever been assaulted by the intensity of sound produced by the artillery barrage that launched the Battle of Vimy Ridge on April 9, 1917.”
Pierre Berton – Vimy
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You picked two of my faves: the Márquez and Orwell.
Katie mentioned one of my other faves.
I love short sentences that immediately set a mood. Another favorite:
“It is a sin to write this.” Anthem by Ayn Rand.
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