Opening lines and snippets.

[Bob Clay]

Sometimes an opening line tells you that you are going to read on. Some are just magic, a few classic examples:

"Now is the winter of our discontent."
"Call me Ishmael."

I'll just give two of my favourites, both from the same book. They're opening lines from the prologue of Alfred Bester's 'The Stars my Destination' in which he sets the scene for the story. Then from the story itself.

Prologue:
"This was a golden age, a time of high adventure, rich living and hard dying ... but nobody thought so."
Story:
"He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead."

What are your favourite opening lines ?

Snippets are little pieces of literature (might even be six sentences long ...) that stick in your mind long after you've read them. I'll give you one example from Len Deighton's spy novel 'An Expensive Place to Die.'

'There were caged birds of all kinds in the market. They were given seed, millet, water and cuttlefish bone for their beaks. Their claws were kept trimmed and they were safe from all birds of prey. But it was the birds in the trees that were singing.'

For some reason that has always stuck in my mind. Do you have any favourite snippets ?

[Jonathan Pinnock]

“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"

Don't you just want to read on after that? (And you won't be disappointed, either)

[Robert McEvily]

"I thought the people I lived with were my parents."

(Opening line of My Story by Marilyn Monroe.)

[Carolyn]

I'm a Richard Basehart fan, and when i see "Call me Ishmael", I think of him in the movie "Moby Dick", so that is definitely a favorite line.

[Louise]

"I wish Giovanni would kiss me." <-----my fave first line, taken from Eat, Pray, Love by Eliz. Gilbert

[Bob Clay]

An opening line from the incomparable Douglas Adams and his 'The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul'.

"It can hardly be a co-incidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression 'as pretty as an airport'."

And for those of you who have never read William Horwood's 'Duncton Wood' you have a treat in store, and what an opener ...

"September."

[Tara Lazar]

Some of my favorite snippets are from Joyce Carol Oates.

Making love they were like two swimmers deep in each other, plunging hard. Wherever they were when they made love, it wasn't the place they found themselves when they returned, and whatever the time, it wasn't the same time.

Death gives to life--to the survivors' shared life, that is--an insubstantial quality. It's like an image of absolute clarity reflected in water, then disturbed, shattered into ripples, revealed as mere surface. Its clarity, even its beauty, can resume, but you can't any longer trust in its reality.

Somehow I must have believed all along that there was a story, a story unknown to me, that had worked itself out without my knowing, like a stream tunneling its way underground. I would not have minded not knowing this story could I only know that it was.

All from The Swimmers

[Toby Tucker Hecht]

The Good Soldier was one of the best books I ever read. Good choice!

[Brenda Kelsch]

Ahhh To Kill A Mockingbird...if I had to take only one book to a desert island, that would be it...then i would pray that I would die quickly because only one book would never do!! The Good Soldier was a great book too,

[Matthew]

"You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak of the Lizard Lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then again, it might not."
Opening lines of Bright Lights, Big city - Jay McInerney

[Louise]

One of my fave snippets: “Without histrionics life is boring.”
―Charles Simic

[Bob Clay]

I know it probably shouldn't count, since it isn't a book, or short story, but a film script. But it's such a great opening line I can't resist it.
The film is 'Sunshine', about a ships crew with the difficult task of journeying to the Sun. (And a truly stunning opening scene to accompany the line....)

First line of the script ....

"Our Sun is dying."

[Jeanette Cheezum]

He was funkier than a skeeters tweeter. :-)