Best opening Paragraph... ever?

[Mr Retro]

Love this description of a smile from Hardy

WHEN Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.

 

[Orang Utan]

I wouldn't call this the best opening paragraph, but it sure as hell gets your attention...

"The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed sub-category. He's got esprit up to here. Right now he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachno-fiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books."

What the hell is that from? Sounds very silly indeed.

 

[chooch]

To Dubversion: Yes. Franny and Zooey

I fucking hate that book. It makes me want to perform DiY dentistry.

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 palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

Blinding. Humbert Humbert is such a beautifully drawn narrator.

 

[Leica]

I fucking hate that book

What do you hate about it?

 

[zed66]

Bit on the dark side, but a Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick has got a pretty arresting opening...

"Once a man stood in the middle of the room and tried all day to get the aphids out of his hair. His doctor told him he had absolutely no aphids in his hair. After he had taken a shower for eight hours, standing under hot water hour after hour suffering the pain of the aphids, he got out and dried himself, and he still had aphids in his hair; in fact, he had aphids all over him. A month later he had aphids in his lungs."

 

[chooch]

What do you hate about it?

All the characters. The way everyone's so loveably quirky and cute and punchable. The sentimentality. The oh so fucking enlightened socialite full-spectrum cuntery. The lame style. The cover. The number of pages.

 

[Leica]

It hurts to see it attacked, but... pass

 

[winston smith]

What the hell is that from? Sounds very silly indeed.

I think its called Snow Crash, by Neil Stephenson, if not him then William Gibson. Up the Cyber Punks.

What about:

In the begining, when God created the heavens, and the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

Genesis: ch1, v1 and 2. (from memory)

 

[fear-n-loathing]

Another contender for me, none of this give it two hundred pages it gets better malarkey:Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing

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?"

Has to be Fear and Loathing

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

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. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.

 

[Wookey]

If feel almost as though I've read that somewhere before.

 

[Diamond]

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

When I came upon the diary it was lying at the bottom of a rather battered red cardboard collar-box, in which as a small boy I kept my Eton collars. Someone, probably my mother, had filled it with treasures dating from those days. There were two dry, empty sea-urchins; two rusty magnets, a large one and a small one, which had almost lost their magnetism; some negatives rolled up in a tight coil; some stumps of sealing wax; a small combination lock with three rows of letters; a twist of very fine whipcord, and one or two ambiguous objects, pieces of things, of which the use was not at once apparent; I could not even tell what they had belonged to. The relics were not exactly dirty nor were they quite clean, they had the patina of age; and as I handled them, for the first time for over fifty years, a recollection of what each had meant to me came back, faint as the magnets' power draw, but as perceptible. Something came and went between us; the intimate pleasure of recognition, the almost mystical thrill of early ownership - feelings of which, at sixty-odd, I felt ashamed.

It was a roll-call in reverse; the children of the past announced their names, and I said 'Here'. Only the diary refused to disclose its identity.

 

[onemonkey]

What the hell is that from? Sounds very silly indeed.

from snow crash by neal stephenson..

deliverators work for cosa nostra pizza delivery service

 

[onemonkey]

As so often with these threads, most of the entries aren't remotely good enough to be considered as "best ever".

yep.. moby dick is still unchallenged

(Though Fear & Loathing comes very close)

this, for example, is dreadful

1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
1:2 The same was in the beginning with God.
1:3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
1:4 In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
1:5 And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

John 1:1-5

I comprehend it not

 

[RaggaKing]

I agree. Such a fab read

I agree, the first paragraph was good but I couldn't read the book because I couldn't stand the wording / scottish slang or whatever it was.

 

[chooch]

this, for example, is dreadful

That rocks. If it didn't involve our lord, I'd sign up.

 

[Donna Ferentes]

Bit on the dark side, but a Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick has got a pretty arresting opening...

"Once a man stood in the middle of the room and tried all day to get the aphids out of his hair. His doctor told him he had absolutely no aphids in his hair. After he had taken a shower for eight hours, standing under hot water hour after hour suffering the pain of the aphids, he got out and dried himself, and he still had aphids in his hair; in fact, he had aphids all over him. A month later he had aphids in his lungs."

I have to say that's very good. It shares however a theme with a scene towards the end of They Shoot Horses, Don't They?.

 

[zed66]

They Shoot Horses, Don't They?.

I've never read this but after googling for a brief synopsis it sounds great, in a bleak twisted kind of way.

A Scanner Darkly is an amazing read. The plot is in theory about an undercover drugs cop set at some unspecified time in the future. The cop is so deep undercover that his identity is not even known to his colleagues. As the book progresses and the level of drug intake and associated psychotic episodes increase his sense of identity is progressively lost altogether.Given what is known of Dick's lifestyle it is possible much of the book was autobiographical. I thought this book was pretty fucked up until I read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

 

[lontok2005]

The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.

The nights are clear but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation.

But by early June the south-west monsoon breaks and there are three months of wind and water with short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with. The countryside turns an immodest greet. Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom. Brick walls turn mossgreen. Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across the flooded roads. Boats ply in the bazaars. And small fish appear in the puddles that fill the PWD potholes on the highways.

It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem.



Sorry - I know it's more than one paragraph but it's beautiful.

 

[chooch]

I thought this book was pretty fucked up until I read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

Aye. That's my favourite of his. I first read it at a time when I was fairly unhinged. It's never gone away.

 

[machine cat]

Seconded 1984.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

 

[Fez909]

I thought this was interesting....Wouldn't call it the best, though; should such a thing exist:

The mjaority of Terrans were six-legged. They had territorial squabbles and politics and wars and a caste systems. They also had suffiencient intelligence to survive on that barren boondocks planet for several billions of years. We are not concerned here with the majority of Terrans. We are concerned with a tiny minority - the domesticated primates who built cities and wrote symphonies and invented things like tic-tac-toe and integral calculus. At the time of our story, these primates regarded themselves as the Terrans. The six-legged majority and other life-forms on that planet hardly entered into their thinking at all, most of the time.

 

[madamv]

I agree, the first paragraph was good but I couldn't read the book because I couldn't stand the wording / scottish slang or whatever it was.

Ah, now see.... you just have to keep going and eventually you end up trying to speak to everyone like it.... after you have been reading for a couple of hours.

Thanks for the inspiration. Thread saved for future books to read

 

[The Groke]

On a dark dark hill there was a dark dark town.
In the dark dark town there was a dark dark street.
In the dark dark street there was a dark dark house.
In the dark dark house there was a dark dark staircase.
Down the dark dark staircase there was a dark dark cellar,
and in the dark, dark cellar, some skeletons lived.

 

[Donna Ferentes]

I've never read this

Neither have I. I was thinking of the film.

 

[fishfingerer]

Flann O'Brien (The Third Policeman)

Not everybody knows how I killed old Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my
spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney
because it is 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.Divney was a strong civil man but he was lazy and
idle minded.He was personally responsible for the the whole idea in the
first place.It was he who told me to bring my spade.He was the one who
gave me the orders on the occasion and also the explanations when they were called for.

A big influence on the tv show Lost (which I've never seen, is it shit or not) apparently, according to here. .

 

[lighterthief]

"This is the story of Danny and of Danny's friends and of Danny's house. It is a story of how these three became one thing, so that in Tortilla Flat if you speak of Danny's house you do not mean a structure of wood flaked with old whitewash, overgrown with an ancient untrimmed rose of Castile. No, when you speak of Danny's house you are understood to mean a unit of which the parts are men, from which came sweetness and joy, philanthropy and, in the end, a mystic sorrow. For Danny's house was not unlike the Round Table, and Danny's friends were not unlike the knights of it. And this is the story of how that group came into being, of how it flourished and grew to be an organization beautiful and wise. This story deals with the adventuring of Danny's friends, with the good they did, with their thoughts and their endeavours. In the end, this story tells how the talisman was lost and how the group disintegrated."

John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat, 1935.

 

[Wraith37]

'The day before, Reinhardt had bought a pint of whisky in Opelika and saved it all afternoon while the bus coursed down through red clay and pine hills to the Gulf. Then after sundown, he had opened the bottle and shared it with the boy who sold Bibles, the blond gangling country boy in the next seat. Most of the night, as the black cypress shot by outside, Rheinhardt had listened to the boy talk about money - commissions and good territories and profits - the boy had gone on for hours with an awed and innocent greed. Rheinhardt had sat silently, passing the bottle and listening.'

- Robert Stone, 'A Hall of Mirrors.'

 

[madamv]

"This is the story of Danny and of Danny's friends and of Danny's house. It is a story of how these three became one thing, so that in Tortilla Flat if you speak of Danny's house you do not mean a structure of wood flaked with old whitewash, overgrown with an ancient untrimmed rose of Castile. No, when you speak of Danny's house you are understood to mean a unit of which the parts are men, from which came sweetness and joy, philanthropy and, in the end, a mystic sorrow. For Danny's house was not unlike the Round Table, and Danny's friends were not unlike the knights of it. And this is the story of how that group came into being, of how it flourished and grew to be an organization beautiful and wise. This story deals with the adventuring of Danny's friends, with the good they did, with their thoughts and their endeavours. In the end, this story tells how the talisman was lost and how the group disintegrated."

John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat, 1935.

I so nearly quoted that one too. I LOVE that story

 

[isvicthere?]

The opening paragraph of Kafka' "Metamorphosis" is pretty heavy duty.