Favourite opening sentence of a book

[Orang Utan]

ooh, i've read that one, and fairly recently. erm...is it Atonement?

anyway, no one's got mine. clue: it's a female author.

I dunno, but it sounds like Angela Carter - not one I've read though

 

[Badger Kitten]

Yep, ( Garcia Marquez's latest ) that's the one

 

[Badger Kitten]

Is it her first one, Foo, Angela Carter's first book? Shadow something...

 

[Orang Utan]

Yep, ( Garcia Marquez's latest ) that's the one

I haven't read it but I knew it was about an old lech

 

[sojourner]

Is it her first one, Foo, Angela Carter's first book? Shadow something...

Shadow Dance - excellent choice foo

 

[Cid]

"I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone reccomended Brooklyn, and so the next morning I traveled down there from Westchester to scope out the terrain."

Paul Auster - The Brooklyn Follies

Admittedly two sentences, but a great piece of writing - draws you right into the book and immediately creates feelings of sympathy and interest...

There are some other gems that spring to mind, but I don't have the books in this house.

 

[foo]

Shadow Dance - excellent choice foo

yep.

not my favourite of her's, and not my favourite opening sentence, but a stonker all the same.

 

[Iam]

"It was love at first sight."

Or....

"Two hours before dawn I sat in the peeling kitchen and smoked one of Sarah's cigarettes, listening to the maelstrom and waiting"

 

[Orang Utan]

The first one is Catch 22 innit

 

[Iam]

Yeah. And the second one is almost a shame... it's the first line of the brief prologue of the book. The first line of Chapter One is:

"Coming back from the dead can be rough."

 

[two sheds]

"Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one half way over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven."

That's my favourite fifth sentence from a novel - hope it's allowed. I'm also hoping it's right since i c&p'd it cos the book's in a cardboard box at the moment.

 

[Paris Garters]

It was the day my grandmother exploded.

I got that too. The beauty of it is that there's a perfectly mundane and plausible reason for said exploding grandparent. I love that book.
Actually I love everything I've read by Banks.

 

[Spion]

"London, the crouching monster, like every other monster has to breathe, and breathe it does in its own obscure, malignant way."

In fact the first two or three pars totally rock

 

[D'wards]

Wot no Moby Dick? - probably the 2nd most famous opening line from a book

 

[laptop]

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

 

[exosculate]

Great thread.

Heres one that I like

IT WAS A QUEER, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs

 

[Orang Utan]

Great thread.

Heres one that I like

IT WAS A QUEER, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs

Is that The Bell Jar?

 

[Badger Kitten]

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

I already dun that one

 

[laptop]

I already dun that one

Sorry, I thought that was last time we did this thread

 

[Badger Kitten]

oh damn didn't we already done this thread.

 

[laptop]

And I checked this thread - but didn't read your nomination in your first post

 

[cyberfairy]

"When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs. Nugent."

Adore both book and film

 

[Haller]

'It was like a jumble sale in the Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan.'
- The Biba Experience

 

[exosculate]

Is that The Bell Jar?

Yep. Very good.

 

[phildwyer]

Marley was dead, to begin with.

 

[phildwyer]

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream

Its a bleeding shopping mall these days.

 

[kazza23]

It is atruth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Diary of a drug fiend...?

 

[Louloubelle]

First you must understand that I am a panda-leopard. My father was a giant panda and my mother was a snow-leopard.

 

[milesy]

i live in a house built entirely from tin, with four tin walls, a roof of tin, a chimney and door. entirely from tin.

 

[tendril]

It was a filthy profession, but the money was addicting, and they were all going to hell.