great opening lines

[mojo pixy]

There are some pretty well-known opening lines on this thread so far. I aint complaining, but for the mix here's something a little more on-topic. An opening line as obscure as it gets: one from my own work (if this is self-promotion then forgive me; it's the only kind I get) and a line that haunted me for a long time before I actually used it...

It started in dust and fire.

The war had been going on for as long as anybody could remember, for as long as any book could tell; for as long as there had been books. War over land, over water, over food; over an idea, over what rules to follow. Sometimes even over something as simple as clothes; the reason was unimportant, it only mattered that the war continued.

 

[not-bono-ever]

.

 

[redsquirrel]

How has this got to page three and no-ones mentioned Pride and Prejudice.

 

[A380]

How has this got to page three and no-ones mentioned Pride and Prejudice.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a thread about first lines will always quote Jane Austin.

 

[redsquirrel]

Or even Jane Austen

 

[MrSki]

Steve Austin Hawaii 5-0

Edit to add it was Steve Mc Garrett Hawaii 5-0

 

[Beats & Pieces]

They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.

 

[ATOMIC SUPLEX]

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.

The Old Man and The Sea...Hemingway

Great book, but that's a well shit opening. Does at least cut to the chase.

 

[Dr. Furface]

Granted: I AM an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peep-hole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.
- Gunter Grass: The Tin Drum

Haha, I nearly went with that one too!

 

[Beats & Pieces]

The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail

 

[Idris2002]

Patrick Doyle was a teacher. Gradually, he had become sickened by it. Then, a very odd thing happened, or was made to happen.

 

[DotCommunist]

The primroses were over.

 

[Lancman]

Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York.

 

[Hocus Eye.]

Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York.

Wrong kind of son I think. (Shakespeare liked his puns I read)

 

[JTG]

''Coventry are fuck all.'' John King - The Football Factory.

We used to shout this at each other when coming back pissed from away games.

We're going to Cov next week

 

[Santino]

Bob Marley was dead to begin with. - A Brief History of Seven Killings

 

[Lancman]

Wrong kind of son I think. (Shakespeare liked his puns I read)

Check with the original please.

 

[mystic pyjamas]

It was a dark and stormy night.

Paul Clifford.
Edward Bulwer Lytton

 

[mojo pixy]

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

 

[mojo pixy]

You awake at sunrise.

Sentence 1 of Paragraph 1 of Steve Jackson's Sorcery! Book 1: The Shamutanti Hills. Days of fun...

 

[a_chap]

"Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living."

2001 A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke.

 

[Idris2002]

Johannes Kepler, asleep in his ruff, has dreamed the secret of the universe. O do not wake. But he will.

 

[Idris2002]

He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It seemed a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in immaculate white from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern ports where he got his living as ship-chandler’s water-clerk he was very popular.

 

[mod]

Granted, I am an inmate of a mental hospital.

Günter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959)

 

[TikkiB]

"It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me" Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess - I found the book very dreary when I read it aged 16 but I was inordinately pleased with my self at having got the nun who was the school librarian to order it for our convent school library.

 

[Idris2002]

The capitalist mode of production presents itself as a great accumulation of commodities.

 

[Beats & Pieces]

Henry VIII, the unconquered King of England, a prince adorned with all the virtues that become a great monarch, having some differences of no small consequence with Charles the most serene Prince of Castile, sent me in to Flanders, as his ambassador, for treating and composing matters between them.

 

[bi0boy]

Emperors and kings, dukes and marquises, counts, knights, and townsfolk, and all people who wish to know the various races of men and the peculiarities of the various regions of the world, take this book and have it read to you.

 

[flypanam]

'This is the saddest story I have ever heard' The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford
'I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies' Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

 

[Siouxsie]

Once upon a time there was a little chimney-sweep, and his name was Tom. That is a short name, and you have heard it before, so you will not have much trouble in remembering it. He lived in a great town in the North country, where there were plenty of chimneys to sweep, and plenty of money for Tom to earn and his master to spend. He could not read nor write, and did not care to do either; and he never washed himself, for there was no water up the court where he lived. He had never been taught to say his prayers. He never had heard of God, or of Christ, except in words which you never have heard, and which it would have been well if he had never heard.

The water-babies by Charles Kingsley.
My fourth favourite book as a child