While we’ve come to terms with the idea that we’re never supposed to judge a book by its cover, both literally and figuratively, no one Read the full post.
Aug 3
2009
05:17 PM ET
Killer first lines: What are your faves?
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Abandon all hope, ye who enter here
“A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head.” A Confederacy of Dunces.
“In three years, the penis will be obsolete.” John Varley, Steel Beach.
The faces of the judges revealed, although they were trying to hide it, deep distaste for the fact that the thirteen-year-old girl in front of them had plucked eyebrows and false eyelashes.–Colors Insulting to Nature by Cintra Wilson.
I’m glad someone mentioned the first line in Catcher In The Rye, that’s one of my favorites.
Another one I love is:
“Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die”-From Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuck
“It was a dark and stormy night…” was actually the opening line of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s
1830 novel “Paul Clifford”. Alas, B-W continued the sentence for an unneeded quarter-page, and today he’s the poster boy for bad writting. There’s an annual bad-writing contest named after him.
When the lights went off the accompanist kissed her. Maybe he had been turning towards her just before it was completely dark, maybe he was lifting his hands. There must have been some movement, a gesture, because every person in the living room would later remember a kiss.
–Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett (I’m choking up just reading it!)
“Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charms as the Tarleton twins were.” (Margaret Mitchell – Gone With the Wind)
“When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind:Paul Newman and a ride home”-The Outsiders by S.E.Hinton. Thirty years later it is still one of my favorite books
I once knew this girl who thought she was God. – Sati, Christopher Pike
“My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.” The Lovely Bones
In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots. The stench of sulfur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease. The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces.The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master’s wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the king himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter”
— Patrick Süskind
It’s long but the most amazingly descriptive opening paragraph of any book I’ve ever read…