Favorite first lines

[KCGrant]

Hi,

We're going to be playing a lot of games at my next writer's group meeting and so I thought it would be fun to put down first lines from books and have people match them up to the title. Anyone have a favorite?

[Wingnut]

I jumped out of be that morning with one question in my mind -- sun or fog? Usually it was fog in January in Holland, dank, chill, and gray. But occasionally -- on a rare and magic day -- a white winter sun broke through.

(The Hiding Place, by Corrie ten Boom)

progris riport 1 martch 3

Dr Strauss says I shoud rite down what I think and remembir and evrey thing that happins to me from now on. I dont no why but he says its importint so they will see if they can use me. I hope they use me becaus Miss Kinnian says mabye they can make me smart.

(Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes)

Flowers for Algernon was published in 1959. I think it would be interesting to read the same story, but modernized. I think it would change a lot of the dynamics.

It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened. No. Wrong word, Jonas thought. Frightened meant that deep, sickening feel of something terrible about to happen.

(The Giver, by Lois Lowry)

On February 24, 1815, the watchtower at Marseilles signaled the arrival of the three-master Pharaon, coming from Smyrna, Trieste and Naples.

The quay was soon covered with the usual crowd of curious onlookers, for the arrival of a ship is always a great even in Marseilles, especially when, like the Pharaon, it has been built, rigged, and laden in the city and belongs to a local shipowner.

(The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas)

My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born. Instead, they returned to Ireland when I was four, my brother, Malachy, three, the twins, Oliver and Eugene, barely one, and my sister, Margaret, dead and gone.

When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

Those last ones are three of my four all-time favorite books. The fourth is one I read for book group once and absolutely loved, but don't yet own a copy of. It is Pope Joan: A Novel, by Donna Woolfolk Cross.

[Guest mormonmusic]

Call me, Ishmael. (Moby Dick by Herman Melville).

I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents.....(Book of Mormon, dead give-away, just kidding).

To Sherlock Holmes, she is always the woman (A Scandal in Bohemia, Arthur Conan Doyle)

[SanctitasDeo]

"Sam Vimes sighed when he heard the scream, but he finished shaving before he did anything about it"

(Night Watch, Terry Pratchett)

Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of a landowner from our district, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, well known in his own day (and still remembered among us) because of his dark and tragic death, which happened exactly thirteen years ago and which I shall speak of in its proper place.

(The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky--okay, not hard to guess)

[Gretchen]

The Wizard of Oz

Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles.

[Nomad]

Since I'm currently in the middle of my project to read the three great tomes of English language Modernism;

Call me Ishmael.

Moby-Dick, or The Whale, Herman Melville

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather, on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

Ulysses, James Joyce

A screaming comes across the sky.

Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

And yes, I know only one of them technically counts as Modernism, but there's a clear line to be drawn and they're all brilliant novels.

[pam]

The only one I ever remember is "Call me Ishmael" but others beat me to it.

[KCGrant]

Thanks--those are really good. It's interesting how many first lines have become so popular that they're dead giveaways as to the titel now.

[Nomad]

Here's a couple of less obvious ones to try out on the group.

That was when I saw the pendulum.

Foucalt's Pendulum, Umberto Eco

The Third Marines were bleeding and dying for three nameless hills north of Khe Sanh in 1967.

The Choirboys, Joseph Wambaugh

I did a quick run through of some of my mosty read books looking for those killer opening lines and these two seemed great, especially my favourite Eco novel. Try some Raymond E. Feist novels, he's famous for starting each chapter with a single sentence to set the scene.

If you ever expand it to opening paragraphs, The Big Sleep has one of the best. Let us know who comes up with the most obscure/interesting opening line.