Title: Favorite First Line Opening in a book...saat_omar says:
What is your first line opening in a book (fiction or fiction shouldnt be a problem)My favorite is the one by Albert Camus: The Outsider....that first paragraph alone is heartbreaking.
gilly8 says:
From Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize winning memoir, "Angela's Ashes":"Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."
Aficionado de Galdós says:
The opening line and paragraph for Anna Karenina (Pevear translation) is fantastic and drew me into the big novel and I never let go until I was done!
Fetsch says:
Now single up all lines!" Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
"A screaming comes across the sky." Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
"A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard." Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
"124 was spiteful." Toni Morrison, Beloved
"See the child." Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
"I sent one boy to the gaschamber at Huntsville." Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold." Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Timothy Boroughs says:
Yeees saat_omar!! The first line of Camus' Outsider - "Mother died today, or it could have been yesterday I'm not sure.....". It totally grabs your interest and sets the tone of the work. Easily the best I've yet read. But speaking of lines within works if I may digress "It was at the age of 39 that I began to feel old...." - Evelyn Waugh of course and the line from Brideshead Revisited. Magnificent also!
Prudence says:
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap..." - Catcher In The Rye
B. Unruh says:
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife." -Pride and Prejudice, Jane Auste
Linda A. Lavid says:
"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"From Nabokov's Lolita
Axolotl says:
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover the miracle of ice." (100 Years of Solitude)One masterful sentence that traverses three time periods (present/future/past), creates suspense and establishes the tone of the entire novel.
David J. Zimny says:
Excellent question! Here's my choice for the best grabber opening line, guaranteed to pull you headlong into the plot. It's from Alan Furst's novel NIGHT SOLDIERS:"In Bulgaria, in 1934, on a muddy street in the river town of Vidin, Khristo Stoianev saw his brother kicked to death by fascist militia."
Paula Bright says:
"I Am Born"Title of first chapter, David Copperfield.And another Dickens:It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
................Whats your favorite?http://www.amazon.com/tag/literary%20fiction/forum?%5Fencoding=UTF8&cdForum=FxTN99755I5FW0&cdPage=1&cdThread=Tx3VSDHJLJ87R52#MxZIV05UUGSU2E