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Wed 10 Aug, 2016 02:00 pm
Call me Ishmael.
Or it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
Which literary first lines (they don't need to be classics) float your book-readin' boat? Do tell.
@jespah,
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
1984, George Orwell
TRUE! --nervous --very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am;
but why will you say that I am mad?
"The Tell-tale Heart"
~Edgar Allen Poe
I am living at the Villa Borghese.
- Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
Afterward, he tried to reduce it to abstract terms, an accident in a world of accidents, the collision of opposing forces - the bumper of his car and the frail scrambling hunched-over form of a dark little man with a wild look in his eye - but he wasn't very successful.
T. C. Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain
STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
James Joyce, Ulysses
My mother would be disappointed if I didn't add this one from
Pride & Prejudice:
Jane Austen wrote:It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
In the town there were two mutes and they were always together. from
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers.
Also captivated by . The small white steamer, Peter Stuyvesant, that delivered the immigrants from the stench and throb of steerage to the stench and throb of New York tenements, rolled slightly on the water beside the stone quay in the lee of the weathered barracks and the new brick buildings of Ellis Island. . from Call It Sleep, by Henry Roth
What is so great is seeing a few books I don't know about! Thanks!
. At five o'clock that morning reveille was sounded as usual, by the blows of a hammer on a length of rail hanging up near the staff quarters. . from One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Yes, Dr. Ebenezer is lonely.
Gerald Rosen, Dr. Ebenezer's Book and Liquor Store
Not much of an opening, but, I really liked it.
@jespah,
Ditto.
quote,
In this book, the result of my inquiries into history, I hope to do two things: to preserve the memory of the past by putting on record the astonishing achievements both of our own and of the Asiatic peoples; secondly, and more particularly, to show how the how races came into conflict.
Herodotis, Book One
Translation by Aubrey de Selincourt
Penguin Classics
$1.45 (probably when I started uni, but maybe from a used book store)
I've read part of it, paperback falling apart.
Sounds so very British.
Lucrezia: All night long it was snowing. A month ago there was rain. And a few months ago there was sunshine. It seems to me I have been up here for centuries.
Beatrice Cenci
A play by Alberto Moravia
(the basic story is probably on wiki)
As soon as the car bringing the mayor of New York --- a fine gray Pontiac borrowed for the occasion --- had stopped at the entrance to the village of Isnello, and Signor Impellitteri and his signora had got out, amid the clamor of applause and the clash of the town band, into a confused mass of policemen, motorcyclists, journalists, photographers, inquisitive speculators, infinite cousins and second cousins and other relations, townsmen, peasants, shepherds, women, and in fact, the whole 4,ooo inhabitants of Isnello who were all waiting for him, the village boys crowded around it, pushing and knocking against each other, elbowing to a way through so as to touch it.
Words Are Stones
Carlo Levi
1951
Impressions of Sicily by the author of Christ Stopped at Eboli
I don't think I have read this. Crimini! Not sure..
On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. Bridge.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Catherine Tekakwitha, who are you?
Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers
@jespah,
I really love this one.
"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show."
—Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)
@jespah,
Paul Auster wrote:
It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
City of Glass, the first book to his New York Trilogy
John Wyndham wrote:
When a day you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.
The Day of the Triffids
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