What is the best opening line (or lines) in literature?
It can be a poem or short story, not restricted to novels. Just the lines and the source are required. If you want to explain why you like it or lobby for it, feel free. Have fun with it.
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M$6 Answers
"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."
~Love in the Time of Cholera by Garbiel Garcia Marquez
I have read this book at least three times in the past 20 years and get something new each time.
"I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot,” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Stammerer,” or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled."
~I, Claudius by Robert Graves
Another classic that I love!
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M$start of Paul Clifford, a novel published in 1830 by English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
This is one of the most famous opening lines ever and is enjoyed and copied widely. It is also known as a great example of "Purple Prose", and as you can see from my belt I like purple.
The opening phrase is also seen, but not as an opening line, in the earlier History of New York, one of my favorites as I was raised there. But even standing by itself the paragraph by Irving is wonderful:
"It was a dark and stormy night when the good Antony arrived at the creek (sagely denominated Haerlem river) which separates the island of Manna-hata from the mainland. The wind was high, the elements were in an uproar, and no Charon could be found to ferry the adventurous sounder of brass across the water. For a short time he vapored like an impatient ghost upon the brink, and then, bethinking himself of the urgency of his errand, took a hearty embrace of his stone bottle, swore most valorously that he would swim across in spite of the devil (spyt den duyvel), and daringly plunged into the stream. Luckless Antony! scarce had he buffeted half-way over when he was observed to struggle violently, as if battling with the spirit of the waters. Instinctively he put his trumpet to his mouth, and giving a vehement blast sank for ever to the bottom."
More recently, Snoopy also echoed the phrase.
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M$
I like it. It displays a far greater command of language and words than most modern prose. Now the fashion seems more towards the simplistic, the obscure, the shocking or the twisted. In the 19th century you were more likely to find a writer with a good vocabulary who wanted to really describe a scene with words. You can hear and feel the stormy night in London. That is a fine beginning that moderns laugh at because they can do no better, just as so many modern painters do squares and splotches because they have not the art for portraits and landscapes.
I have always been partial to this one myself!
ah, that's true. Now if you want to read an author who's imagery is outstanding I suggest Mervyn Peake - the Gormenghast Triolgy
How about this as a selection, it describes Steerpike
"High-shouldered to a degree little short of malformation, slender and adroit of limb and frame, his eyes close-set and the colour of dried blood, he is climbing the spiral staircase of the soul of Gormenghast, bound for some pinnacle of the itching fancy - some wild, invulnerable eyrie best known to himself; where he can watch the world spread out below him, and shake exultantly his clotted wings."
Now that's prose!
I'll only agree that it is famous.
That opening line has been laughed at since it was written! There's even a competition each year for the worst opening sentence of a book that takes it's name from this author!
http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/
It's not the BEST opening line, it's the tackiest, worst ever opening for a story! Read the others from the competition in the link below...awesome stuff!
http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/lyttony.htm
I read that Gormenghast trilogy decades ago. I really liked the first volume. I didn't much like the second, and the third was completely incoherent and awful. Some authors can start a good story and just can't keep it up.
A Tale of Two Cities: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity".
And, my personal favourite, Brave New World: "A squat grey building of only thirty-four storys. Over the main entrance the words, Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, and, in a shield, the World State's Motto, Community, Identity, Stability."
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M$
Hahaha, perhaps, it is quite a catchy and succinct slogan; I don't think I would want anything else they do politically in that novel to happen in real life, though (marginalizing us into classes dependent on intelligence, then discriminating against those who are in the lower classes!!! Evil stuff!!)
That's not a bad motto. Maybe teh next election somebody can use it for a slogan!
• Call me Ishmael. -- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
• It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. -- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• A screaming comes across the sky. -- Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
• Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. -- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
• Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. -- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
• Riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. -- Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
• It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. – 1984 by George Orwell
• I am an invisible man. -- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
• 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. -- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Sources:
http://www.alternativereel.com/includes/top-ten/display_review.php?id=00117
http://www.infoplease.com/ipea/A0934311.html
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M$
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
love charles dickens.
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M$
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
" 'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door —
Only this, and nothing more."
Haven't found where to put a source here in M4. So here is the full text of The Raven:
http://www.eapoe.org/works/poems/ravena.htm
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M$
I am especailly impressed with the opending from "Love in the time of Cholera". I may have to re-read the whole book!