Arbitrary. Fun.
Charlie Harris, professor emeritus of English at Illinois State University, contemporary literature reader/critic extraordinaire (secretary of the Center for Book Culture.org and former director of the Unit for Contemporary Literature), and all-around fine fellow, informs me that a bunch of literary-minded folk are putting together a list of Great First Lines in Novels, as an arbitrary-but-fun counterpart to the American Film Institute’s 100 great movie lines.
So far they have over 150 nominations, and many of them are what you’d expect:
Call me Ishmael.
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.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
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.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.
But there are a few surprises and flights of whimsy, as well: “It was a pleasure to burn,” from Fahrenheit 451; “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new,” from Beckett’s Murphy (a personal fave—the line, and the novel); and even, from Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford, the immortal
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
So, then, today’s Arbitrary but Fun game is this: suggest more Great First Sentences for the list. I offered them “A screaming comes across the sky” and “Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting,” but they already had ‘em. When Charlie emailed me the full list-in-progress, however, I realized that they had overlooked one of the greatest lines of the late twentieth century:
There are songs that come free from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads.
Was there ever a more devastating opening than this gem from Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County? “But it sucks,” you say. “It’s just hideously godawful. It doesn’t make any damn sense, either—it’s like ‘there are musical compositions for which you do not have to pay royalties, and they come from this really bizarre kind of plant that has eyes.’” But that’s the point, of course. It is a great first line in that it not only encapsulates everything that Waller is about to inflict on his readers, but serves as its own best parody as well. (Try to outdo it. Try again. See, I told you.)
In Swann’s Way, Proust writes that Swann had “a sort of taste, of tact, so automatic in its operation that . . . if he read in a newspaper the names of the people who had been at a dinner-party, [he] could tell at once its exact degree of smartness, just as a man of letters, simply by reading a sentence, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.” Wow! You think. That must have been back in the days when literary critics were really good, back before all this Theory gunk got into the evaluative machinery! But sometimes it works, you know . . . when you’re reading a truly Great First Line.
Well, this will be just for us here, as it’s ineligible for the official competition: “In the second century of the Christian æra, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.”
Posted by on 07/15 at 01:21 PM“It’s just hideously godawful. It doesn’t make any damn sense, either—it’s like ‘there are musical compositions for which you do not have to pay royalties, and they come from this really bizarre kind of plant that has eyes.’”
Or perhaps - just perhaps - Waller displays in this line an actual familiarity with the details of the setting of his admittedly atrocious novel. Blue-eyed grass is the common name, you see, of Sisyrhinchium a widespread genus of North American wildflowers in the iris family. And that “songs that come” thing is, to those who’ve read literature of place, an obvious, trite paean to the feeling one gets from inhabiting a particular landscape while conscious of the aspects of that landscape.
The line’s faults lie in its clunkiness, its passive construction, and the screamingly painful cliché in the last three words. But it makes palpable and complete sense.
Posted by Chris Clarke on 07/15 at 01:24 PM"I get the willies when I see closed doors.” The only good thing about Joseph Heller’s second novel, Something Happened.
Posted by Aaron Barlow on 07/15 at 01:24 PMOf course we must have:
“Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.”Posted by on 07/15 at 01:33 PMI could ger cute and nominate En un lugar de La Mancha, de cuyo nombre no puedo, ni quiero acordarme....
Posted by on 07/15 at 01:34 PMYep, Justin, they’ve got that one too. And Chris, I stand corrected! Obviously I need to get outside one of these days.
Posted by on 07/15 at 01:38 PM"Where’s Pa going with that ax?”
Posted by on 07/15 at 01:42 PMI don’t know if any of these are great or the best, but they are first lines (most from novels) that have stuck with me – often without my concent:
“She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him.”
—Wings of the Dove”“One thing was certain, that the WHITE kitten had had nothing to do with it:—it was the black kitten’s fault entirely.”
—Through the Looking Glass“The strange thing was, he said, how they screamed every night at midnight.”
—“On the Quai at Smyrna” (the first of In Our Time)“When they unscrewed the time capsule, preparatory to helping temponaut Enoch Mirren to disembark, they found him doing a disgusting thing with a disgusting thing”
—Harlan Ellison, “How’s the Night Life on Cissalda?”And back in the 80s, I used to like the first sentence of William Kennedy’s “Quinn’s Book.” But I won’t type it out here. Now how do you italicize and such?
Puzzled, Peter
Posted by on 07/15 at 01:44 PMTo begin with, I wish to diclaim the possession of those high gifts of imagination and expression which would have enabled my pen to create for the reader the personality of the man who called himself, after the Russian custom, Cyril son of Isidor—Kirylo Sidorovitch—Razumov.
Posted by eb on 07/15 at 01:45 PMSorry if broke the one-per-customer and don’t-name-the-source rules.
Posted by on 07/15 at 01:45 PMI’d like to say that I think that “Call me Ishmael” is cheating, since Moby-Dick begins as follows:
ETYMOLOGY.
(Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School)
The pale Usher--threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.
Posted by JoXn Costello on 07/15 at 01:46 PMIs anybody in here? {listens to echoes reverberate} The theory conference is over—it’s safe to come out now.
Long ago, I made a first-day comp class writing prompt out of a bunch of great first lines. Always provokes some thought.
******************
Some short/plain ones:
******************The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida.
124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.
I am an invisible man.
I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot county, Maryland. I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it.
*************
I have a fondness for the longer, more involved beginnings, that run hard to get out in front at the starting gun:
*************The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at three o’clock.
A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.
From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that—a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what they were then doing;--that not only the production of a rational Being was concern’d in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;--and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:----Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,----I am very persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.
Posted by on 07/15 at 01:46 PM"He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher - the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum.”
I read it more than half a century ago, and I’ve been fascinated with India ever since.
Posted by Richard Blumberg on 07/15 at 01:47 PMAll you gotta do, Michael, is find a way to take me up on that Bay Area dinner. I’ll include a hike.
Posted by Chris Clarke on 07/15 at 01:48 PMCan Kafka get more than one entry? I prefer these two more than “a gigantic insect.”
- “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” (The Trial)
- ““It’s a peculiar apparatus,” said the Officer to the Traveler, gazing with a certain admiration at the device, with which he was, of course, thoroughly familiar.” (In the Penal Colony)
Though it misses something without the rest of the paragraph:
- “Running out of gas, Rabbit Angstrom thinks as he stands behind the summer-dusty windows of the Springer Motors display room on Route 111, traffic somehow thin and scared compared to what it used to be.” (Rabbit is Rich)
And is there a Borges kicker better than this? I ask you all:
- “I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.”
Posted by konczal on 07/15 at 01:48 PMMy nomination for a great first line:
“In five years, the penis will be obsolete,” said the salesman.
Posted by JoXn Costello on 07/15 at 01:50 PM"I was born in a house my father built.”
--First line of Richard Nixon’s memoirs.Posted by Steven Shaviro on 07/15 at 01:52 PMThese must be on the list already. But since they’re not yet mentioned, it gives me pleasure to include:
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and razor lay crossed.
and
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo
Posted by on 07/15 at 02:04 PM"Maman died today.”
Posted by Steven Rubio on 07/15 at 02:04 PMIn no particular order: there’s no “don’t name the source” rule, and yes, you can nominate more than one novel/ line. Yes, they’ve got the opening of The Trial too, and you make italics by typing a <, then an i, then a > (and you go back to roman by typing < /i > (without spaces). They also have “124 was spiteful” and “I am an invisible man,” and a healthy debate over when, precisely, Moby-Dick (and Pale Fire and Lolita) can truly be said to begin. But they somehow overlooked those great opening lines of The Bluest Eye (which I suggested) and Song of Solomon (thanks, rm! thanks also for the galumphous openings of Absalom, Absalom and the third-greatest novel in English, Tristram Shandy).
You shouldn’t have to ask what numbers one and two are. Some things simply aren’t arbitrary.
Posted by on 07/15 at 02:17 PMThank God for Philistine Fridays!
“This is the story of Achilles’ rage.”
Posted by Roxanne on 07/15 at 02:18 PMto wound the autumnal city.
Posted by on 07/15 at 02:21 PMIt was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
Posted by on 07/15 at 02:24 PM"At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the water-side in the city of St. Louis.”
Posted by on 07/15 at 02:26 PM"At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of March, there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon railway station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar systems one of those infinitesmal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause, which always occur when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe.”
John Cowper Powys, “A Glastonbury Romance”
Posted by on 07/15 at 02:30 PMFrom the only Ayn Rand novel with any real literary merit, there’s “Petrograd smelt of carbolic acid.”
Posted by on 07/15 at 02:30 PMOh, since it’s ok to give source titles, the passage I gave above is from Conrad’s (awesome) Under Western Eyes.
Posted by eb on 07/15 at 02:35 PMI actually came across this concept on a young lady’s t-shirt in 1981 or so. From the popular ("In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.") to the more obscure ("A destiny that sends the English to the Dutch is strange enough"), it included several of the current suggestions.
I will add a bit of genre fiction, at the risk of lowering the serious tone of the conversation: The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Posted by on 07/15 at 02:35 PM"At this point I interrupted my sister as usual to say, ‘You have a way with words, Scheherazade.’”
Posted by on 07/15 at 02:39 PM"Either foreswear fucking others or the affair is over.”
Philip Roth, <em>Sabbath’s Theater<em>
Posted by Goldberg on 07/15 at 02:41 PMsorry about the screwed up html tags. my bad.
Posted by Goldberg on 07/15 at 02:41 PM"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez--Love in the Time of Cholera
“I am an American, Chicago born--Chicago, that somber city--and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.” Saul Bellow--The Adventures of Augie March
Wish I knew enough “theory” to explain in eloquent detail why I love these two quotes so very much...instead, I’ll just say it’s because they make me wish I could write! Alas.
Posted by on 07/15 at 02:44 PMIn no particular order:
“Daddy said it was a bedsheet, a fitted bedsheet, and he said she was wearing it up on her shoulders like a cape with two of the corners knotted around her neck.”
“Having harbored two sons in the waters of her womb, my mother considers herself something of an authority on human fetuses.”
“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression ‘As pretty as an airport.’”
“A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head.”
“As I sat in the bath tub, soaping a meditative foot and singing, if I remember correctly, ‘Pale Hands I Loved Beside The Shalimar,’ it would be deceiving my public to say that I was feeling boomps-a-daisy.”
Posted by corndog on 07/15 at 02:44 PMNice one, Ellen1910. I’m miles from my bookshelves, or I’d have picked out one of his myself.
Posted by on 07/15 at 02:45 PMIt was like so, but wasn’t.
Posted by on 07/15 at 03:08 PMHorizontally wakeful amid universal widths, practising laughter and mirth, satire, the end of all, of Rome and yes of Babylon, clenched teeth, remembrance, much warmth volcanic, the streets of Paris, the plains of Jerico, much gliding as of reptile in abstraction, a gallery of watercolors, the sea and the fish with eyes, symphony, a table in the corner of the Eiffel Tower, jazz at the opera house, alarm clock and the tap-dancing of doom, conversation with a tree, the river Nile, Cadillac coupe to Kansas, the roar of Dostoyevsky, and the dark sun.
Now let’s have some bloody applause for the great culture of the San Joaquin Valley, damnit.
Posted by Roxanne on 07/15 at 03:11 PMUNDER WESTERN EYES
Hey eb: One thing about Conrad is that I found his *beginnings* so great--world class--that I always get a surprise when I look at the *first sentence* of any of his novels or novellas. They are not so great. The Nelly sentence in *HOD* should win no prize--it’s a standard opening for any sea yarn--but the first half-page is one of the great beginnings.
It’s a different ballgame in his stories--e.g. “The Secret Sharer"--the STORIES will have a great first sentence.
But all these novels have great first pages yet their first sentence bats usually no more than .290, which is what I’d give the first sentence of *Lord Jim*.
“He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.”
Then there’s *Nostromo*--amazing prose--and yet here’s the first sentence. .260 hitter:
“IN THE time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco--the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity--had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo.”
mneh. but it gets A LOT better from there, right away.
Batting seventh, and hitting .240, is the beginning of *The Secret Agent*:
Mr Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brother-in-law.
Not a zinger.
The beginning of *The Shadow Line* looks basically like a decent hook for the beginning of any story, but WHAT is that baudelaire quote doing alongside it? The baudelaire quote with a different first sentence, or vice versa, but not both together---The effect is grotesque--like a pitcher hitting.
D’autre fois, calme plat, grand miroir De mon desespoir.
BAUDELAIRE
“ONLY the young have such moments.”
Posted by on 07/15 at 03:19 PM"Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks, ‘I have come from Alabama a-walking. A fur piece.’”
This is Mississippi; it’s August; it’s hot; it’s humid.
Why is she wearing a fur piece?
Posted by on 07/15 at 03:19 PMI suppose they have ‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day’?
Posted by Ophelia Benson on 07/15 at 03:26 PMjackd: I will add a bit of genre fiction, at the risk of lowering the serious tone of the conversation: The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Lower away! The first sentence of Neuromancer is the best sentence of Neuromancer. And they’ve already got the opening line of 2001: A Space Odyssey, “The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended.” So there.
And hi Shawn! Yes, they have the opening line of Galatea 2.2, too. I should have said something about this at the outset—they’re a pretty contemporary bunch over there, so there’s lots of postwar material, including Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March (thanks, Michael Kircher) and 1984 (thanks, OtherDoug) and Sabbath’s Theater (thanks, Goldberg). Cormac McCarthy already has three nominations.
Posted by Michael on 07/15 at 03:30 PM"Here’s the person I want.”
Vladimir Nabokov, TRANSPARENT THINGS
Posted by on 07/15 at 03:34 PMA couple from children’s/YA lit:
Meeting Harris would never have happened were it not for liberal quantities of Schlitz and Four Roses.
--Harris and Me, Gary PaulsonLyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.
--The Golden Compass, Philip Pullmanand from Ann Marie MacDonald’s The Way the Crow Flies (not children’s lit by any stretch of the imagination)
The birds saw the murder.
Posted by on 07/15 at 03:35 PM"The only advice I can offer, should you wake up vertiginously in a strange flat, with a thoroughly installed hangover, without any of your clothing, without any recollection of how you got there, with the police sledgehammering down the door to the accompaniment of excited dogs, while you are surrounded by bales of lavishly-produced magazines featuring children in adult acts, the only advice I can offer is to try to be good-humoured and polite.”
Posted by Kenneth Rufo on 07/15 at 03:35 PMHey, how about last lines?
“And then in my dream I looked down at myself, and saw in what rags I stood; and I am a child again, begging on the threshhold of eternity.”
Posted by on 07/15 at 03:40 PMThree from John Crowley:
“There were angels in the glass, two four six many of them, each one shuffling into his place in line like an alderman at the Lord Mayor’s show.”
“Once, the world was not as it has since become.”
and (this is from a short story, so it doesn’t count):
“He found, quite suddenly and just as he took a stool midway down the bar, that he had been vouchsafed a theme.”
Posted by Jon on 07/15 at 03:41 PM"They shoot the white girl first. With the others they can take their time”—Toni Morrison, Paradise
“Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.”—Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Posted by rdturpin on 07/15 at 03:45 PMOphelia: I suppose they have ‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day’?
Um, no, amazingly enough! See, this is why we need to help them out.
That book’s all about empire, by the way. Just saying.
And they didn’t have “Here’s the person I want,” either, Sian. Thanks!
Posted by Michael on 07/15 at 03:45 PMAnd while we’re on the Brontes, they didn’t have “I have just returned from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbor that I shall be troubled with.” But now they will.
Posted by Michael on 07/15 at 03:49 PMA-And another think....
on the subject of conrad and mediocre first lines--
With chapters that begin “Mescal, said the Consul.” or “A corpse will be transported by express.” here is the beginning of Chapter 1 of *Under the Volcano*. Has this guy been reading Conrad or what?
“Two mountain chains traverse the republic roughly from north to south, forming between them a number of valleys and plateaus.”
Posted by on 07/15 at 03:51 PM"Marley was dead: to begin with.”
It’s the colon that gets me. It doesn’t look like it’s doing anything a colon is supposed to do. It’s a good line without it, but I like it. Mark Twain once regretted putting an esophagus in a story; I wonder if Dickens ever regretted this colon.
“Lamar Pye had the biggest penis in the entire Arkansas state prison system.” (or something like that)
This line prepares you. It lets you know in no uncertain terms that unpleasantness will follow. It is a clear and fair warning that some people should probably not continue reading.
Posted by on 07/15 at 03:59 PMCan we move into drama with
“Who’s there?”
Posted by on 07/15 at 04:00 PMStately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
Posted by on 07/15 at 04:00 PMHe was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
--Scaramouche
Raphael SabatiniNo live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.
Shirley Jackson
The Haunting of Hill House(The entire first paragraph is great, but we’re doing first lines)
Christmas crept into Pine Cove like a creeping Christmas thing; dragging garland, ribbon, and sleighbells, oozing eggnog, reeking of pine, and threatening festive doom like a cold sore under the mistletoe.
The Stupidest Angel
-Christopher Moore(Yeah, okay, that’s a little self-serving, but I think it’s a funny first line.)
Posted by Chris Moore on 07/15 at 04:00 PMOk, I know you’ve already nominated it, but it’s my favorite so I will type it out:
“I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concern’d in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind ;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his
whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost : ---- Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly, ---- I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.”Also please tell me they have “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
“"You too will marry a boy I choose,” said Mrs Rupa Mehra firmly to her younger daughter.” -Vikram Seth, _A Suitable Boy_
And, not a novel, but a great first line anyway: “It’s cost me every sexual relationship I’ve ever had.” -David Foster Wallace, “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.”
Posted by bitchphd on 07/15 at 04:05 PM"Upon waking, the dinosaur was still there.”
- the first (and only!) line of Augusto Monterroso’s short story “El Dinosaurio”
Posted by on 07/15 at 04:06 PMNow, touching this business of old Jeeves - my man, you know - how do we stand?
Posted by on 07/15 at 04:18 PMAlso please tell me they have “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
They do indeed.
Posted by Michael on 07/15 at 04:37 PMMichael said, in reference to _Tristram Shandy_ as the 3rd-greatest English-language novel: You shouldn’t have to ask what numbers one and two are. Some things simply aren’t arbitrary. But of course, my friend. Ha, ha, ha. Why, I hardly even need to mention it, I know the answer so well. Um, see any good movies lately?
#1, actually, is easy: _Wuthering Heights_, without any doubt. I always announce this fact to my classes with utmost confidence.
#2, uh . . . uh . . . _Absalom, Absalom!_? _Tom Sawyer_? _Emma_? _Humphrey Clinker_? _The Notebook_? _VALIS_? _Lord Jim_? (_Heart of Darkness is technically a novella, right?)I like the beginning of Melville’s _The Confidence Man_ (David Ross McIvine’s quote with the man in cream-colors), even if it ain’t quite “Call me Ishmael.”
Toni Morrison is good with first lines, isn’t she? Maybe because she works so hard on sentences in general.
I pulled a bunch of favorites off the bookshelves, only to find many of them have so-so first lines. I need to find my Ralph Ellison short stories, and my Edwidge Danticat novels. Those writers are good with sentences.
Here’s a great, caustic first line from Langston Hughes’ short story “Slave on the Block”:
“They were people who went in for Negroes—Michael and Anne—the Carraways.”Posted by on 07/15 at 04:38 PM"They threw me off the hay truck around noon.” (James M. Cain, “The Postman Always Rings Twice.")
“The archangel had always loved heights.” (Henry Adams, “Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres.”
Posted by on 07/15 at 05:04 PM"A smear of fresh blood has a metallic smell.”
-- John D. MacDonald, A Deadly Shade of GoldPosted by on 07/15 at 05:06 PMI’m sure they have this one:
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, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Posted by Jim on 07/15 at 05:08 PMI haven’t seen these suggested yet, so I will throw them out there… enjoy…
A great one from William Gaddis:
Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.Or, how about a little Salman Rushdie…
“To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.”
Of course this does cut off Gibreel’s quotation midway through, but it still works well for me as quite a memorable first line..And David Marskon works pretty well here also, although I suspect it’s already been suggested somewhere, by someone…
“In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.”Posted by on 07/15 at 05:09 PMSpeaking of fiction serving as its own best parody.
If you are thirty-five or older, chances are good that your childhood in America was pretty much like mine, no matter where you grew up. Bill O’Reilly - The No-Spin Zone: Confrontations with the Powerful and Famous in America
First things first: I’m a New Yorker. Sean Hannity - Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty over Liberalism
The monuments have fallen now and the faces are changed. David Horowitz - The POLITICS OF BAD FAITH: The Radical Assault on America’s Future
I decided to write this book to tell a bit about myself and my radio show and where I stand on the important political and social issues affecting our society today. Rush Limbaugh, The Way Things Ought To Be
Posted by corndog on 07/15 at 05:20 PMOkay, two lines, but:
Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk.
Posted by Chris Moore on 07/15 at 05:24 PM"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Rest in Peace, good Doctor.
Posted by on 07/15 at 05:32 PM” ‘All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all uhappy ones are more or less alike,’ says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R. G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880).”
--Nabokov, ADA, OR, ARDOR, A FAMILY CHRONICLEPosted by on 07/15 at 05:34 PM"You are hearing the screams of a small fat man.” -Jack O’Connell, Word Made Flesh.
And you know he’s trying to evoke Pynchon (by starting a novel with a scream) and Hammett (by keeping a character a “fat man” long before we know his name).
Posted by on 07/15 at 05:36 PMCouple of faves I haven’t seen mentioned:
“I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte.”
--RED HARVEST (does anyone not LOVE this sentence?)“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.”
--THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD (top 100 title, too)Posted by Geoff on 07/15 at 05:38 PMKenneth, you beat me to The Thought Gang, so I’ll have to settle for this:
“They made a silly mistake, though,” the Professor of History said, and his smile, as Dixon watched, gradually sank beneath the surface of his features at the memory.
I’ve always loved how Amis used the prepositional phrases to sink the sentence as the mistake sunk the smile.
Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman on 07/15 at 05:38 PM"They sent a slamhound on Turner’s trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair.”
Another Gibson, from Count Zero. Just ‘cause I like the word “slamhound.”
Posted by on 07/15 at 05:43 PMPynchon, *The Crying of Lot 49*
“One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.”
It’s like Dickens, if Dickens lived in California in the 1960’s. And you gotta love the swipe at the Tupperware party hostess.
Posted by on 07/15 at 05:46 PMHmm, afraid it doesn’t carry too well in English, but anyways:
>The wrath sing, goddess, of Peleus’ son, Achilles
(Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος)
-The IliadAnother classic, if I may cheat and include three lines:
>MIDWAY upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
(Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita.)
-The Divine ComedyAnd finally, to ruin any pretensions of taste:
>I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other.
-Tarzan of the ApesPosted by Bistroist on 07/15 at 05:49 PMHow about the first few lines of Paul Auster’s _City of Glass_? I don’t have my copy with me at the moment, but if I recall correctly it starts with something like “It was a wrong number that started it.”
Are translations allowed? I also have a fondness for the first few lines of Kobo Abe’s _The Box Man_:
This is the record of a box man.
I am beginning this account in a box. A cardboard box that reaches just to my hips when I put it over my head.
That is to say, at this juncture the box man is me. A box man, in his box, is recording the chronicle of a box man.Posted by on 07/15 at 06:00 PMThe Graham Greene Trinity:
“Mr. Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder: out into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust.” (The Power and the Glory)
“Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork.”
(The Heart of the Matter)“A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
(The End of the Affair)Posted by on 07/15 at 06:03 PM"This is the saddest story I have ever heard.”
Posted by on 07/15 at 06:19 PMYes! “The Good Soldier.” I was disappointed by the novel, but then again it would be hard to live up to a first line like that.
Posted by on 07/15 at 06:20 PMI hate you, JR, for getting that one. I am so jealous it actually causes me pain.
Posted by on 07/15 at 06:21 PM"She would leave him, she thought, when the begonias had bloomed.”
Posted by on 07/15 at 06:27 PMThis is fun, and my, my, anti-prolixity returns...when I was in graduate school, a friend had fun putting the first sentence and the last sentence of philosophy greats together, and claiming it captured the book. As I recall, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason works reasonably well, and maybe even Hegel’s Phenomenology…
Posted by A. G. on 07/15 at 06:27 PM"There once lived in a sequestered part of the county of Devonshire, one Mr. Godfrey Nickleby, a worthy gentleman, who taking it into his head rather late in life that he must get married, and not being young enough or rich enough to aspire to the hand of a lady of fortune, had wedded an old flame out of mere attachment, who in her turn had taken him for the same reason; thus two people who cannot afford to play cards for money, sometimes sit down to a quiet game for love.”
Posted by on 07/15 at 06:44 PMFour, in order of length. I’m surprised I’m first with #3 (on this list, at least), given Michael’s coy reference to the second-greatest novel in English. It could be argued that #2 is not really a novel. #4 is definitely not really a novel, but I’m hoping it can be grandfathered in.
1. High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. (Changing Places)
2. Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his. (Invisible Cities)
3. Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? (Middlemarch)
4. About that time that the terror of the world and fever quartan of the French, Henry the Eight (the only true subject of chronicles) advanced his standard against the two hundred and fifty towers of Turney and Turwin, and had the emperor and all the nobility of Flanders, Holland, and Brabant as mercenary attendants on his full-sailed fortune, I, Jack Wilton, a gentleman at least, was a certain kind of appendix or page belonging or appertaining in or unto the confines of the English court, where what my credit was a number of my creditors that I cozened can testify. (The Unfortunate Traveller)
(My apologies if this all shows up twice--I tried to send it once before, but after 15 minutes it hasn’t appeared.)
Posted by on 07/15 at 06:52 PMSomebody already got Mrs. Dalloway & everything else that first came to mind, but here are two that occurred to me while reading these comments:
1. “One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away.”
2. “In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her scholarship, had learend the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.
Posted by KathyR on 07/15 at 07:02 PMThis was incredibly hard to do while at work, away from my own books. (Amazon’s “look inside” feature sure is handy.) Here are a few favorites of my favorites:
1. First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey.
2. Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941.
3. Spring comes hard down here.
4. I can’t believe I’m on this road again, twisting along past the lake where the white birches are dying, the disease is spreading up from the south, and I notice they now have seaplanes for hire.
5. I get the willies when I see closed doors.
6. At the beginning of the summer I had lunch with my father, the gangster, who was in town for the weekend to transact some of his vague business.
7. She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.
8. There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name.
9. In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
1. Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
2. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
3. Andrew Vachss, Blue Belle
4. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing
5. Joseph Heller, Something Happened
6. Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
7. Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint
8. Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories
9. J.R.R. Tolkien, The HobbitI still remember my oldest brother reading that last one to me—it must have been more than 30 years ago.
Posted by Brian Zimmerman on 07/15 at 07:08 PMOh dear god, how could I forget this one:
“While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour. “ Thackeray, of course, _Vanity Fair_ I just adore the way the sentence plods along at four miles an hour…
Posted by bitchphd on 07/15 at 07:15 PMOne that Professor Harris will surely know:
“In a sense, I am Jacob Horner.”
--from a novel which contains this gem (which I think I remember correctly):
“A turning down of dinner damped, in ways subtle past knowing, manic keys on the thin flute of me, least pressed of all, which had shrilled me rarely.”
Posted by on 07/15 at 07:19 PM"Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface.”
Posted by Chris Clarke on 07/15 at 07:23 PM"To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.”
When reading The Grapes of Wrath was mandatory I managed to avoid it. Like Dick Cheney, I had other priorities. Many years later this one sentence made a counter offer too eloquent to refuse.
Posted by on 07/15 at 08:06 PMOnce there was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
Posted by julia on 07/15 at 08:30 PMyeah. here to represent for the pomos, cuz ford madox ford’s “dullest story” was already taken:
“For whom is the funhouse fun?” -Barth (not a novel, but whatever, it’s better than most novels i’ve read)
“I am a sick man ... I am a wicked man.” -Dostoevsky (a surprise I got to this first. whoops. he’s not pomo, is he?)
“--Money...? in a voice that rustled.” -Gaddis (JR’s keen)
“It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton.” -Shea / Anton Wilson (man did i ever do a lot of drugs in undergrad days)
“Parents stink.” -Acker (good god is she wonderful)
and from my current rereading project:
“Vaughan dies yesterday in his last car-crash.” -Ballard (which, incidentally, makes for an interesting scene when yr English 15 students are working busily away at draft review and yr up at the front cooly reading about semen- and blood-stained instrument panels)
Posted by on 07/15 at 08:47 PMoops. died. “Vaughan dies yesterday” would be a totally different novel, wouldn’t it?
Posted by on 07/15 at 08:50 PMAfter reading 87 of these entries, I’ve really got to hand it to David Ross. It takes a good eye – and a bit of guts – to identify bad opening lines, especially when they are attached to great openings and greater novels. Well done.
And his note kept springing to mind as I read many of the foregoing. Many of the opening sentences are great – much of their greatness seems borrowed from the books that they introduce – and the affection we have for those books. I won’t name names, but imagine reading these sentences for the first time. Do they plunge you into a world? Catch you off-guard? Set the aesthetic pace? Teach you how its book should be read?
But here’s a more generous demurral. Maybe it’s just easier to write a great opening. After all, every writer knows the weight it carries. It represents the start of something – the gate onto an entire world. Endings, however, are hard. As James and Kermode and James Wood have all pointed out, endings are always a bit of a let-down – too pat, too quick, too far from the feeling of life. It’s a lot easier to start a pattern than to end one.
A final thought – one that contradicts my first point. Maybe these opening sentences look especially good when we amputate them and isolate them. They all read like little Imagist poems, reducing entire worlds to a few scant, suggestive words.
I wonder…would most any opening sentence look good, floating there, hinting and promising. Here are sentences, plucked semi-randomly from a very disorganized bookshelf. Image they are all novels – or all criticism:
“It is about three years since I made a sketch in print of a problem which has been on my mind for some time.”
-- C. P. Snow“I am a sick man…I am a wicked man.”
-- Dostoevsky“There have been times when the question, ‘What is an image?’ was a matter of some urgency.”
-- W.J.T. Mitchell“This was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track.”
-- DeLillo“What is the simplest – the absolute minimum – that can be said about seeing?”
-- James Elkins“The doctor with whom I discussed the question told me to begin my work with a historical analysis of my smoking habit.”
-- Svevo“What ended when, in 1989 in Moscow, history ended?”
-- Walter Benn MichaelsPosted by on 07/15 at 09:08 PMRereading the original post reminded me of this one, which undoubtedly they already have:
For a long time I would go to bed early.
(Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.)
-Proust, Swanns Waycorndog quoted Douglas Adams earlier, so I thought I’d just mention this:
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.-That’s the opening line of the novel, as well as of the second episode of the radio series on which it is based. The first episode starts thusly:
This is the story of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, perhaps the most remarkable, certainly the most successful book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor - more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than 53 More Things To Do In Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Coluphid’s trilogy of philosophical blockbusters: Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes and Who is This God Person Anyway?Posted by Bistroist on 07/15 at 09:13 PMwhen I was nine years old, I hid under a table and heard my sister kill a king.
Posted by on 07/15 at 09:20 PMSing, O Muses, of the wrath of Achilles.
Well okay, that is actually from an epic poem, as the novel as a form came considerably later.
And not be too much of the literary crank as I love the short and the poetic, occasionally in the form of Poe, but isn’t Metamorphosis, the story of Gregor Samsa, more of a short story, at most a novella, rather than a novel?
Posted by The Heretik on 07/15 at 09:21 PM"John Dortmunder was a man on whom the sun shone only when he needed darkness.”
Posted by on 07/15 at 09:33 PMI scanned rapidly through these, so pardon me if someone else already had,
“Longtemps, je me suis couché a bonne heure.”
Posted by Jonathan Mayhew on 07/15 at 09:36 PMIt’s not a novel, but James Salter’s Burning the Days is hard to beat:
“The true chronicler of my life, a tall, soft-looking man with watery eyes, came up to me at the gathering and said, as if he had been waiting a long time to tell me, that he knew everything. I had never seen him before.”
Posted by on 07/15 at 09:36 PM"Vaughan died yesterday in his last car crash.”
J.G. Ballard, “Crash”
Posted by sfmike on 07/15 at 10:06 PM"The mind of a gorilla is the mind of a gorilla. But the mind of a gorilla that has drunk woman’s milk is the mind of a gorilla that has drunk woman’s milk.”
--Which opens Chapter 5, so it’ll be disqualified, unfortunately.
Posted by on 07/15 at 10:08 PM"The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting"--The Red Badge of Courage
“My family is American, and has been for generations,in all its branches, direct and collateral.” --Grant’s Memoirs
Posted by on 07/15 at 10:17 PMYep, they’ve got the Recherche, but in English. And hey y’all, now that we’re at 100 comments, could you provide author and title if you’re citing anything reasonably obscure? Thanks.
Posted by Michael on 07/15 at 10:18 PMOops. Sorry, Michael. Mine at #86 was from Stegner’s Crossing to Safety.
Posted by Chris Clarke on 07/15 at 10:24 PMMine at 95 was Donald Westlake, Bad News. Here’s another Westlake, from Backflash: “When the car stopped rolling, Parker kicked out the rest of the windshield and crawled through onto the wrinkled hood, Glock first.”
Posted by on 07/15 at 10:28 PMWhen Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
Posted by on 07/15 at 10:29 PMI’m jealous of Lance for thinking of _Lot 49_ first. Surely the contest must have all of Pynchon entered—the yo-yo, the screaming, the executrix, the godzilla footprint, the snowball stars.
Who are the English-language masters of first lines? Jane Austen, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pychon, and who else?
Oh, and, ha ha ha, of course I knew #2 was _Middlemarch_ all along, everyone knows that, I just didn’t want to sound to cocky, naturally. Ahem.
Posted by on 07/15 at 10:31 PMIt’s funny how many of these lines actually make me want to stop reading at that point. Not because I think they’re bad, but because so many of them seem so self-contained that you don’t need to go any further. And, of course, because some of them are so well-known that they stand in for the whole novel and you DON’T have to go any further. It’s kind of depressing.
Anyway, my favorite opening line of any work, anytime:
Day had broken cold and gray, exceedingly cold and gray, when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail and climbed the high earth-bank, where a dim and little traveled trail led eastward through the fat spruce timberland.
(Arguably, that would be the best first sentence that is almost never quoted after the 10th word.)
And then my favorite novel:
The first time I ever laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of the Dancers.
(Jack London, “To Build a Fire”, 1908 version)
(Raymond Chandler, THE LONG GOOD BYE)Posted by MoXmas on 07/15 at 10:40 PM"The killer was carrying two weapons.”
William Shatner, Teklab
Posted by on 07/15 at 11:07 PMBurgess gives up an arresting opening in Earthly Powers:
“It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.”
Posted by on 07/15 at 11:33 PM1. From “RN: The Memiors of Richard Nixon”: “I was born in the house my father built.”
2. From Sinclair Lewis:
a. “Ann Vickers”: “Slow yellow river flowing, willows that gesture in tepid August airs, and four children playing at greatness, as, doubtless, great men themselves must play. Four children, sharp-voiced and innocent and eager, and blessedly unaware that compromise and weariness will come at forty-five.”
b. “Elmer Gantry”: “Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk.”3. Barbara Kingsolver: “The Poisonwood Bible”: “Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.”
4. Ray Bradbury: “Fahrenheit 451”: “It was a pleasure to burn.”
5. Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth: “The Space Merchants”: “As I dressed that morning I ran over in my mind the long list of statistics, evasions, and exaggerations that they would expect in my report.”
Posted by Mitchell J. Freedman on 07/15 at 11:44 PMHow could I have forgotten?
My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.
-- Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Posted by Brian on 07/16 at 12:47 AMAlready got Barth, my #2 quote at comment #82. Can’t do a better Barth than Sot-Weed. No need to resort to non-novels.
Posted by KathyR on 07/16 at 12:49 AMYikes. My whole library is in boxes, so I’ll have to work from memory.
First of all, a good *last* line (as I see someone has suggested that category): “Isn’t it pretty to think so.” And vociferous seconds for “It was a pleasure to burn,” which is also the best sentence in that entire novel, and “One thing was certain, that the white kitten had nothing to do with it...”
I’ll cheat slightly with an opening salvo (three sentences): “Call me Jonah. My parents did, or almost did. They called me John.”
And I have a feeling that there is a whole (prefatory) chapter that precedes it, but: “Listen. Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”
There are two novelists in particular you can always count on to make a big impression early on. It may not be in the first sentence, but they’re willing to sell pretty hard in that first chapter (I’ll have to break down and Google at this point). So: “If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.” And (more subtle [and thank you Michael Palin]): “A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment.”
Finally, I know it’s not a novel, but: “To begin at the beginning.” And the next couple dozen sentences aren’t too shabby neither.
Posted by on 07/16 at 01:23 AMI can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch up uptown A train… Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit holds the door back for me.
-W. Burroughs, Naked LunchWOOF! Woof woof! Woof! Woof!
-Henry Miller, PlexusI was the shadow of the waxwing slain,
By the false azure in the windowpane;
-Vladimir Nabokov, Pale FirePosted by on 07/16 at 02:38 AMcan’t believe no one’s said “All this happened, more or less.”
Posted by on 07/16 at 02:44 AMThis is children’s literature, and it’s more than one sentence, but:
“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.”
Posted by on 07/16 at 03:09 AM"The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He’s got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off of its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.”
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash.