Best First Lines

aethercowboy: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

aethercowboy: There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it

hipdeep: In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

aethercowboy: I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

aethercowboy: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

aethercowboy: 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.

aethercowboy: It was a pleasure to burn.

hipdeep: This is my favorite book in all the world, though I've never read it.

hipdeep: Marley was dead, to begin with.

aethercowboy: 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.

aethercowboy: All this happened, more or less.

hipdeep: Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

aethercowboy: Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.

aethercowboy: 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.

aethercowboy: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

aethercowboy: Call me Ishmael.

ManWithAnAgenda: No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

aethercowboy: If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and 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, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

aethercowboy: It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.

Aquila: I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.

aethercowboy: 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 considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned 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.

aethercowboy: In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

aethercowboy: 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.

aethercowboy: 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.

aethercowboy: Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.

aethercowboy: 124 was spiteful.

Aquila: All children, except one, grow up.

aethercowboy: Mother died today.

aethercowboy: This is the saddest story I have ever heard.

aethercowboy: They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.

aethercowboy: I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

hipdeep: Taran wanted to make a sword, but Coll, charged with the practical side of his education, decided on horseshoes.

aethercowboy: In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together.

ManWithAnAgenda: My wound is geography.

aethercowboy: You better not never tell nobody but God.

aethercowboy: Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

aethercowboy: I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.

aethercowboy: 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.

aethercowboy: I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho' not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call'd me.

aethercowboy: Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

aethercowboy: "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die."

aethercowboy: The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

aethercowboy: He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.

aethercowboy: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.

Aquila: "Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents."

aethercowboy: The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard.

aethercowboy: 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.

aethercowboy: I am an invisible man.

Macbeth: I blame the Pope

aethercowboy: Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.

hipdeep: Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, [...]

hipdeep: No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were being scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

aethercowboy: You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.

aethercowboy: The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

aethercowboy: Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.

hipdeep: I don't know what I should talk about - about death or about love? Or are they the same?

aethercowboy: 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.

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

aethercowboy: He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.

aethercowboy: 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.

aethercowboy: Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.

hipdeep: We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.

hipdeep: When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.

aethercowboy: For a long time, I went to bed early.

aethercowboy: He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.

aethercowboy: A screaming comes across the sky.

ManWithAnAgenda: The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.

aethercowboy: I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

aethercowboy: 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.

aethercowboy: In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.

aethercowboy: Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash.

ManWithAnAgenda: I am thirty years old and that is nothing.

aethercowboy: 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.

aethercowboy: Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space

aethercowboy: The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.

ManWithAnAgenda: Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

Aquila: I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites.

Aquila: In the myriadic year of our lord—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!—Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.

Aquila: Hal was not yet a prince when she fell in love with Lady Hotspur, but she would be within the hour.

Aquila: The wind came into the house from the Sound, and it blew Daisy and me around her East Egg mansion like puffs of dandelion seeds, like foam, like a pair of young woman in white dresses who had no cares to weigh them down.

hipdeep: I am old now, and have not much to fear from the anger of gods.

Aquila: The note said: someone in this class is a witch.

Aquila: There was a wall.

Aquila: Apart from the one in the church tower, there were five clocks in the village that kept reasonable time, and my father owned one of them.

Aquila: I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other.

aethercowboy: The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

hipdeep: Once upon a time on a small, watery, excitable planet called Earth, in a small, watery, excitable country called Italy, a soft-spoken, rather nice-looking gentleman by the name of Enrico Fermi was born into a family so overprotective that he felt compelled to invent the atomic bomb.

hipdeep: My old eighth-grade teacher, Miss Maggie Doubloon, said she was half Spanish, half French, and half Irish, a plethora of halves not entirely unnoticed by some of the brighter pupils.

hipdeep: From the top of the large boulder he sat on, Ensign Tom Davis looked across the expanse of the cave toward Captain Lucius Abernathy, Science Officer Q'eeng, and Chief Engineer Paul West and thought, "Well, this sucks."

aethercowboy: 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 house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

aethercowboy: Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.

aethercowboy: I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man.

aethercowboy: Where now? Who now? When now?

hipdeep: Dirk Moeller didn't know if he could fart his way into a major diplomatic incident.

aethercowboy: Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. "Stop!" cried the groaning old man at last, "Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree."

aethercowboy: In a sense, I am Jacob Horner.

aethercowboy: It was like so, but wasn't.

aethercowboy: —Money . . . in a voice that rustled.

aethercowboy: They shoot the white girl first.

aethercowboy: The moment one learns English, complications set in.