Best Opening Lines
 

So what are your favorite opening lines to your favorite (or possibly your not-so-favorite) novels?

As a supplement to the thread, here's an online "opening lines" quiz:

<a href="http://spotlight.encarta.msn.com/Features/encnet_departments_education_1_default_page_quiz61_Quizid_61.html" alt="Opening Lines Quiz" target="_OpeningLinesQuiz">Opening Lines Quiz</a>

10/13 for me, with some correct and incorrect guesses. I actually knew about 7 or 8 of them.

-ringding-

I got 10/13 as well. I was surprised that I knew so many.

Ross Thomas wrote some of my favorite opening lines.

From <I>Chinaman's Chance</I>:

"It was while jogging along the beach just east of the Paradise Cove pier that Artie Wu tripped over a dead pelican, fell, and met the man with six greyhounds."

9/13 - not quite as good, but I knew most of them at least.

My all-time favorite opening line:

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.", taken from Stephen King's The Gunslinger

9/13. Grrr.
 

One I've often seen cited is:

"A perfect morning in a city of perfect mornings, an artist would have worked a god would have rested." - T. Jefferson Parker's Laguna Heat

"The penis will be obsolete within 5 years."
John Varley's Steel Beach

7/13 :(
I missed #8, which I checked out from the library on Thursday but havent' read yet.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

+1

You obviously didn't take the quiz... :(



;)

-ringding-

Howard Roark laughed.

For some reason, this one has always stuck with me. No clue why.

8/13. :(

We were just outside of Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold...

:up: Mine as well.

My favorite also.:thumbsup:

11/13

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

It really jumped out at me when I first read the book.

I'm also fond of

"In a hole in the ground lived a Hobbit."

7/13

How about:
"It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton."

I got 10/13.

10/13 for me.

Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure.

6/13

Another great opening line:

"A screaming comes across the sky." - Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

Who is John Gault?

Which is it? The best? Or worst? Makes no sense! That's one of the best opening lines? (I'm paraphrasing a Cheers episode,which I found to be hilarious)

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."

...5/13...I think I need to read more...

9/13 - I should have gotten "The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended." right, but I couldn't place it out of context. Felt like kicking myself when I read the right answer.


Here's one that always haunts me:

"The angel lay in a little thicket. It had no need of love; there was nothing anywhere in the world could startle it- we can lie here with the angel if we like; it couldn't have hurt much when they slit its throat."

-'The Journal of Albion Moonlight' by Kenneth Patchen

11/13 (English major)...oddly enough, correctly guessed at a couple but incorrectly chose Bleak House & Martian Chronicles (both which I had read).

Death is my beat. - The Poet Michael Connelly

10/13, and I'm mad at myself for missing the 2001 line.

Maybe not the best, but it made me laugh:

"It has been reported that Tanuki fell from the sky using his scrotum as a parachute."

Villa Incognito, by Tom Robbins.

While I wasn't thrilled with the book as a whole, I've always loved the opening line to Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil:

"He was tall, about fifty, with darkly handsome, almost sinister features: a neatly trimmed mustache, hair turning silver at the temples, and eyes so black they were like the tinted windows of a sleek limousine - he could see out, but you couldn't see in."

I do not see what is so great about it myself.