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Favourite opening line?


Mogwai

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What are your favourite or most memorable opening lines from books? I'll go with....

"The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm."

It's from 'Something Wicked this way comes' by Ray Bradbury.

It's a line I've always remembered. I just found it very evocative.

 

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This is a bit of a longer opening line than your choice @Mogwai (the brevity of which I really like btw):

"On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide- it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese- the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope."

The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides.

A haunting opening line in a haunting novel. How could you not read on?

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I started reading "Nightwoods" by Charles Frazier this week and thought this was as strong an opening to a novel as I've read:

" Luce's new stranger children were small and beautiful and violent. She learned early that it wasn't smart to leave them unattended in the yard with the chickens. Later she'd find feathers, a scaled yellow foot with its toes clenched. "

I'm a big fan of this writer and can also strongly recommend his books "Cold Mountain" and "Thirteen Moons". 

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11 hours ago, historyman said:

First line of The Lovely Bones was great - but not so great that I can quote it without a copy of the book. 

'Martha was surrounded by death' is the first line of The Dead Beat by Doug Johnstone. He's written a few good books. 

" My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973." ("The Lovely Bones").

Aye, it's a cracker of an opening right enough.

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They’re out there.

Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kessy (1962). 

 

It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.

Catch-22, Joseph Heller: (1961)

 

 

 

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I had never read anything by Carl Hiaasen until this week. I found "Nature Girl" on my Dad's bookshelf, read the first line, and was hooked immediately:

"On the second day of January, windswept and bright, a half-blood Seminole named Sammy Tigertail dumped a dead body in the Lostmans River."

The rest of the novel lived up to the opening. A writer I will definitely read more of.

 

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Late to the party as a newbie member. I would have gone for the Earthly Powers line, but I also love:

“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”

Quite a lot of subtext packed into one sentence.

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