Favourite opening sentences?
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Favourite opening sentences?
Favourite opening sentences?
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We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
I remember that one and looking up Barstow, but I was reading the thing as a kid and I really got bored with it. I was unable to relate to (or care about) the crazed degeneracy depicted in the novel, and around the point that the one guy wants to drop the toaster in the tub or something I stopped reading. I have a clear memory of that being one of the few things that I just cut off out of sheer boredom and never bothered to finish.
Holy fricking filtered
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
Nah, too dull.
This is the only one I can remember. I think this phrase every day along with some stupid thread openers from IQfy.
None of them knew the colour of the sky
-stephen crane
going to cheat and do two sentences.
"Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure."
Molloy?
Based moron
To be fair, Molloy starts with something like "I am in my mother's room"
way to butcher one of the best opening in history anglo scum
Tend to your flag
DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.
whoever wrote this...sounds like a homosexual
"I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it – without knowing why."
Pessoa?
>It is an old saying, that he who seeks what he should not, finds what he would not. Every one has heard of the ape who, in trying to pull on his boots, was caught by the foot. And it happened in like manner to a wretched slave, who, although she never had shoes to her feet, wanted to wear a crown on her head.
Spare me of the grammatology.
I'm a sick man...I'm a spiteful man. I'm an unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased.
he is so me
>I asked her how she was so good at sucking wiener and she told me she grew up with six brothers.
What book?
what book anon?
It's a meme you perv
Google ain't giving me nuffin.
>It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
>weather and time
ngmi
>It was a dark and stormy night.
Imitators can't handle the original.
doubleplusungood
He had me at
>Call me Ishmael
>As my exciting story opens, I am being punched in the stomach. But I guess a lot of stories start that way. Most of mine do anyway.
>Black folk COULD BE HERE
>All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
love this one. I think it’s the best I ever read. it was the first Tolstoy I read and right away I knew he was great.
>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.
i WAS COUGHING BLOOD
>Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
Why is she saying thank you?
It's just an old saying in England, usually used just before stretching your legs.
It is a very English thing, used to suppress criticism or doubt in a humorous way.
>I frick babies.
You have my attention.
blood Meridian: the mccarthy cut
In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.
>Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, inveganate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.
The black watermelon sun is one of my favorite things ever.
I am going to pack my two shirts with my other socks and my best suit in the little blue cloth my mother used to tie round her hair when she did the house, and I am going from the Valley.
How Green was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn
Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.
No but you see I’ve got to explain all this because I don’t, we don’t know how much time there is left and I have to work on the, to finish this work of mine while I, why I’ve brought in this whole pile of books notes pages clippings and God knows what, get it all sorted and organized when I get this property divided up and the business and worries that go with it while they keep me here to be cut up and scraped and stapled and cut up again my damn leg look at it, layered with staples like that old suit of Japanese armour in the dining hall feel like I’m being dismantled piece by piece, houses, cottages, stables orchards and all the damn decisions and distractions I’ve got the papers land surveys deeds and all of it right in this heap somewhere, get it cleared up and settled before everything collapses and it’s all swallowed up by lawyers and taxes like everything else because that’s what it’s about, that’s what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight, entertainment and technology and every four year old with a computer, everybody his own artist where the whole thing came from, the binary system and the computer where technology came from in the first place, you see?
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.
YOU STUPID MONKEY
Now is the winter of our discount tent, made glorious summer by this sum of pork
The Industrial Revolution and it's consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
olbigatory but based
It terrifies me that people like that exist. This is the new breed of "man", the next step on our "evolutionary" journey.
They're the type of people to swoon towards a manufactured revolution - one where the system isn't in danger of being toppled, and where the individual isn't in danger of consequence or even taking basic action other than whining and cosplaying online. Only on rare occasions do they venture outside and "protest", usually at the command of the FBI - and then the "protest" is covered and either dismayed/paraded by the usual suspects. All to further sow false division and hatred when unity against the system and its handlers should be paramount.
But McDonalds, prescription meds, and wiener taste better than freedom, I guess.
>tfw technology enables these nonfunctional people to live and prosper
If they live and prosper then they're not nonfunctional.
Everyone b***hing about city folk are city folk, they just like to larp as "real men." Most everyone outside of the cities celebrate city folk who can not function outside of the city, they stay were they belong and do not frick up our nice comfy lives.
No, people who complain about city folk do so because they influence country folk massively with the politicians they vote for and the support they give to legislation which is focused on the city. City folk are massively disconnected from the country folk who produce the food/resources the city desperately needs to function.
For example, in the UK knives are banned from being carried. A fine enough law in London where nogs roam the streets, but what about the farmer who needs a knife on hand who gets into trouble for visiting a shop on the way home and forgot to take his knife off his hip? Or if he gets stopped by police while driving and still has his knife?
The same shit applies to all the nonsense 'green' laws and firearm laws which harm country folk. All supported and voted for by city folk.
>UK
No such thing as country folk in the UK, you got city folk and then you have serfs who are beholden to the city folk.
what are you on about only rich people live in the country in the uk and there isn't such a thing as a farmer in northern or western europe that isn't wealthy.
Every time I hear or read "city folk" I picture a guy in his 20s wearing clean flannels he got from target under a pristine Carhartt rated for fricking antarctica that he wears to his job at the aforementioned target. Everyone here is phony.
"City folk" is common parlance here in the rural upper midwest. I am 40, almost none of my clothes are pristine, I wear them until they wear out and often patch them. The nearest bigbox store is about 50 miles away and it has been about a decade since I last stepped in a such a store. I do the bulk of my shopping at a farm supply store, which is really just a general store which also sells shit like animal feed in bulk, I did work there for a couple summers back in highschool.
I was going to say you're too old for this site then I remembered it launched almost 20 years ago. So instead I'm just going to say that you responding to my questioning the authenticity of your identity with "My clothes are patchy and I don't go to Costco" doesn't make you come across any less phony. Any form of self-referential influence on your identity immediately invalidates it and turns it into something else. It's like directing a movie about yourself where you're playing yourself, anybody with sense would understand the disparity between the character on screen and you the actual individual human being. Script writers sit around a table debating whether such and such character would go to a bigbox store or wear brand new clothes, or if audiences would find that not "country folk" enough to be believable. Actual people just do things.
>I am right even if I am wrong.
>He can't invalidate my statement if it's entirely unsubstantial.
Galaxy brain 10000 IQ 5D chess reply right there.
weird cope
Literal Calhoun National Institute of Mental Health rat
Nice, glad to know I won't go hungry when the age of cannibalism begins.
I don't write first lines. I just start off in the middle of the story and then think backwards if I think it needs a proper beginning. Sometimes I don't and leave it as is.
Any recs for such stories?
In order to understand both the spirit of tradition and its antithesis, modern civilization, it is necessary to begin with the fundamental doctrine of the two natures.
>Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised
It's three sentences, but:
>How many swords had Lady Beveridge in her pierced heart! Yet there always seemed room for another. Since she had determined that her heart of pity and kindness should never die.
>riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay..
On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays it was Court hand and Summalae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology.
An ancient English Cathedral Tower? How can the ancient English Cathedral tower be here! The well-known massive grey square tower of its old Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect. What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe, it is set up by the Sultan's orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colors, and infinite in number and attendants. Still, the Cathedral Tower rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike. Stay! Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on the top of a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry? Some vague period of drowsy laughter must be devoted to the consideration of this possibility. Shaking from head to foot, the man whose scattered consciousness has thus fantastically pieced itself together, at length rises, supports his trembling frame upon his arms, and looks around. He is in the meanest and closest of small rooms. Through the ragged window-curtain, the light of early day steals in from a miserable court. He lies, dressed, across a large unseemly bed, upon a bedstead that has indeed given way under the weight upon it. Lying, also dressed and also across the bed, not longwise, are a Chinaman, a Lascar, and a haggard woman. The two first are in a sleep or stupor; the last is blowing at a kind of pipe, to kindle it.
AI edition:
>I am, or was.
>There was once a man who lived for a very long time; perhaps three thousand years, or perhaps a thousand million years, maybe a trillion or so, depending on how the scientists look at it.
>I am Eilie, and I am here to kill the world.
>I have just been informed, that the debate over the question ‘is it right or wrong to have immortal souls’ has been finally brought to a conclusion.
>The purple-haired woman came to the clearing in the plain, and without looking up from her book, said, “It’s too late to be thinking about baby names.”
>The village of Pembrokeshire, in the county of Mersey, lies on a wide, happy plain, which, in a few years, was to become known as the “Land of the Endless Mountains.”
>I was playing with my dog, Mark the brown Labrador, and I had forgotten that I was also playing with a dead man.
>The black stone was aching from the rain.
>How many times have I had the misfortune to die?
>The first day I met my future self, I was aboard the old dirigible that lay in wait for me on the far side of the moon.
https://www.aiweirdness.com/how-to-begin-a-novel-19-11-19/
Wow!!
>>The black stone was aching from the rain.
Frick this is nice.
>There was once a man who lived for a very long time; perhaps three thousand years, or perhaps a thousand million years, maybe a trillion or so, depending on how the scientists look at it.
frick I love this one
>>I am, or was.
Kinooo
>I am, or was.
Kingdom Hearts ass AI
>Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
My favorites:
>In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
>As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
Also The Stranger that was mentioned
Through this evenings tide of faces unregistered, unrecognized, amid hurrying black
shoes, furled umbrellas, the crowd descending like a single organism into the stations airless
heart, comes Shinya Yamazaki, his notebook clasped beneath his arm like the egg case of
some modest but moderately successful marine species.
The time is now 3:33, and it is time to proclaim the message.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit: librivox.org.
Hot take: If an opening sentence is memorable, it's a bad opening sentence.
That's a memorable opening sentence
do zoomers use the word "hot" to refer to something being stupid now?
because it sure seems like it
Hello twitter turist. Frick off
Why twitter?
Twitter is all about writing short half witty "hot takes". It's like a competition who can come up with the most moronic and halfway fringe opinions in as few characters as possible. That's if you're a dude, if you're a woman you just need to post something relatable to get likes
how do you know so much about how people talk on twitter? it sounds like you're the twitter gay here
It makes sense. Creating a spectuacular attention-seeking sentence is juvenile.
samegay
Ok but why? Why is it bad?
An opening sentence might be your only opportunity to get the reader's attention with your material. The Stranger's immediately tells you what the subject matter of the book is about, without saying what its about
And don't bring up muh blurbs either, because a reader might not look at them or a publisher can frick with them
There’s no doubt that it’s important, but the tryhardism that results makes for more eye rollers than anything.
"i am seated in a room surrounded by heads and bodies" is such a fricking memorable line, idk what it is but i cannot get that out of my head it just flows in language so perfectly.
"The building was on fire and it wasn't my fault."
Her ass was fat and my dick was hard.
The opening to “Call of the Arcade”
My dick was fat and her ass was hard.
I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of gods.
“ ON THE DAY they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on”
"Ordwald... I find the name... distasteful!"
Let there be light.
>"So, I'm sorry- very sorry to ask this, but do you think when your son jumped he... was aiming his- himself at the... uh.." the young detective trailed off, gesturing his limpening hands towards shit and blood covered barbershop pole.
IT HAS turned out fortunate for me to-day that destiny appointed Braunau-on-the-Inn
to be my birthplace
>Let us look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreans—we know well enough how remote our place is.
>Gully Foyle is my name, Terra is my nation, deep space is my dwelling place, and the stars my destination.
From an album instead of a book, but
>In 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection
Call Me Ishmael
>For sale: used condom, never unopened
It was June 16, 1904, and Stephen Dedalus was about to have the greatest day of his life.
First sentence of pic
The fact that such inane twaddle was ever published really drives home the fact that women can't write
Anybody has that terrible sentence from some redditor that's like "CRASH you never wake up to "hey we bought a golden retriever"" or some shit.
CRASH
The adopted golden retriever had made pancakes for breakfast.
Holy..... I need more...
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.
>The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
—V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (1979)
See the child.
Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr'd the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware,-- the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stocking'd-foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen, in a purposeful Dither since Morning, punctuated by the ringing Lids of Boilers and Stewing-Pots, fragrant with Pie-Spices, peel'd Fruits, Suet, heated Sugar,-- the Children, having all upon the Fly, among rhythmic slaps of Batter and Spoon, coax'd and stolen what they might, proceed, as upon each afternoon all this snowy December, to a comfortable Room at the rear of the House, years since given over to their carefree Assaults.
Wasn't GR's something like this?
>A screaming comes across the sky.
Always thought that was a great line.
> << FRICK YOU >> (written in bold + italics 9cm font) - Now that I have your attention [...]
The first page of East of Eden is divine.
Welcome to the exciting world of Chemistry!
>"It was a pleasure to burn."
Sing, goddess, of the anger of Achilleus, son of Peleus, the accccursed anger which brought uncounted anguish on the Achaians and hurled down to Hades many mighty souls of heroes, making their bodies prey to dogs and the burds' feasting: and this was the working of Zeus' will.
Her ass was fat and my dick was hard; the only problem was, so was hers, 'this is a quandary' I intonated above the face hoovering my pelvis.
>hoovering
amusingly, I can't tell if this is a typo or not, because hovering makes sense but hoovering(vacuming like the hoover vacuum) also makes sense and makes it funnier
it's hoovering
On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the last wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadn't ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.
for shoes: baby shoes, never shoes
I start everything I wrote with
>He did nothing wrong
or
>It never happened, but it should have
Then I start building upon that.
Sissy looked at the shot glass full of pig semen and threw it back neat.