ITT: Best opening lines in literature

[Anonymous No.18787201]

>The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

[Anonymous No.18787211]

>>18787201
call me ishmael

[Anonymous No.18787214]

>>18787201
That's not how that book opens

[Anonymous No.18787215]

>>18787201
How is that a good opening line or the best in literature by any means

[Anonymous No.18787240]

>>18787201
Correction: See the child he is pale and thin.

[Anonymous No.18787244]

>>18787201
>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.

[Anonymous No.18787250]

>>18787201
>Call me Ishmael

[Anonymous No.18787251]

>>18787201
Did you paste the wrong sentence or something?

[Anonymous No.18787253]

>>18787215
it's not, it's just very evocative. the book itself is pretty average, the next book in the series is shit.

[Anonymous No.18787260]

>>18787201
>It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs Shears' house. Its eyes were closed.

[Anonymous No.18787305]

>It is true that she wasnt the prettiest girl, but in my eyes she was always beautiful

[Anonymous No.18787456]

>>18787214
>>18787240
OP has posted BM as either an example without actually posting the opening or just to attract posters. The opening in the OP is SK's Gunslinger.

[Anonymous No.18787465]

>>18787201
lmao mccarthy writes like stephen king

[Anonymous No.18787468]

>>18787456
I haven't read either but I swear my first thought was literally
>This is too shit to be from a good writer, it has to be from something like The Dark Tower

[Anonymous No.18787473]

>It was a pleasure to burn

[Anonymous No.18787479]

All children, except one, grow up.

[Anonymous No.18787486]

>>18787465
If you have read neither, sure.

[Anonymous No.18787489]

>I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man.

[Anonymous No.18787495]

>>18787260
Kek, curious case. It's an ok book, decent for YA.

[Anonymous No.18787496]

>A screaming comes across the sky.

[Anonymous No.18787503]

>All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

[Anonymous No.18787546]

>Mony pissed for long against the door, then he knocked at it.

[Anonymous No.18787547]

>>18787479
kek

[Anonymous No.18787570]

>>18787503
Fucking kek

[Anonymous No.18787659]

>>18787201
“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.”

[Anonymous No.18787755]

>I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.

[Anonymous No.18787768]

Today, Maman died

[Anonymous No.18787807]

I don't get what is so good about Call me Ishmael, can someone please explain it to me.

>>18787768
Mother died today is a better translation.

[Anonymous No.18788013]

>>18787807
Ishmael is an archaic term for maybe. It's a reference to Carly Rae Jepsen's classic hit, popular at the time, and ironic in this context due to the music video's theme of her chasing after, and ultimately failing to get harpooned by her own white whale (doubly ironic as the cinematography takes time to note the subjects noticeably low bodyfat).

[Anonymous No.18788032]

>There was no possibility of taking a walk that day

[Anonymous No.18788039]

>>18788013
The gay motif also complements the "sperm" whale

[Anonymous No.18788183]

>>18787201
Wrong book retard.

[Anonymous No.18788315]

>>18787201
The day was June 16, 1904 and Stephen Dedalus was about to have the greatest day of his entire life.

[Anonymous No.18788360]

>>18788039
>>18788013
>>18787807
cmon guys. lit is better than this. it's a good opening line because by starting the novel with Call me Ishmael, that is, the narrator interpellating himself, Melville is establishing the creation of identity as the central theme of the novel, we don't even know if his name is Ishmael, what we know is that he wants to control how he's being perceived by himself and others. later in the work,
>And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

[Anonymous No.18788510]

>>18787214
>>18787240
>>18787251
>>18787456
>>18788183
corncob status: seething

[Anonymous No.18788521]

>>18787201
Christ almighty get a better taste in Lit

[Anonymous No.18788536]

It was a dark and stormy night.

[Anonymous No.18788544]

>>18788521
/lit/ doesn’t read.

[Anonymous No.18788565]

>>18788360
Actual good analysis on lit? I am surprised

[Anonymous No.18788769]

Call of the Arcade by F. Gardner

[Anonymous No.18788781]

A sneeding cums across the thigh.

[Anonymous No.18788831]

>>18788769
These books are so much fun.

[Anonymous No.18788839]

>>18788781
Kek

[Anonymous No.18788841]

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

[Anonymous No.18788969]

>>18788510
>talking to himself again

[Anonymous No.18788983]

>>18787201
Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.

[Anonymous No.18788996]

>>18788510
>it's the butthurt fag again

[Anonymous No.18789213]

>>18788360
>It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
thats true, I always feel better on the water. I would enlist in the royal navy if I could

[Anonymous No.18789410]

>>18788969
>>18788996
corncob status: coping

[Anonymous No.18790593]

wait a minute...

[Anonymous No.18790603]

>>18788315
Kek, good one

[Anonymous No.18790606]

>>18787807
Mother is too adult. Maman is like the French word for Mommy, which Jean-Paul Sartre notes the choice of mommy instead of mother adds a bit of irony when contrasting with Mersault's apathetic feelings towards her.

[Anonymous No.18790616]

"It was four hours into their two hour flight when Eric began to worry"

[Anonymous No.18790624]

>>18787201
i don't understand how people like that book. the stephen king one, i mean. blood meridian was really good. spits.

[Anonymous No.18790627]

On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.

[Anonymous No.18790630]

>>18787201
>I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
>By the false azure in the windowpane;

[Anonymous No.18790715]

>>18788769
10/10

[Anonymous No.18790746]

>>18790616
where is this from?

[Anonymous No.18790762]

"... And then began the visit to that strange building located in an austerely respectable but by no means dismal street."

[Anonymous No.18790816]

>>18790616
Sauce?

[࿇ C Œ M G E N V S ࿇ !KNDY3cHnRY No.18791062]

>«VINE A COMALA PORQUE ME DIJERON QUE ACÁ VIVÍA MI PADRE, UN TAL PEDRO PÁRAMO.»

[Anonymous No.18791111]

>HAAAAARK

[Anonymous No.18791297]

>>18788769
>>18788831
kys already gardener

[Anonymous No.18791767]

>>18787253
Gunslinger > Wizard and Glass > Wolves of the Calla > The Waste Lands > The Drawing of Three > The Dark Tower > Song of Susannah

it is known

[Anonymous No.18792314]

>>18787503
That's not the opening line

[Anonymous No.18792418]

>>18792314
Lately I've been skeptical; sullen when I would used to speak.

[Anonymous No.18792481]

>>18788769
my favourite aspect of gardners works is his blatant disregard for keeping consistency in his tense or grammatical person.

[Anonymous No.18792507]

>>18787201
En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor.

[Anonymous No.18792606]

Nothing but the sounds of the jungle tonight. The Americans have decreased their foot patrols in this area the last two weeks, I'd like to think it's because of me. Just two years ago I would have given anything to have a night like this, been glad to not get into a gunfight with 11 rounds of ammunition in my pocket and zero radio contact with the rest of my unit, I still feel that way sometimes. But tonight, and on every night like this, when I have nothing but the sounds of the jungle and my own thoughts to keep me company I can't help but think about everything I've seen the last two years. All the friends, I've lost, all the destruction to my country I've seen, all the families without homes. On nights like these the only thing I want is a GI to make an example of.

[Anonymous No.18792637]

>>18790746
>>18790816
Someone will guess it

[Anonymous No.18792645]

>>18787503
Have read Anna Karenina. Is this any good?

[Anonymous No.18793280]

>>18787201
you forgot
>pic not related

[Anonymous No.18793296]

>>18793280
>pic not related
but it is

[Anonymous No.18793307]

>>18787253
I haven't read the sequels, but the Gunslinger is 100% pure kino all the way through
And probably the best thing Stephen King ever wrote, except maybe also his Bachman books
fite me irl

[Anonymous No.18793531]

>>18787244
Checked and kekt

[Anonymous No.18793589]

>>18791062
Basado y Rulfo-pillado

[Anonymous No.18793647]

>>18790606
Huh, I was told in high school that Maman was a weirdly formal and unattached way for him to refer to his own mother. Guess I got memed on by American education again.

[Anonymous No.18793733]

>>18793647
If you read the forward to the Matthew Ward translation, he explains it all.

[Anonymous No.18793751]

>>18793647
Really, it's your fault for not doing your own research.

[Anonymous No.18793758]

>>18790606
I wished they had translated Maman as Mom or Mommy instead of leaving it in French because I failed to notice this irony until now.

[Anonymous No.18793808]

>>18793758
They left it as Maman? Holy stupid, at least have the balls to change it properly regardless of a dumb tradition

It's like having the Brothers Karamazov instead of the Karamazov Brothers. What's the deal?

[Anonymous No.18793816]

>>18793808
Traditionally, the word was translated as Mother, so the novelty here is leaving it as Maman.
As regards to the Brothers Karamazov, I see no problem.

[Anonymous No.18793899]

>>18788841
isn't that neuromancer?

[Anonymous No.18793923]

>>18787496
kek

[Anonymous No.18794038]

>>18791062
Oh shit, they're basically twins.

[Anonymous No.18794454]

>>18788032
Underrated

[Anonymous No.18794531]

"My right arm fell off today."

[Anonymous No.18794551]

>>18791062
Rulfopilleado, check

[Anonymous No.18794607]

>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, spine-cabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek.

[Anonymous No.18794651]

April is the cruelest month

[Anonymous No.18794837]

>>18787489
Kek'd hard

[Anonymous No.18794852]

>>18793899
yeah, great opening desu

[Anonymous No.18794895]

Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades, of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at that critical moment it presumes itself as reality.

[Anonymous No.18794964]

If i as a reader cannot see the stage lit with lights it’s alway a bad opening. Bad openings always go through a black hole and when the stage lits its shit.

[Anonymous No.18795000]

>>18794964
Bad shit opening always tells how somehing was, never something is in the fucking right now. Bad shit opening always laments. I cannot stand it. There is always this shit bad author trying to captivate the reader with his shit, how things have been and shit, spraying fancy words over the shit and hoping that the reader won’t grasp that his opening is shit. Fuck.

[Anonymous No.18795036]

>I am waiting at the counter for the man to pour the coffee and he only fills it halfway

[Anonymous No.18795046]

>>18792637
The Langoliers

[Anonymous No.18795109]

>>18794964
>>18795000
interesting thoughts anons. can you give some examples or openings you like and dislike?

[Anonymous No.18795116]

>I learned how to fly first-class when I was ten.

[Anonymous No.18795124]

>>18795109
>Money? In a voice that rustled

[Anonymous No.18795152]

>>18794964
>>18795000
This, give examples please>>18795109

[Anonymous No.18795633]

>>18795109
Good one that i just read:

”I had a charming guest.
Opposite me, by the massive Renaissance fireplace, sat Venus: not, mind you, some demimondaine who, like Mademoiselle Cleopatra, had taken the pseudonym of Venus in her war against the enemy sex. No: my visitor was the Goddess of Love—in the flesh.” (Venus in fur)

Good one but starts with dimmed lights: great gatsby. It starts with dimmed lights but it starts with a voice that is a light in its own.

Lolita starts with dimmed lights but the lights are growing, also. A good voice as is.

A dim one, the one that goes on and on with dimmed lights is the one that almost always is a omniscient voice using third person method, describing a character’s character or his history, owning the character and describing him or her with fancy words while taking over, almost as if trying to impress someone outside the story or something, describing a character but without giving the character any voice. In shit startings it’s always the author ruining things. If i see this, i close the book and never come back again.

The ones that starts like letters to someone other go well, even if the lights are out. These are always in first person. Like T.E Lawrence’s seven pillars of wisdom. In the good ones that start with dimmed lights it is always the character speaking, not the author. To me it feels like that anytime when the author is taking over and starting things, it goes to shit. It always goes to ”look at me, the author, look at me how fancy i am describing my characters and stuff. Look at me how i can use so many words to impress someone who i don’t even know. Just hear me grasping in darkness, hoping to impress someone, anyone”

Third person mode is always giving me this weird feeling or presence of a crap author, this almost never happens when author uses first person mode. I always just delete anything that reeks of a crappy author. Somehow i am left with first person stories. There’s an exception to this rule and it’s Michael Punke’s The Revenant.

[Anonymous No.18795660]

>>18787201
« C'était à Mégara, faubourg de Carthage, dans les jardins d'Hamilcar ».

[Anonymous No.18795681]

>>18795633
>opening of lolita
>not referring to the forward

[Anonymous No.18795694]

>>18794895
>>18794964
>>18795000
>>18795036
>>18795109
>>18795116
>>18795124
>>18795152
>>18795633
>>18795660
this is w hy you dont do drugs kids

[Anonymous No.18795740]

>>18790746
>>18790816
>>18795046
>He doesn't know

[Anonymous No.18795756]

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

[Anonymous No.18795766]

>>18787201
He was born in 1891 on a small farm in central Missouri near the village of Boonville, some forty miles from Columbia, the home of the university

[Anonymous No.18795780]

>>18795633
i like your style anon, and i’m inclined to agree with you. third person feels almost impossible to write these days, it’s either boring beyond words or too cute. to read as well, for the reasons you listed, and when you know what can be (and has been) done with the novel format for over a century now

[Anonymous No.18795782]

>>18795766
sounds like stoner

>>18795756
sounds like diceksn

>>18795740
sounds like he doesnt know

[Anonymous No.18796802]

>>18795782
kek

[Anonymous No.18796866]

>>18790624
Well now. He said as he wiped his plate clean with a tortilla. How about that.

[Anonymous No.18796977]

>>18787214
>>18787240
>>18787251
>>18788183
>>18793280
Filtered

[Anonymous No.18796991]

>>18787489
This is the best

[Anonymous No.18798193]

>>18788841
heh

[Anonymous No.18798447]

>it was the best of times, it was the blurst of times

[Anonymous No.18798476]

>>18787201
>Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested. His landlady, Frau Grubach, had a cook who brought him breakfast each day around eight, but this time she didn't appear. That had never happened before.

[Anonymous No.18798600]

>>18793307
>fite me irl
3:00pm, behind the old schoolyard basketball court. Be there or be chikin, bitch.

[Anonymous No.18798612]

I like this one:
>He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eight-four days now without taking a fish.

[Anonymous No.18798658]

>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

[Anonymous No.18798863]

>Hold your back for the rhythm attack
>Coming down on the floor like a maniac
>Hold your track so clean up the dish
>By the way, how much is the fish?

[Anonymous No.18798953]

>At the hour of the hot spring sunset two citizens appeared at the Patriarch’s Ponds.

[Anonymous No.18800186]

>>18793733
Thanks anon

[Anonymous No.18800234]

>>18790616
For the love of god i need sauce, i know ive read this sentence before but the internet turns up nothing

[Anonymous No.18800670]

>>18800234
Newfag

[Anonymous No.18800884]

>>18788841
seethe

[Anonymous No.18800921]

>>18787244
Jej

[Anonymous No.18800928]

>>18793307
Night Shift short stories >>>

[Anonymous No.18801125]

>>18787201
no one posted this on an american board??? i'm french and i've been chasing that high ever since
>The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

[Anonymous No.18801440]

>>18787201
Cairey Turnbull is precariously perched on the edge of a fall.

[Anonymous No.18803113]

>>18801440
hell yeah dude

[Anonymous No.18803389]

>>18798658
Fuck u kys

[Anonymous No.18803410]

>>18787211
Okay

[Anonymous No.18803418]

>>18787201
If you can remember the first line of a book, then it's not a good first line.

[Anonymous No.18803446]

>>18787768
it's this and it's not a contest

[Anonymous No.18803453]

>Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.

Certainly the best opening in travel literature, at least

[Anonymous No.18803456]

>>18803446
You are gay.

[Anonymous No.18803476]

>In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

[Anonymous No.18803497]

>>18803418
How do I have to alter my diet to become as retarded as you are, anon-kun?

[Anonymous No.18803546]

>>18787201
>Call me Christian.

[Anonymous No.18803693]

>abandon all hope ye who enter here is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enought to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn't seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, "Be My Baby" on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so."

[Anonymous No.18805318]

Death and the Dervish by Meša Selimović
The book has a really good first chapter, but i'll only type out some of the first few lines. Really recommend reading the first chapter in its entirety. Interesting writing about writing/ purpose of writing.

>"I begin my story for nothing, without benefit for myself or anyone else, from a need stronger than benefit or reason. I must leave a record of myself, the chronicled anguish of my inner conversations, in the vague hope that a solution will be found when all accounts have been settled (if they may ever be), when I have left my trail of ink on this paper, which lies in front of me like a challenge. I do not yet know what will be written here. But in the strokes of these letters at least some of what was in me will remain no longer to perish in eddies of mist as if it had never been, or as if I had never known what happened. In this way I will come to see how I became what I am--this self that is a mystery even to me. And yet it is a mystery to me that I have not always been what I am now. I know these lines are muddled; my hands trembles at the task of disentanglement that I face, at the trial I now commence. Here I am everything: judge, witness, and accused. I will be as honest as I can be, as honest as anyone ever could be, for I have begun to doubt that sincerity and honesty are one and the same. Sincerity is the certitude that we speak the truth (and who can be certain of that?), but there are many kinds of honesty, and they do not always agree with one another.
My name is Ahmed Nuruddin..."

[Anonymous No.18805395]

>>18805318
The end of the first chapter goes as:
>"Let me return again to myself and the tekke. I loved it, and still love it. It is quiet, clean, mine. It smells of tansy in the summer, and of harsh wind and snow in the winter. I also love it because I made it what it is, and because it knows secrets that I have never revealed to anyone, that I have hidden even from myself. It is warm and peaceful; in the early morning pigeons coo on the rooftop, and rain drums lightly on the tiles. It is raining now as well, persistently, perpetually, even though it is summer. The rainwater drains away through wooden gutters into a night that has descended ominously on the world. I fear that this night might never be lifted; at the same time I hope that the sun will soon rise. I love the tekke because it protects me with the peace of my two rooms, where I can be alone when I wish to rest from people."
>"The river resembles me: sometimes turbulent and foaming, more often calm and inaudible. I was sorry when they dammed it up below the tekke and diverted it into a trench to make it obedient and useful, so it would run through a trough and drive a mill wheel. And I was happy when it swelled, destroyed the damn, and flowed free. I knew all the while that only tamed waters can mill wheat."
>"But the rain is still pouring down, as it has for days, and the pigeons coo in the attic, since they cannot go out from under the eaves. They announce a day that has not yet come. My hand has become stiff from holding the pen, the candle spits and sparks a little to stave off its death. I look at these long rows of words, the tombstones of my thoughts, and i do not know whether I have killed them, or given them life."

End of chapter 1. <3

[Anonymous No.18805446]

Dantes Inferno is the only correct response

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

[Anonymous No.18805448]

>>18790616
"It was seeing the darker complexions and the niqabs when Jonathan began to worry he was in a flight to Ankara, not Berlin"

[Anonymous No.18805620]

>>18805448
Source?

[Anonymous No.18805657]

>>18788983
They made me read that one in Grade 9 English. I liked it at the time. Don't like Vonnegut now, though. Still probably a good book.

[Anonymous No.18805808]

>One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.

[Anonymous No.18805859]

"Three men at McAlester State Penitentiary had larger penises than Lamar Pye, but all were black and therefore, by Lamar's own figuring, hardly human at all."

[Anonymous No.18805875]

>>18787244
Literary genius, profound yet simple, and unequivocally based

[Anonymous No.18805879]

>>18805859
Da fuck

[Anonymous No.18805893]

>>18787201
>Where's Papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.

[Anonymous No.18806589]

>>18796977
>Filtered by Stephen King