Favorite first line from a novel?

Question

Modern novel or classic.

Mine will always be from A Tale from Two Cities.
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, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us...

Yours?

Answer 1

Good one!



"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." -Pride and Prejudice

Answer 2

I have more than one. The idea of 'favorite' has never come easy for me :)



From Murphy by Samuel Beckett

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



From David Copperfield by Dickens

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.



From Slaughterhouse 5 by Vonnegut

All this happened, more or less.



From Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

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.



From The Gunslinger by Stephen King

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



From I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

Answer 3

My favorite first and last line:



First: Listen; Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.



Last: Po-tweet



From "Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. I do like that opening from "A Tale of Two Cities," though. The whole first page of the edition that I read was the opening sentence.

Answer 4

From "Their Eyes Were Watching God" by Zora Neale Hurston:



"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men."

Answer 5

I, Lucifer by Glen Duncan



I, Lucifer, Fallen Angel, Prince of Darkness, Bringer of Light, Ruler of Hell, Lord of the Flies, Father of Lies, Apostate Supreme, Tempter of Mankind, Old Serpent, Prince of This World, Seducer, Accuser, Tormentor, Blasphemer, and without a doubt Best Fk in the Seen and Unseen Universe (ask Eve, that minx) have decided - oo-la-la! - to tell all.

Answer 6

By the river Piedra I sat down and wept. There is a legend that everything that falls into the waters of this river -leaves, insects, the feathers of birds- is transformed into the rocks that make the riverbed. If only I could tear out my heart and hurl it into the current, then my pain and longing would be over, and I could finally forget.



By the river Piedra I sat down and wept by Paulo Coelho.

Answer 7

i do no longer think of you are able to overcome A tale of two cities, which to me is as reliable a mix of beginning and shutting statements as exists in literature, by technique of my very own widespread is from The Fountainhead. After a philosophical and psychological war has been waged and victims strewn around the battlefields of Ayn Rand's conflict between collectivism and individualism, one heroic silhouette keeps to be in Dominque Francon's resourceful and prescient as she rides in direction of the top of concrete and symbolic shape: "Then there replaced into purely the sea and the sky and the discern of Howard Roark." Like long gone With the Wind, it extremely is short and candy, yet wraps up the story and the characters dramatically and poetically. even with the incontrovertible fact that, as consistently, there is Kurt Vonnegut. With maximum of memorable strains, perhaps Cat's Cradle's ultimate strains are his maximum suitable: "If I have been a youthful guy, i could write a historic past of human stupidity; and that i could climb to the precise of Mount McCabe and lie down on my returned with my historic past for a pillow; and that i could take from the floor the a number of blue-white poison that makes statues of adult males; and that i could make a statue of myself, mendacity on my returned, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nostril at you recognize Who."

Answer 8

"'what's it going to be then eh'"

there was me that is Alex and my three droogs Pete Georgie and Dim, Dim being very dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks of what to do with the evening."



The nonchalant question into the haunting narration of the protagonist from A Clockwork Orange sets up everything you need to know about the character as well as makes his "ultra violent" activities all the more disturbing as the novel starts in a situation one can relate to (what are we going to do) and jumps steadily and calmly into beating people on the streets

Answer 9

From Wicked



A mile above OZ, the Witch balanced on the wind's forward edge, as if she were a green fleck of the land itself, flung up and sent wheeling away by the turbulent air.

Answer 10

Call me Ishmael <3

Answer 11

I love the quote you put up. It's one of my favorites.



From Tolstoy's Anna Karenina: "All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."



&



"It was a dark and stormy night."

Answer 12

"It was love at first sight" from Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Answer 13

Call me Ishmael.

Answer 14

When I was six, I was a horse.....From She Flies Without Wings.

Answer 15

same