First lines that you like

The primroses were over.

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

"In five years, the penis will be obsolete," said the salesman.

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the phrase, "as pretty as an airport."

132 is the rudest number.

"The house was on fire and it wasn't my fault"

Or something very close to that. I don't have a copy on me to get a direct quote.

"To the worm who first gnawed on the cold flesh of my corpse, I dedicate with fond remembrance these Posthumous Memoirs."

"A screaming comes across the sky."

"There was once a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."

"It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton."

"I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more."

no one will notice that I changed this

"It's a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful." -Matilda, Roald Dahl

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." -1984, George Orwell (I've never even read the book, but I really love that line.)

edited 3rd Jun '11 12:27:52 AM by BlueViolet

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors are finished with us. -Thomas Carlyle

...I kinda want to know where that penis line is from.

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

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"My name is Jake. And I was one sorry cockroach."

"In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit."

@Knightof Lsama

"The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault." -Harry Dresden,Blood Rites

I love that line. If you show it to someone unfamiliar with the series, their first reaction is generally something along the lines of "Why did he need to specify that it wasn't his fault?"

edited 3rd Jun '11 9:48:40 AM by Mokari

Zoofights VI, Loser's League Fight Four: NEW CROAK vs. CRYSTAL PEP-SIMIAN

The penis line is from Steel Beach by John Varley. As I recall, the rest of the book doesn't live up to it.

"If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die."

edited 3rd Jun '11 11:39:01 AM by Micah

132 is the rudest number.

"Somewhere a ponderous tower clock slowly dropped a dozen strokes into the gloom." -Thurber, The Wonderful O

"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." -Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."

I didn't think I was dumb enough to enjoy this, but I was.

"Nervous, true, dreadfully nervous I have been and am, but why will you say that I am mad?"

I've heard that Spider Robinson has done a bunch of good first lines, too, but I haven't read much of his work. I do remember that the back of Steel Beach has a quote from him saying not even he'd attempt a first line like that.

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a latter volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately bean trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming the environment with rough copies of themselves, or through more direct means which hardly need to be belabored.

edited 3rd Jun '11 5:56:45 PM by Taelor

The Philosopher-King Paradox

"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. "

"The artist is the creator of beautiful things." (from the Preface)

"Yes, but who will cure us of the dull fire, the colourless fire that at nightfall runs along the Rue de la Huchette, emerging from the crumbling doorways, from the little entranceways, of the imageless fire that licks the stones and lies in wait in doorways, how shall we cleanse ourselves of the sweet burning that comes after, that nests in us forever allied with time and memory, with sticky things that hold us here on this side, and which will burn sweetly in us until we have been left in ashes." (from chapter 73, which is the first chapter)

"I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot,” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Stammerer,” or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled."

A last line: "You are young," replied Athos, "and your bitter memories have time to turn into sweet ones."

Seconding the first line of 1984. I like the first lines of The Tell-tale Heart, The Hobbit and Twelfth Night, too.

"Doctor Who means never having to say you're kidding." - Bocaj

'The building was on fire and it wasn't my fault'. Seriously.

edited 3rd Jun '11 8:14:05 PM by NLK

Likes many underrated webcomics

At eight o' clock on Thursday morning Arthur didn't feel very good. He woke up blearily, got up, wandered blearily around his room, opened a window, saw a bulldozer, found his slippers, and stomped off into the bathroom to wash.

-The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy.

"Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife."

This one always sticks with me for some reason.

'There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.'

edited 4th Jun '11 12:55:17 AM by Sparkysharps

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderlay again." — Rebecca.

"There was no chance of taking a walk that day." — Jane Eyre.

My very favorite, although I'm cheating, because it's really the second line that I like: "Once upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn't go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his niece, the Princess Saralinda. She was warm in every wind and weather, but he was always cold." — The Thirteen Clocks.

edited 5th Jun '11 4:07:55 PM by TTurtle

"The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years - if it ever did end - began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain"

- IT by Stephen King.

Notes From The Underground by Dostoevsky

the pronoun system in Cherokee is just better. Need Scion GM.

Alussa oli suo, kuokka ja Jussi. ("In the beginning there were the swamp, the hoe and Jussi.")

The opening words of a Finnish novel called Täällä pohjantähden alla ("Under The North Star") by Väinö Linna, which is about a loan farmer who turns a mire into a field and struggles to survive and raise a family in the late-19th, early-20th century Finland. The opening sentence is iconic to Finnish literature.

—

On a more global scale, I simply adore the opening paragraph that begins every Wheel Of Time book:

"The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning."

edited 12th Jun '11 10:21:55 AM by Kerrah

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

edited 12th Jun '11 10:26:17 AM by annebeeche

Banned entirely for telling FE that he was being rude and not contributing to the discussion. I shall watch down from the goon heavens.

I don't know know about any other language, but in Finnish that is called a "snowstorm".