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I'll try better.
"Mab, The Queen Of Air And Darkness, has unique ideas on physical theraphy". Cold Days by Jim Butcher
edited 4th Sep '16 4:43:06 AM by RBomber
I skip the ones that have already been mentioned in this thread ... and there is also much, much more, but these books I have in my bookshelf:
They chased the dogs and bit the cats, they —
But there was more to it than that. As the amazing Maurice said, it was just a story about people and rats. And the difficult part of it was deciding who the people were, and who were the rats.
(Pratchett. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents)
.
This is brilliant:
(Hannu Rajaniemi. The Quantum Thief)
"Warmind? This is the kind of science fiction I want to read!"
.
(Jules Verne. 20,000 Leagues under the Seas. Or rather, the equivalent line in the translation to my native tongue.)
.
The next one isn't just a couple of lines , but rather a couple of paragraphs from the first page (which I guess isn't exactly the point of this thread), but I like them all so much that I can't decide where to stop quoting:
Some of the passengers by this particular train were returning from abroad; but the third-class carriages were the best filled, chiefly with insignificant persons of various occupations and degrees, picked up at the different stations nearer town. All of them seemed weary, and most of them had sleepy eyes and a shivering expression, while their complexions generally appeared to have taken on the colour of the fog outside.
When day dawned, two passengers in one of the third-class carriages found themselves opposite each other. Both were young fellows, both were rather poorly dressed, both had remarkable faces, and both were evidently anxious to start a conversation. If they had but known why, at this particular moment, they were both remarkable persons, they would undoubtedly have wondered at the strange chance which had set them down opposite to one another in a third-class carriage of the Warsaw Railway Company.
(Dostoyevsky. The Idiot. Again, the quote is from Project Gutenberg, instead of the translation to Finnish by J. Konkka I'm more familiar with.)
.
Yet again, I have not an English translation at hand:
(Antoine De Saint-Exupéry. Terre des hommes. )
.
I also rather like the beginning of the prologue (actually, whole of the prologue) and the the beginning of the first chapter of Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury (can't actually decide from which one I'd quote from, the prologue, or the first chapter), but I can't seem to be find those bits of the English text anywhere on the internets, and I dare not to translate back to English from my Finnish copy, so I'll just mention them here.
edited 16th Sep '16 12:30:49 PM by maus42
In English, the prologue begins "First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys." I like how the first chapter begins, which is with "The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm."
Mysterious Stranger
"It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea"
"Annabel Lee", Edgar Allan Poe
Okay, first and second line in this case, but they work so well together.
edited 22nd Jan '17 11:45:05 AM by DreamCord
Hey.
"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new"
Samuel Beckett, "Murphy".
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." - Neuromancer, by William Gibson.
One of my favorite high school teachers once said "you can tell a lot about a book by it's first line" and with Neuromancer's first line, it almost perfectly sets the tone of the book.
The Return to Oz novelization had a really good opening line but for the life of me I can't find it. (Movie novelizations in general are kinda underrated XD;)
edited 23rd Feb '18 12:08:54 PM by lalalei2001
The Protomen enhanced my life.
Philip K. Dick, The Game Players of Titan:
"It had been a bad night, and when he tried to drive home he had a terrible argument with his car."
"It was all going so nicely up until the massacre."
Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I "haunt".
Nadja by Andre Breton
"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic Orders? And even if one were to suddenly take me to its heart, I would vanish into its stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear, and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains to destroy us. Every Angel is terror"
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies
"Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars - Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the old world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet." -The Nemedian Chronicles
Robert E. Howard - The Phoenix on the Sword - opening epigraph in the first Conan story. Epigraphs count as first lines, right? Especially when they're fictional epigraphs that only appear in the one work?
If not, then the opening line is "Over shadowy spires and gleaming towers lay the ghostly darkness and silence that runs before dawn." Or in other words, "it was a dark but quiet night."
The Ice Queen
"Maybe I shouldn't have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number, but who cares?"- Carrie Fisher, Postcards from the Edge
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” — George Orwell, 1984 It sets the whole "something is seriously wrong here" stage from the first line.
I realized just now that "thirteen" as a time indication sounds odd for an english-speaking reader (since in Italy we use the 24 hour standard, at least officially, so 'thirteen' is just 1 P.M. for us).
In 1948 in England it was definitely wrong.
Dogs, gigs, food and books.
Rek was drunk. Not drunk enough to matter, but drunk enough not to matter.
David Gemmell - Legend.
"It looks like a one-winged bird crouching in the corner of our living room. Hurt. Trying to fly every time the heat pump turns on with a click and a groan and blows cold air into the sheet and lifts it up and it flutters for just a moment and then falls down again. Still. Dead." — Kathryn Erskine, Mockingbird.
"Pine cones. Cinnamon. Roasted chestnuts and crackling firewood. The scents mingled in the air, rising high and swirling with wisps of chimney smoke and snow flurries." — Meredith Rusu, The Nutcracker And The Four Realms (Novelization)
"Sophie had waited all her life to be kidnapped." — Soman Chainani, The School for Good and Evil
That's about all I can come up with for now.
Edited by TwilightPegasus on Oct 24th 2019 at 1:28:54 PM
Here I was going to post the opening line of The School for Good and Evil, and two people already beat me to it.
I'll thrown in the line for the second book in the series (spoilers for book 1):
And from Beasts of Burden:
This is understandable, given the fact that dogs aren't exactly known for their keen sense of time.
That's all that comes to mind right now.
The building was on fire and it wasn't my fault. Blood Rites
edited 4th Sep '16 5:30:21 PM by Journeyman