First lines that you like

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul."

has to be the best opening line ever

'It was midnight in Ankh-Morpork's Royal Art Museum.*

You have to hand it to anyone who begins a book with a most-of-a-page-long footnote.

edited 16th Jul '11 12:31:06 PM by cityofmist

"No one was really surprised when it happened, not really, not at the subconscious level where savage things grow."
— Stephen King, Carrie

edited 30th Dec '11 5:53:55 PM by TwoGunAngel

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

'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.'

"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."

Lolita IS the best line ever, to me. The Metamorphosis is also great.

My mom read me the first line of a thriller where the heroine is being held at gunpoint and finds herself wondering in a trauma-detached kind of way if the black gun flatters her figure. Damn, I should ask You Know That Show about that one.

Got to be Aeneid for me.

"arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris"

Which Dryden put as:

"Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc'd by fate,
And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate,
Expell'd and exil'd, left the Trojan shore."

Also quite partial to the typically jaunty opening lines of Pope's 'Epistle to Cobham':

"Yes, you despise the Man to books confin'd,
Who from his Study rails at human kind;
Tho' what he learns he speaks, and may advance
Some gen'ral maxims, or be right by chance.
The coxcomb bird, so talkative and grave,
That from his cage cries cuckold, whore, and knave,
Tho' many a passenger he rightly call,
You hold him no Philosopher at all."

edited 4th Jan '12 1:07:47 PM by Bajazeth

"He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead."

"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."

[Rough translation: "In a village in La Mancha, whose name I don't care to remember, not so long ago there lived a gentleman—the kind that tends to own a wall-mounted lance, antiquated shield, skinny nag horse, and a racing greyhound."]

I'll spare you the original text here, and offer you an even rougher translation:

"Rage be thy song, goddess, the reckless rage of Peleus' son Achilles..."

Two lines, but this one from Monster Hunter International sticks out the most in my mind:

Edited by Nohbody on Oct 4th 2018 at 4:10:19 AM

If we're talking about classics, then:

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer, harried for years on end, after he plundered the stronghold on the proud height of Troy. He saw the townlands and learned the minds of many distant men, and weathered many bitter nights and days in his deep heart at sea, while he fought only to save his life, to bring his shipmates home.

Fitzgerald is best translation.

edited 3rd Jan '12 8:59:14 PM by NoirGrimoir

Amen to Fitzgerald—accept no substitutes!

Slight exception: Pope's Iliad is a classic unto itself, but it's so unfaithful to Homer that you could scarcely call it a translation ... it's more like an "imitation," in the Neoclassical sense of that word.

'Empires wax and wane, states cleave asunder and coalesce'.

edited 4th Jan '12 6:21:20 PM by Thenamelesssamurai

Admittedly I'm basing this opinion solely on that line, but those books must have the purplest prose ever.

I don't know anything about Chinese literature, so my opinion's not exactly well-informed. Although I guess the translation is also a factor.

edited 5th Jan '12 6:59:33 AM by cityofmist

Well, it's an ancient Chinese epic, so...

'This is not for you.'

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

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

'It was love at first sight.'

edited 6th Jan '12 12:16:55 PM by HerrKman

"***HERE IS A SMALL FACT *** You are going to die." - The Book Thief

"In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages." - Perfume

"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

edited 6th Jan '12 9:42:24 AM by whataboutme

The sun sets in the west. Almost everybody knows that. But Sunset Towers faced east. Strange.

From The Westing Game, my personal favorite book of all time.

For pure quotability: 'The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.'

For pure "what was that" strangeness: 'When my sister was released from the mental hospital, she came to live with me in the tilting and crumbling one-bedroom house I'd bought with the small amount of money I inherited when our parents died.'

Under the cliffs, near the rotted logs, at the edge between sand and water, something impossible happens.

"Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt." - John Dies At The End

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