First lines that you like

"The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don’t got nothing much to say."

It's from The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness.

"Lady Firebird Angelo was trespassing." ~Firebird

"Almost as if the elements, too, mourned the death of the gentle old Harper, a southeaster blew for three days, locking even the burial barge in the safety of the Dock Cavern." ~Dragonsong

"Sithen the sege and the assaut watz sesed at Troye,
The borgh brittened and brent to brondegh and askez,
the tulk that the trammes of tresoun ther wroght
Watz tried for his tricherie, the trewest on erthe:
Hit watz Ennias the athel, and his highe kynde,
That sithen depreced prouinces, and patrounes bicome
Welneghe of al the wele in the west iles."
~Sir Gawain and the Green Knight*

And while this isn't from fiction, it has to be one of the best opening lines of an academic essay I've ever read:
"As William Maher has suggested, archives may be seen as a special example of chaos theory." ~Christopher Prom, "User Interactions with Electronic Finding Aids in a Controlled Setting"

edited 15th Jan '12 3:08:10 PM by Nocturna

"Gate Delta, Site 17, 1x10^14AD (Home Date: 5 January 2235)"

From Gary Gibson's Final Days. Neatly sets up the time travel aspects.

I also have to add:

• Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair. The doctor told him there were no bugs in his hair. - A Scanner Darkly
• Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die - Fight Club

Murphy by Samuel Beckett

Yeah, Murphy. Which is a pretty funny book all around.

"I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia." - Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

"When I turned eighteen, I already had a past behind me. But the world had one too, and it was decidedly more complex than mine." — Freefall, by Nicholai Lilin

One of my favourite military memoirs, hands down. I could probably think of more, but this is what is foremost in my head.

"Boris Stuchenko would be dead in less than nineteen minutes. And he had no idea why." The Ezekiel Option by Joel C. Rosenberg.

"Here we are, alone again. It's all so slow, so heavy, so sad... I'll be old soon. Then at last it will be over. So many people have come into my room. They’ve talked. They haven’t said much. They’ve gone away. They’ve grown old, wretched, sluggish, each in some corner of the world." (from Céline's 'Death on credit')

There is a certain introductory and descriptory equivalent of a character's Badass Boast that I would like to throw in here, but I don't have the full text, and it has to be my own translation:

If you're curious there was also a part about being born by a thunderstruck woman waiting for her viking lover.

I'll third Neuromancer, that opening line really wowed me.

The other one I really love is:

"Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure." ~ Albert Camus, The Stranger

Also: I'd throw in the first line from the first Witcher story, but I don't know into what it was translated to English.

"On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench."

(Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings)

This has already been mentioned but:

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

edited 8th Feb '12 9:58:39 AM by MurkyMuse

Did we have drama in this thread yet? From my favorite Shakespeare play:

"Now is the winter of our discontent
made glorious summer by this sun of York;"

It has an underlying metaphor that, in true Shakespearean fashion, is abandoned in mid-thought for a different one two lines later, a silly little pun and doesn't make much sense out of context. I love it.

@wuggles, from like a month ago: Holy crap, I have been looking everywhere for that book! I found it on the shelf randomly and opened it up and read the first line and thought "This looks awesome," but then I never remembered the title! Mystery solved! Thank you!

"North of Mexico, south of Canada, not too far west of the freshwater sea called Lake Michigan, in a place where cows polkadot the hills and men are serious about cheese, there is a lady on a pole."

Yes yes yes!

Opening lines are so incredibly important. The set the tone of the entire story. With a good story, you can tell what it's really about from the first and last lines. Some of my favorites are:

• "Wrath, goddess, sing of the wrath of Achilles son of Peleus, that horrible rage that inflicted countless pains upon the Achaeans. "
  • The Iliad (A classic one)

• "Will you read me a story?"
• "Read you a story? What fun would that be? I've got a better idea: let's tell a story together."
  • Photopia (Sorry, I've been thinking about this game a lot recently)

• "Finally, here you are. At the delcot of tondam, where doshes deave. The doshery lutt is crenned with glauds. But you are the gostak. The gostak distims the doshes. And no glaud will vorl them from you."
  • The Gostak (Yeah, sorry for all the Interactive Fiction examples)

• "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."
  • A Tale Of Two Cities (Kind of cliched, I know, but it gives a good example how you can sum up a work in the first lines)

edited 23rd Feb '12 2:47:40 AM by AlexisPius

"They said later that he rode into the village on a horse the color of buttermilk, but I saw him walk out of the wood." Winter Rose; Patricia Mc Killip.

"When Eddie Dickens was eleven years old, both his parents caught a horrible disease which made them turn yellow, go a bit crinkly around the edges and smell of old hot water bottles."

And it just gets better from there.

I remember that one! Sort of, at least; the bit about smelling like hot-water bottles is hard to forget.

"Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of a landowner from our district, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, well known in his own day (and still remembered among us) because of his dark and tragic death, which happened exactly thirteen years ago and which I shall speak of in its proper place."

"The bureaucrat fell from the sky." — Michael Swanwick, Stations of the Tide

"Fame is a terminal disease. It screws you up worse than your mom and dad." - Eric Idle, The Road to Mars

"There is a similarity, if I may be permitted an excursion into tenuous metaphor, between the feel of a chilly breeze and the feel of a knife's blade, as either is laid across the back of the neck." — Stephen Brust, Jhereg

"His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god. But then he never claimed not to be a god. Circumstances being what they were, neither admission could be of any benefit. Silence, though, could." — Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light

Re the Neuromancer quote that several people have mentioned already: that one may be suffering a bit from Technology Marches On. To those of us of a certain age, a television tuned to a dead channel makes us think of spotty grey. Younger readers, though, are more likely to imagine a vivid blue! And, of course, both are reasonable colors for a sky.

@Mort: What book is that from?

"Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood." The Lightning Thief.

edited 31st Mar '13 6:28:04 PM by BioSafety

A House Called Awful End by Philip Ardagh.

"The past is a foreign country - they do things differently there." The Go Between, L P Hartley