“Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.”
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
It's pretty embarrassing in retrospect, but I got "Lo. Lee. Ta." tattooed on me at 18 because I love the opening page of this book so much. It's perfect.
>There was once a man who lived for a very long time; perhaps three thousand years, or perhaps a thousand million years, maybe a trillion or so, depending on how the scientists look at it.
>I have just been informed, that the debate over the question ‘is it right or wrong to have immortal souls’ has been finally brought to a conclusion.
>I was playing with my dog, Mark the brown Labrador, and I had forgotten that I was also playing with a dead man.
>I am forced to write to my neighbors about the beast.
I loved the first three books when I read them back in the early nineties but The Gunslinger is my favourite of the series. It had a certain poetic beauty and mysterious quality to it that was unlike any other Stephen King book that I had read before – or since.
LIFE IN this society being, at best, an utter bore
and no aspect of society being at all relevant to
women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible,
thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the
government, eliminate the money system, institute
complete automation and destroy the male sex.
Valerie Solanas' The SCUM Manifesto has a great opening, and tbf sustains the pace and spice for a few pages, but subsequently becomes almost unreadable.
How many examples of a great opening line with a dismal rest-of-the-story do you have? To me, the great opening line is a microcosm of the great story: the tension between setup and punchline, between conflict and resolution, between mystery and revelation, and so on. The alchemy of storytelling is for an author to maintain that seemingly gravitational pull of the audience being inexorably hungry for the next answer without ever making it feel cheap. By extension, the ideal master of the craft can crystalize that dynamic at precisely the points that matter, and thereby make a space to play with such luxuries as theme and characterization and metaphor and parable in the rest.
While I'm sure that one could find plenty of counter-examples if they tried, I did indeed flip through my (quite few) two-starred books on GoodReads, read their opening sentences, and found that each one was a clunker. So I think you make a good point.
Actually, I wonder if I could accurately guess my own ratings by how much I liked the first line.
I'm not sure that's true. Certainly there are a number of "classics," including some like A Tale of Two Cities that are probably not the author's best work, which most people would probably find boring with memorable openings.
Unforgettable, brilliant. (Find the original large-format hardback, not the paperback re-issue that can't possibly recapture the exuberant pictures spread across the pages.)
(I guess you may have been thinking of a different book...?)
The opening line and following run-on sentence has acquired a bit of a cult following and inspired a contest for best worst fictional opening: https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/
It's possible the author you linked was inspired by this as well.
> It's possible the author you linked was inspired by this as well.
More than possible; I'm pretty sure it's deliberate. They like to take well-known, even clichéd, elements and re-imagine them in new and creative ways.
We read fear and loathing to each other in a tent hunkered down in a 48hr long storm in Iceland. I don't think I've laughed as hard since. What a blinder of a novel.
I am reminded of the first sentence of The Postman Always Rings Twice, something like "They threw me off the hay truck about noon." I suppose this is because it was somewhere out in southeastern California also.
“Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.”
(Especially as an Englishman who is terrible at French)
“Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo.”
―Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
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.
That one’s in the article. What’s interesting is that it suggests different colors depending on whether you grew up with CRT or flatscreen televisions.
A disconnected video input is usually presented with a solid blue picture. I (along with this person: http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/Blue.html) would love to know who came up with the idea!
I've found a lot of good opening lines in short free-form essays. Here are some examples:
"This single stick, which you now behold ingloriously lying in that neglected corner, I once knew in a flourishing state in a forest." - A Meditation Upon a Broom-Stick, Jonathan Swift, 1701.
"'What is Truth?' said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer." - Of Truth, Francis Bacon, 1625
"The devil is a citizen of every country, but only in our own are we in constant peril of an introduction to him." - Disintroductions, Ambrose Bierce, 1902
"Human being are curious creatures, and in nothing more curious than in the forms of diversion which they devise for themselves." - Evening Parties, Rose Macaulay, 1926
"The effort which people put up to avoid thinking might almost enable them to think and to have some new ideas." - Symmetry and Repetition, Lewis Namier, 1941
"The other day a cousin of mine was married; thought what God or myself had to do with it I do not know, but I was obliged to go to church." - The Sterner Sex, Rebecca West, 1913
"Sometimes it is so hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle.", Bad Poets, Randall Jarrell, 1953
I'm glad this essay mentioned the opening line of 1984. It's one of my favorites: "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."
I looked up some of the author's writings. She had an interesting opening line in one of her short stories, entitled "Endangered":[1]
"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany." — John Irving in A Prayer for Owen Meany
An excellent book throughout, but an especially gripping opening line.
Yeh, The Crow Road. I met him once working a book signing. He was brilliant, incredibly down to earth, very very funny and an all round good bloke. His books have kept me enthralled, especially Dead Air and Complicity. Helluva read.
"In the beginning, the world was created. This made a lot of people angry, and has been widely regarded as a bad move." (OK, that's two sentences. So sue me.)
"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."
He continues the grand tradition of science fiction writers producing works of conceptual genius marred only by insipid characters lacking any development and absent plots.
The first half of this book was absolutely amazing... Could have been one of the best sci-fi books ever, but the second half was mediocre and unconvincing... Such a disappointment. Still worth it though overall.
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.
My favorite opening line in a book is from Peace by Gene Wolfe:
> The elm tree planted by Eleanor Bold, the judge’s daughter, fell last night.
It's very plain. The kind of sentence your eye just passes over while looking for something more obviously relevant. But the book itself is a mystery hidden in plain sight, and this mystery is both declared and resolved in the very first line of the book. That level of subtle, elegant engineering is what's so impressive about Wolfe, and what makes this book in particular so rewarding.
A line that becomes great(er) after you've read the book is not what most people would think of as a great opening line. Personally I think a plain line can work as well as a more baroque one, and that's in general what Wolfe does so well. Fifth Head of Cerberus left a big impression on me for that reason.
"The year is 50 BC. Gaul is entirely occupied by the Romans. Well, not entirely... One small village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the invaders."
Since 1982 the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest has challenged participants to write an atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written. The whimsical literary competition honors Sir Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel Paul Clifford begins with “It was a dark and stormy night.”
Second sentence: "Suddenly a shot rang out." Which explains my (never actually submitted) entry:
"He was a dork, and Stormy Knight suddenly shot the ring right out of his fingers, because she was tired of dorks, and especially the kind of dork who would presume that she would marry him, even though he was a dork and she was the kind of girl who could shoot a ring right out of a man's hand, hitting nothing but the ring and a few miscellaneous bits of fingertip."
Wow, that is attrocious. I kept getting bored part way through and had to force myself to go back and try again. Now I've reached semantic saturation on the word dork.
Stephen King is very underrated in my opinion. Of course, everyone knows he is the wildly successful author of many bestsellers, but he is also considered low-brow and many won't acknowledge he can really write.
I own a collection of iconic short stories, the Pocket Book of Short Stories (apparently first published in 1941) which has an interesting preface reviewing the strengths and difficulties of the short story form.
It argues the short story has no time to waste, unlike the novel. It must grip us from the very first sentence, otherwise all is lost.
As an example, the preface recounts the story of a writing class professor who, fed up with every student writing dreadful and depressing stories about class warfare and the struggles of the proletariat, told his students in exasperation "don't just write about the proletariat and the dreadful existence of the oppressed. Add more variety! Please also consider spicier topics, and include an aristocrat now and then!"
(I'm quoting from memory and possibly making a mistake, but the next line stuck with me).
So the next day, the first student read a story which started like this:
"'What insolence!', cried the Duchess. 'Take your hand off my knee!'"
I decided to read Lonesome Dove from the epigraph alone:
“All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.”
"There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made."
IT WAS NIGHT AGAIN. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.
The most obvious part was a hollow, echoing quiet, made by things that were lacking. If there had been a wind it would have sighed through the trees, set the inn’s sign creaking on its hooks, and brushed the silence down the road like trailing autumn leaves. If there had been a crowd, even a handful of men inside the inn, they would have filled the silence with conversation and laughter, the clatter and clamor one expects from a drinking house during the dark hours of night. If there had been music . . . but no, of course there was no music. In fact there were none of these things, and so the silence remained.
...
(93 chapters later)
IT WAS NIGHT AGAIN. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.
...
--- ---
That isn't a "first and last line are the same" but rather "the prologue and the epilogue are the same".
For my favorite self reference, however, is part of the Jhereg / Taltos series by Burst. He does it a couple times, though the one that sticks in my mind the most is a prologue that is a cleaning / clothing repair list. "Tear on left sleeve" type thing. Then each chapter, that issue happens to the clothes.
I like those kind of echoes. Edvard Grieg has two piano pieces, one from the very beginning of his publication history, one from near the end, and both have the same musical theme. The first piece is a simple one-pager, and the third is a waltz that modulates through several keys, almost as if traveling through memories.
All of Catch-22 is full of brilliant lines like this, and littered with absurdist comedy gems. Curious how it turns into such a horribly depressing story by the end.
I read that again recently and laughed that it would only resonate with readers that had analogue televisions when younger.
The quote is William Gibson, Neuromancer.
Neil Gaiman did a tribute to it in Neverwhere: "The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel." because for a while, blue was the colour of an untuned channel.
Plenty of kids now probably don’t even grok what a channel number or TV is.
Doubly interesting because no-one, not even Gibson himself, can tell what visual imagery he was thinking of with that description. I always thought it was "gray snow/static", but TVs didn't always show that (they certainly don't today, as you pointed out). Depending on the era, dead channels alternated between black, static snow, blue, etc; when Gibson was talking dead channels it wasn't static snow.
In 1984, when Neuromancer was published, TV was analog and inbetween channels you got static snow. Gibson had to mean that. A grey/white overcast sky.
Everything else is over-thinking.
I love Neuromancer but the irony is how badly cyberpunk or indeed any sci-fi has predicted the future, the absence of smartphones being the most obvious example.
If you read the scifi.se Q&A I linked to, which mentions several contradictory answers given by Gibson over the years, you'll see it's not so simple and definitely not overthinking it!
Analog TVs didn't always give static snow, by the way.
One of Gibson's latest answers is a retweet of Monica Lewinsky's (yes, that Monica) photo of a cloudy gray day and stating "that's exactly what I was thinking of". It looks nothing at all like an analog's TV static snow!
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”
"I WISH either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me"
Tristram Shandy
"Only the young have such moments. I don’t mean the very young. No. The very young have, properly speaking, no moments. It is the privilege of early youth to live in advance of its days in all the beautiful continuity of hope which knows no pauses and no introspection."
the shadow-line
Maybe not the greatest, but the whole paragraph’s pretty good:
> Theo, by occupation, was a devil. That is, he worked as apprentice and general
servant to Anton, the printer. Before that, he was lucky enough to be an orphan, for
the town fathers of Dorning prided themselves in looking after their needy. So, instead
of sending him away to a King's Charity House, where he would be made miserable,
they arranged the same for him locally. He was farmed out first to a cooper, then to a
saddler, and in both cases did badly. Accidentally, he had learned to read, which in
some opinion spoiled him for anything sensible. Anton finally agreed to take in the
boy and teach him his trade.
And the rest of the page is great, and the rest of the chapter, and the whole book is a really great opening to a decent trilogy IMO (Westmark, by Lloyd Alexander).
> When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s ‘The Thieving Magpie,’ which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.
Look I haven't seriously studied literature or anything, so maybe I'm being a philistine. But what in the world is the appeal of this? Doesn't balance clarity and curiosity - a lot of mundane details, not reason for me to care about their phone call. I guess it's weird in a meta sense, in how it bucks the trend for good openers?
I don't doubt some people genuinely like that line, but that just says to me that this question is so subjective and so unimportant in the grand scheme of things (do people seriously stop reading after a single sentence?) that it sounds bizarre to go as far as teaching a class on the topic.
Metal Gear Solid 4 (2008 ps3 game) has this opening cutscene:
“War has changed.
It's no longer about nations, ideologies, or ethnicity. It's an endless series of proxy battles, fought by mercenaries and machines.
War--and it's consumption of life--has become a well-oiled machine.
War has changed.
ID-tagged soldiers carry ID-tagged weapons, use ID-tagged gear. Nanomachines inside their bodies enhance and regulate their abilities.
Genetic control, information control, emotion control, battlefield control…everything is monitored and kept under control.
War…has changed.
The age of deterrence has become the age of control, all in the name of averting catastrophe from weapons of mass destruction, and he who controls the battlefield, controls history.
War…has changed.
When the battlefield is under total control, war becomes routine.”
This is a great opening because while Solid Snake speaks, you are presented with a 5 minute showcase of everything unchanged about the war.
Call me Ishmael. Yeah I know, but in this case it’s really my name: Ishmael Horatio Wang. My parents had an unfortunate sense of humor. If they had known what I’d wind up doing with my life, they might have picked a different one—Richard Henry Dana, perhaps. Exactly why they picked Ishmael Horatio is a long, and not terribly interesting, story that started with the fact that Mom was an ancient lit professor and ended with my being saddled with these non sequitur monikers.
That particular story was over eighteen stanyers before the two Neris Company security guards showed up at my door with long faces and low voices. Perhaps it was their expressions, or that they were looking for me and not Mom, but either way I knew their visit wasn’t good. I didn’t think they had come to drag me off to juvie or anything. I’d never been a troublemaker like some of the others in the university enclave. They had come for me though—to tell me she was dead.
A compelling but strangely simple opening indeed (and in the article). Heard some analysis on this that speculated that this is a heavy implication that Ishmael is not his real name, which makes the fact he wants to use a pseudonym a hook to read on.
(I also saw an amusing tweet once, something like:
Moby Dick has one of the most iconic openings in literature: "I hope you motherfuckers like reading about whales")
The first line didn't hook me, because picking up a book is generally a bigger effort than opening a page and looking at the first line.
This idea of "what makes a great opening line" is simply, to be simple to understand for me. You need to lead in to the next line and the next. The wandering text that was the first line of "We Love You Crispina" caused me to skip it. Once I reconsidered that it might have something important in it, I had to force myself to go back and re-read it. Multiple times. I am not going to remember that book.
"On our wedding day I was forty-six, she was eighteen. Now, I know what you are thinking: older man (not thin, somewhat bald, lame in one leg, teeth of wood) exercises the marital prerogative, thereby mortifying the poor young—
But that is false."
"Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo."
The book is a Kunstlerroman. It tracks his development from infancy to adulthood. I admit the first part of the book isn't nearly as interesting as the later parts. It's still my favorite novel ever, and I'm convinced Joyce might be the greatest English writer.
I agree that that's what the book does. But it never made me care about the individual it was tracking, and that ruined everything else. If I don't care about the main character or the person he's talking to, why do I care about the conversation? Even more, why do I care about the exhaustive details of the route they walked while they were having the conversation?
The main character gives his (and Joyce's?) theory of art: art should not create any response in the viewer. If it does, it mars the purity of the art. Joyce may be a great author; he certainly succeeded in writing a book that created no response whatsoever in me (other than annoyance at the time I wasted plowing through the tedium of something that I didn't care about whatsoever). That may be great art, but I don't have to like it.
"Desde la puerta de La Crónica Santiago mira la avenida Tacna, sin amor: automóviles, edificios desiguales y descoloridos, esqueletos de avisos luminosos flotando en la neblina, el mediodía gris. ¿En qué momento se habia jodido el Perú?"
"From the doorway of La Crónica Santiago looks at the Avenida Tacna without love: cars, uneven and faded buildings, the gaudy skeletons of posters floating in the mist, the gray midday. At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?"
La conversación en la catedral, Mario Vargas Llosa
That's the version I have; the Matthew Ward translation. Some other versions start with "Mother died today" or "Mama died today", but I prefer this version.
This book also inspired the song "Killing an Arab" by The Cure.
Both of the first two sentences need to be there, I felt. (Camus uses very short sentences in the first parts of the book.) In the last part, the apparent lack of emotion in the face of his mother's death is used in evidence for Meursault's uncaring nature at the trial.
Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you.
“The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live, will remember it.”
The actual opening line of Lord of the Rings is so disappointing and unremarkable though:
"When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton."
I don't think it was entirely intentional. I think it's the random mix of two narratives: the more childish The Hobbit, which grew out of stories for Tolkien's child, and the more serious and for grownups The Silmarillion. Tolkien wanted to write about the latter but publishers felt the readers wanted "more hobbits".
"Jesus El Pifco was a foreigner and he knew it. He had imigrate-
ful from his little white slum in Barcelover a good thirsty year
ago having first secured the handy job as coachman in Scotland."
In a short story, isn’t the last sentence just as important? For example, it is the last sentences of The Last Question by Asimov and The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke that make the stories. I’ll always remember the last sentences, I have no idea what the first sentences are (despite rereading both recently).
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. His story will be told here.
"“Several and a half metric miles North East of Sligo, split by a cascading stream, her body on earth, her feet in water, dwells the microcephalic community of Puckoon”
Reminded me of: I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.
'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly.'
On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.
Hah! I'm an Ellis fan, or at least a fan of his Comic Books (or are they Graphical Novels, I never learn), but I didn't really get along with Crooked Little Vein. I honestly don't remember a single piece of the plot (it's 15-ish years since I read it), but I do remember that I got the feeling that his main objective was to gross me out. A bit like Garth Ennis, but it novel format. I get a bit annoyed when (it's a bit too obvious that) the author's main objective is to play his audience rather than to tell a story.
And for a long time you'll be reading the rest of the book!
I started reading it in jail, after reading 1Q84 which had a line stating that the only place you'll ever get enough time to read that book is in prison.
