AskReddit: What book has the best opening line ?
“There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.” Louis Sachar, Holes
“The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
“Ludwig Boltzman, 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. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously.” D.L. Goodstein, States of Matter.
“I’m pretty much fucked.” Andy Weir, The Martian.
“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” C. S. Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.
“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.” J.R.R Tolkien, The Hobbit.
“The man in Black fled across the desert.” Stephan King, The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger.
“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.” Albert Camus, The Stranger
“Marley was dead, to begin with.” Charles Dickens.
“This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don’t think it’s a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night.
“My mother was the village whore, and I loved her very much.” Mary Brown, Pigs Don’t Fly.
“The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault.” Jim Butcher, Blood Rites.
“First the colors. Then the humans. That’s how I usually see things. Or at least, how I try. *** HERE IS A SMALL FACT *** You are going to die.” Markus Zusak, The Book Thief.
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” William Gibson, Neuromancer.
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” King James Bible.
“The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don’t got nothing much to say.” Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go.
“My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.” Alice Sebol, The Lovely Bones.
“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
“If you are interested with about stories with happy endings, you would probably be better off with another book.” Daniel Handler, A Series Of Unfortunate Events.
“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 García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
“It was a pleasure to burn.” Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
“It is not easy to cut through a human head with a hacksaw.” Michael Crichton, Travels.
“I’m a liar and and cheat and a coward but I will never, ever let a friend down. Unless of course not letting them down requires honesty, fair play, or bravery.” Mark Lawrence, Prince of Fools.
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulu.
“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.” Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita.
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