What are your favourite first sentences from books? Is there a book that you liked specially because of its first sentence? Or a book, perhaps that you didn’t like but still remember simply because of the first line?
I’m afraid I am a little boring when it comes to this question. “Call me Ishmael,” and “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” could probably compete for best-known first line, and I love both books and both beginnings. The Good Soldier also has a great memorable first line, “This is the saddest story I have ever heard,” and that is one of my favorite books ever. I never particularly cared for Tropic of Cancer but I do love its first line: “I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.”
Of course, it is Nabokov whose first lines I can practically recite.
- I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure in the windowpane;/I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I/Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. (Pale Fire)
- Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. (Lolita)
- “All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,” says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievich Karenina, transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880). That pronouncement has little if any relation to the story to be unfolded now, a family chronicle, the first part of which is, perhaps, closer to another Tolstoy work, Detstvo i Otrochestvo (Childhood and Fatherland, Pontius Press, 1858). (Ada, or Ardor)
How appropriate that the last one, and my favorite, should itself be all about the beginnings of books.
You’ve remembered some top notch ones!
The Anna Karenina is a good one.
I like the lines from Lolita.
I have to say, the worst thing about this post was that quoting all these just made me want to keep reading so badly!
And, to clarify, the last quote refers to Anna Karenina but is actually the converse of that books first line, which is, in my edition, “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Ada takes place in a bit of an alternate universe.
[...] to the first question, but there are many I like and know by heart. Most of the ones I mentioned in this post, for example, especially the openings of Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada. A middle-of-the-book quote [...]