Great Opening Lines

[Umney]

'It is the immensity, I believe. The hugeness of things below. The darkness of dreams. But I am woolgathering. Forgive me. I am not a literary man.'

- From Gaiman's A Study in Emerald

[Piranesi]

"No human organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighthy years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."

-- Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

[helios1014]

"First black clouds dimming the sky, trailing shredded white veils in the rustle of settling audience, and, as each cloud passes framing itself perfectly in its own outlines, one especially stands out--looming like an iceberg above the others. It's moving steadily along now, coming fast and low over green canyons. It dips between the hills into a smell of water, and the placid anxious hush of rain falling on trees and grass."

--The Divinity Student by Michael Cisco

I have always loved the use of well constructed language for the sake of emotional effect and Cisco has that in spades.

[Viva June]

Ezechiel von Marx was the best somnambulist I have seen in my life.

—Gustav Meyrink: "The Secret of Hathaway Castle"

Death has a bad memory.

—Sophus Michaëlis: The Dance of Death

Edith loved him. More on this later.

—Robert Walser: The Robber

Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar.

—Flann O'Brien: The Third Policeman

Assuming an eye, an eye already open at the moment of birth (unlike certain animals (dogs, mice, cats, rats) which are blind and have membranes covering their eyes for several days, even weeks, after birth), this eye which immediately, with the aid of its rods and cones, sees something no one remembers later: the very first, raw visual impression (which still, allegedly, can be recalled through hypnosis but is then forgotten once more as soon as the hypnosis is lifted) of painful light, usually, in our time, in our society (as we say, as if we somehow own our time and our society), in a hospital, just in a different ward from where the dying are losing their sight (in specialist cases: the terminal ward), surrounded by technology which to an untrained eye appears almost identical.

—Tor Ulven: "Given"

The people of our time still indulge themselves, regardless of any emerging resignation, in the glorification of consciousness and knowledge.

—Alfred Seidel: Consciousness as Fatality

Edit: How I love finding a year-old post of mine and feeling a desperate need to correct my own grammar.

[Bleak&Icy]

Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim. It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds everywhere in the world, and originates in needs and necessities inseparable from life itself, as serving no purpose at all as the result of mere chance. Each separate misfortune , as it comes, seems, no doubt, to be something exceptional; but misfortune in general is the rule.

-- Arthur Schopenhauer, "On the Sufferings of the World" (trans. T. Bailey Saunders)

[Piranesi]

It was a day in March.

Never, never begin a story this way when you write one. No opening could possibly be worse. It is unimaginative, flat, dry and likely to consist of mere wind. But in this instance it is allowable. For the following paragraph, which should have inaugurated the narrative, is too wildly extravagant and preposterous to be flaunted in the face of the reader without preparation.

Sarah was crying over her bill of fare.


-- O. Henry, "Springtime à la Carte."

[Bleak&Icy]

Franklin Fletcher dreamed of luxury in the form of tiger-skins and beautiful women. He was prepared, at a pinch, to forgo the tiger-skins. Unfortunately the beautiful women seemed equally rare and inaccessible. At his office and at his boarding-house the girls were mere mice, or cattish, or kittenish, or had insufficiently read the advertisements. He met no others. At thirty-five he gave up, and decided he must console himself with a hobby, which is a very miserable second-best.

He prowled about in odd corners of the town, looking in at the windows of antique dealers and junk-shops, wondering what on earth he might collect. He came upon a poor shop, in a poor alley, in whose dusty window stood a single object: it was a full-rigged shop in a bottle. Feeling rather like that himself, he decided to go in and ask the price.

-- John Collier, "Bottle Party"

[When_MP_Attacks]

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

[Bleak&Icy]

Possibly my favourite opening sentence in all of literature:

There was a glow in the sky as if great furnace doors were opened.

-- Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

[Bleak&Icy]

In his recent interview with the Weird Fiction Review, Ligotti, when asked to provide a list of overlooked weird fiction writers, mentions the Hungarian oddball Géza Csáth, an opium-addicted psychiatrist who specialized in nervous disorders. In the early eighties Penguin published a wonderful paperback series--"Writers from the Other Europe"--which featured "virtually unknown" authors, such as Schulz, Danilo Kiš, ect. The edition of Csáth's demented tales, Opium and Other Stories, contains an introduction by Angela Carter, and is well-worth tracking down. On to some opening lines:

True, waking up mornings brings lingering suffering. Unbearable suffering. The morning light roars through the street in thundering chords. Neither frosted glass nor dark drapery can protect one from it, its insulting rhythms penetrating everything, calling one away to mean, inferior beings who believe that merciless vile music the Law of Life and what they live, Life.

-- Géza Csáth, "Opium" (trans. J. Kessler and C. Rogers)