Great Opening Lines

B

Bleak&Icy

Grimscribe
No, not the kind of opening lines that might initiate amorous activity, a subject about which I know next to nothing, but great opening lines from literature. I thought it might be fun to assemble a collection of memorable openings from novels, stories, poems or essays--the more obscure, or little-known, the better. To get things started, here is the opening paragraph from one of my favourite novels, a neglected masterpiece (which might interest the Medusa-seeking Dreglers among us):

I grew up in a small Southern town which was different from most other towns because it contained an insane asylum. At the time I was growing up there, however, I did not think of this as a distinction. As we had been aware of it from birth, it had for us who lived there no aspect of novelty; it was simply one of the facts of our existence, and belonged, with the fire station, the clinic, the schoolhouse, and the granary, among those elemental institutions by which life is both sustained and interpreted. I thought all towns had asylums. With the equanimity of a child I accepted the fact that there was madness everywhere, just as there was conflagration, illness, ignorance, and hunger. I can, indeed, remember being disconcerted, somewhere around the age of twelve, by the discovery that other towns did not have asylums, and engaging in much troubled speculation as to how the insane people of these communities were disposed of.

-- J. R. Salamanca, Lilith
 
For a work of prose. Samuel R. Delany's magic and profound, DHALGREN.to wound the autumnal city. So howled out for the world to give him a name. The in-dark answered with wind.Only, CALL ME ISHMAEL., hooked me deeper...Sorry, not little know, but the ones that cut deepest, to me . . .
 
Convicts' garb is striped pink and white. Though it was at my heart's bidding that I chose the universe wherein I delight, I at least have the power of finding therein the many meanings I wish to find: there is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter. Should I have to portray a convict -- or a criminal -- I shall so bedeck him with flowers that, as he disappears beneath them, he will himself become a flower, a gigantic and new one.

- Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal.
 
"I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below. Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or a degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realise, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death." - H.P Lovecraft, "Dagon"

is a huge favorite here.

The introduction to Ligotti's "The Bells Will Sound Forever" is amazing.

"I was sitting in a small park on a dry morning in early spring when a gentleman who looked as if he should be in a hospital sat down on the bench besides me."
Short, but effective.
 
Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.

This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome.

-- Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark
 
"Several faces I recognized; though I should have known them better had they been shrivel or eaten away by death and decomposition." -- H. P. Lovecraft, "The Tomb"

As a child I was told not to gather souvenirs from the cemetery, but it was hard to determine where our overgrown garden blended with the overgrown fringe of Dreamers' Hill. I had found skulls that clearly lay on our property. If Mother permitted me to collect them, although she would shudder and urge me to find a healthier pastime, why shouldn't I pick up skulls that lay in plain sight a few steps farther on? If it was right to uncover relics with the toe of my boot when I glimpsed them protruding from the earth, why was it wrong to seek them out actively with shovel and crowbar? The inability to make such fine distinctions has forever been my undoing.

-- Brian McNaughton, "The Throne of Bones"
 
"For a ghoul is a ghoul, and at best an unpleasant companion for man." -- H. P. Lovecraft, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath

Meryphillia was the least typical ghoul in the graveyard. No man would ever have called her a beauty, but her emaciation was less extreme, her pallor less ghastly, and her gait less grotesque than those of her sisters.

Untypically tender-hearted, she would sometimes shed a tear for a dead infant that her nature compelled her to devour. She was considerate of her fellows, too, and her feeding habits were all but mannerly. Least typical of all, for ghouls love to laugh, was her inextinguishable sorrow for the world of sunlight and human warmth she had lost.

-- Brian McNaughton, "Meryphillia"
 
"A young man asked a father for his daughter's hand, and received it in a box - her left hand."
- Patricia Highsmith, "The Hand" (Little Tales of Misogyny).
 
Highsmith is a genuine original; it is exceedingly rare to encounter a female writer with as much hate and vitriol in her heart. Not only was her outlook caustically misanthropic and her humour black as bile, she also penned a nasty little tale of fungal horror! Here is the opening:

On the outskirts of the small town of G--- in eastern Austria lies a mysterious cemetery hardly an acre in size, filled with the remains of paupers for the most part, their places marked by nothing at all, or at best by tombstone fragments now all in the wrong spots. Yet the cemetery became famous for its odd excrescences, bulbous figurines of bluish-green and off-white colour, which eerily rose above the surface of the soil and grew, some, to a height of two metres or so. Others of these mushroom-like growths attained only fifty centimetres, some were even smaller, and all were bizarre, like nothing else in nature, even coral.

-- Patricia Highsmith, "The Mysterious Cemetery," Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes
 
As he glided by the extremely small, out-of-the-way cemetery in his airborne prowl car, late at night, Officer Joseph Tinbane heard unfortunate and familiar sounds. A voice. At once he sent his prowl car up over the spiked iron poles of the badly maintained cemetery fence, descended on the far side, listened.

The voice said, muffled and faint, "My name is Mrs. Tillie M. Benton, and I want to get out. Can anybody hear me?"

Philip K. Dick - Counter-Clock World
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'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
 
"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)
 
"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.
 
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
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Edit: How I love finding a year-old post of mine and feeling a desperate need to correct my own grammar.

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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)
 
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."
 
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"
 
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
 
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
 
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)
 
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