Great Opening Lines

There are so many things which are impossible to explain! Why should certain chords in music make me think of the brown and golden tints of autumn foliage? Why should the Mass of Sainte Cécile send my thoughts wandering among caverns whose walls blaze with ragged masses of virgin silver? What was it in the roar and turmoil of Broadway at six o’clock that flashed before my eyes the picture of a still Breton forest where sunlight filtered through spring foliage and Sylvia bent, half curiously, half tenderly, over a small green lizard, murmuring, “To think that this also is a little ward of God!”

— Robert W. Chambers, “The Yellow Sign” (1895)
 
"Sorcery and sanctity," said Ambrose, "these are the only realities. Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life."

Cotgrave listened, interested. He had been brought by a friend to this mouldering house in a northern suburb, through an old garden to the room where Ambrose the recluse dozed and dreamed over his books.

-- Arthur Machen, "The White People" (1904)
 
There are other realities beside and beyond our own, which is the only one we know, and therefore the only one we think exists.

A man staggers out of the howling recesses of some seedy dive into the uncertain gray of dawn.

His movements reveal the combination of bold daring and practiced confidence that mark a habitual drinker - the deadly serious parody of a clown.

His face is the crater field of some lost satellite.

His overstimulated senses are seething with impulses: the din of the tavern, philological disputes, pride, humiliation, love, quotations, dirty jokes, hate, loneliness, faith, purity, despair –

He doesn’t know his way home.

So he sleepwalks to the next intersection, where the tram tracks cross the street - two dully glistening snakes.

Keeping his head aloft as though he were blind, he taps and tests the ground with his cane, then he pokes it into one of the rail grooves, and lets himself be led as if tethered to a pole.

The tip of his cane sails through the groove, raising a bow wave of moldy leaves and trash, gravel, dirt and muck; his shoes splash through puddles, wrench his ankle on the uneven cobblestones, trip over track ties, churn through gravel, dig through dust. The fog slaps his face like wet cotton wool. Wind tears at the strands of hair that dangle onto his forehead from below the edge of his hat; dew settles on his lips, giving them a salty taste, and collects in tickling drops inside the two creases on either side of his mouth: his pulpy, oily cheeks do not absorb the moisture. He mumbles to himself, occasionally blurts something out loud, launches into a song, interrupts himself, laughs, goes silent, resumes his mumbling. His eyes are wide open and fixed unblinkingly ahead, like those of a blind man, like those of the gods.

In this manner he travels from one end of the city to the other.

The city lies somewhere in the godforsaken southeastern part of Europe and is named Czernopol.

-- Gregor von Rezzori: An Ermine in Czernopol (translated by Philip Boehm)
 
"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."
George Orwell "1984"

For some reason this will always remain to me one of the most chilling opening lines of any book.
 
The cabin-passenger wrote in his diary a parody of Descartes: 'I feel discomfort, therefore I am alive,' then sat pen in hand with no more to record.


--Graham Greene...A Burnt-Out Case



Incidentally, this book seems an attempt to dramatize anhedonia, if such a thing is possible...
 
This book is dedicated to the Ancient Ones, to the Lord of Abominations, Humwawa, whose face is a mass of entrails, whose breath is the stench of dung and the perfume of death, Dark Angel of all that is excreted and sours, Lord of Decay, Lord of the Future, who rides on a whispering south wind, to Pazuzu, Lord of Fevers and Plagues, Dark Angel of the Four Winds with rotting genitals from which he howls through sharpened teeth over stricken cities, to Kutulu, the Sleeping Serpent who cannot be summoned, to the Akhkharu, who suck the blood of men since they desire to become men, to the Lalussu, who haunt the places of men, to Gelal and Lilit, who invade the beds of men and whose children are born in secret places, to Addu, raiser of storms who can fill the night sky with brightness, to Malah, Lord of Courage and Bravery, to Zahgurim, whose number is twenty-three and who kills in an unnatural fashion, to Zahrim, a warrior among warriors, to Itzamna, Spirit of Early Mists and Showers, to Ix Chel, the Spider-Web-that-Catches-the-Dew-of-Morning, to Zuhuy Kak, Virgin Fire, to Ah Dziz, the Master of Cold, to Kak U Pacat, who works in fire, to Ix Tab, Goddess of Ropes and Snares, patroness of those who hang themselves, to Schmuun, the Silent One, twin brother of Ix Tab, to Xolotl the Unformed, Lord of Rebirth, to Aguchi, Master of Ejaculations, to Osiris and Amen in phallic form, to Hex Chun Chan, the Dangerous One, to Ah Pook, the Destroyer, to the Great Old One and the Star Beast, to Pan, God of Panic, to the nameless gods of dispersal and emptiness, to Hassan I Sabbah, Master of the Assassins.
To all the scribes and artists and practitioners of magic through whom these spirits have been manifested....
NOTHING IS TRUE. EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED.

-- William S. Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night
 
"Horror and fatality have been stalking abroad in all ages. Why then give a date to this story I have to tell?"

Edgar Allan Poe, Metzengerstein
 
Nightscape of city in November: intermittent blotches of streetlight; a chilly thing, the wind slithering across the weeping faces of buildings; the silence.

Form is dulled and softened. Outlines are lost, silhouettes unsealed. Matter bleeds some vital essence upon the streets.

-- Roger Zelazny, "Is There a Demon Lover in the House?" Heavy Metal Magazine
 
Something has happened to me: I can't doubt that any more. It came as an illness does, not like an ordinary certainty, not like anything obvious. It installed itself cunningly, little by little; I felt a little strange, a little awkward, and that was all. Once it was established, it didn't move any more, it lay low and I was able to persuade myself that there was nothing wrong with me, that it was a false alarm. And now it has started blossoming.

Jean-Paul Sartre "Nausea"
 
God grant that the reader, emboldened and having become at present as fierce as what he is reading, find, without loss of bearings, his way, his wild and treacherous passage through the desolate swamps of these sombre, poison-soaked pages; for, unless he should bring to his reading a rigorous logic and a sustained mental effort at least as strong as his distrust, the lethal fumes of this book shall dissolve his soul as water does sugar.

--- Comte de Lautréamont: Maldoror.
 
"Where ultimate knowledge is denied, mystery must rule. Every enterprise is instigated by it; every word is founded upon it. Above all does it live in the ruins of certain cities, where everything has been denied and even the shadows suffocate in the dense ether of mystery.
A type of worship may even be devoted to the ruined state, consecrating earthly objects that in their decrepitude have attained a divine status. Crumbling pillars shake off their burden, forsake their function, and stand serenely above the rubble of old pediments. And what domes and spires may still be held aloft release their grasp upon the gray heights of a barren horizon. Below, carven images of gods and beasts all abandon themselves to shattered confusion, their once perfect likenesses now heaped and corroded, their significance lost. Skeletons eased of all flesh openly consort with stones and dust, liberated from the duties of life."
-Thomas Ligotti, "The Mocking Mystery"
 
"There are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker."
-Sadegh Hedeyat, The Blind Owl
 
"It should be possible to build a pagoda of crispbread, to think of nothing, to hear no thunder, no rain, no splashing from the gutter, no gurgling around the house. Perhaps no pagoda will emerge, but the night will pass."
-Max Frisch, Man in the Holocene
 
"No one can tell you about your soul.
However persuasive the voice of another might be, is there not something in the soul that ultimately resists any attempt to impose authority from outside?
But then, it seems that somehow all kinds of voices manage to get inside, and all that is needed to control you is for someone to persuade you that one of those voices inside is truly your own."
-Quentin S. Crisp, Remember You're A One-Ball
 
"There was no one inside him; behind his face (which even in the bad paintings of the time resembles no other) and his words (which were multitudinous, and of a fantastical and agitated turn) there was no more than a slight chill, a dream someone failed to dream. At first he thought that everyone was like him, but the surprise and bewilderment of an acquaintance to whom he began to describe the hollowness showed him his error, and also let him know, forever after, that an individual ought not to differ from its species."
-Jorge Luis Borges, Everything & Nothing
 
"We are buried within ourselves; we send out signals, gestures, and sounds indefinitely and uselessly. No one listens to anyone else. Everyone speaks; no one hears; direct or reciprocal communication is blocked. This one here speaks learnedly; he is as boring as the last course he gave; he doesn't care if people hear him. Another, more jovial, plays a strong role that he dearly holds onto: he spreads his good humour through his discourse. The third, an irritable pipsqueak and always on his high horse, terrorizes those around him; they all play their favorite instrument, whose name is their own."
-Michel Serres, The Parasite (Noises)
 
"Forever be accursed the star under which I was born, may no sky protect it, let it crumble in space like a dust without honor! And let the traitorous moment that cast me among the creatures be forever erased from the lists of Time! My desires can no longer deal with this mixture of life and death in which eternity daily rots. Weary of the future, I have traversed it days, and yet am tormented by the intemperance of unknown thirsts. Like a frenzied sage, dead to the world and frantic against it, I invalidate my illusions only to irritate them the more. This exasperation in an unforeseeable universe - where nonetheless everything repeats itself - will it never come to end? How long must I keep telling myself: I loathe this life I idolize? The nullity of our deliriums makes us all so many gods subject to an insipid fatality. Why rebel any longer against the symmetry of this world when Chaos itself can only be a system of disorders? Our fate being to rot with the continents and the stars, we drag on, like resigned sick men, and to the end of time, the curiosity of a denouement that is foreseen, frightful, and vain."
-E.M. Cioran, A Short History Of Decay (Quousque Eadem?)
 
"Some People are capable of pleasure, of enjoying themselves, but none are truly capable of content. A conviction of content can be sustained only by consistent coercion, outer or inner; and, even then, the underlying reality, the underlying mystery, inevitably seeps through, sooner or later, via some unforeseeable rift."
-Robert Aickman, Compulsory Games
 
"For those who are racked with melancholia, writing about it would have meaning only if writing sprang out of that very melancholia. I am trying to address an abyss of sorrow, a noncommunicable grief that at times, and often on a long-term basis, lays claims upon us to the extent of having us lose all interest in words, actions, and even life itself. Such despair is not a revulsion that would imply my being capable of desire and creativity, negative indeed but present. Within depression, if my existence is on the verge of collapsing, its lack of meaning is not tragic - it appears obvious to me, glaring and inescapable.
Where does this black sun come from? Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me, pinning me down to the ground, to my bed, compelling me to silence, to renunciation?"
-Julia Kristeva, Black Sun
 
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