Great Opening Lines

"I had an acquaintance who had begun, before I knew him, as a painter, but who took to "compiling and editing" those costly, glossy books about art which are said to sell in surprising numbers but which no person one knows ever buys and no person one sees ever opens."

- Robert Aickman, "Ravissante"

It's such an absurd observation, and yet so specific a detail taken from the mundane world, that it introduces a very convincing setting for the following strange events.
 
Three men at McAlester State Penitentiary had larger penises than Lamar Pye, but all were black and therefore, by Lamar's own figuring, were hardly human at all. His was the largest penis ever seen on a white man in that prison or any of the others in which Lamar had spent so much of his adult life. It was a monster, a snake, a ropey, veiny thing that hardly looked at all like what it was but rather like some form of rubber tubing.

Therefore he was Number One on the fag hit parade, but the fags knew to keep away and could only dream of him in private. Lamar wasn't a fag, although, when the spirit moved him, he was a buttfucker. He wasn't a boss con's fuckboy either, or a punk, or a bitch or a mary or a snitch, and he carried a simple message in the graceful economy of his movements: to fuck with me is to fuck with death itself.

Dirty White Boys, Stephen Hunter

I always quote the classy stuff...
 
This is a honeycomb world. It hides a hollow heart.

The truth of nature, wrote the philosopher Democritus, lies in deep mines and caves. The stability of what is seen and felt beneath our feet is an illusion, for this life is not as it seems. Below the surface, there are cracks and fissures and pockets of stale, trapped air; stalagmites and helactites and unmapped dark rivers that flow ever downward, a labyrinth of crystal tumours and frozen columns where history becomes future, then becomes now.

For in total blackness, time has no meaning.

The Killing Kind, John Connolly
 
An opening line about great opening lines [I am kinda proud I remembered it]:

In any memoir it is usual for the first sentence to reveal as much as possible of your subject's nature by illustrating it in a vivid and memorable motto, and with my own first sentence now drawing to a finish I see I have failed to do this!

Paul Theroux, Saint Jack

and a favorite:

It is cold at 6:40 in the morning of a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad.

Frederick Forsyth, The Day of the Jackal
 
Even though I did not read A Tale of Two Cities I love the opening:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way."

And this, my favorite Shakespeare play:

First Witch: When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
Second Witch: When the hurlyburly's done,
When the battle's lost and won.
 
My favorite first page:

Some places are too evil to be allowed to exist. Some cities are too wicked to be suffered. Calcutta is such a place. Before Calcutta I did not believe in evil—certainly not as a force separate from the actions of men. Before Calucutta I was a fool.

After the Romans had conquered the city of Carthage, they killed the men, sold the women and children into slavery, pulled down the great buildings, broke up the stones, burned the rubble, and salted the earth so that nothing would ever grow there again. That is not enough for Calcutta. Calcutta should be expunged.

Before Calcutta I took part in marches against nuclear weapons. Now I dream of nuclear mushroom clouds rising above a city. I see buildings melting into lakes of glass. I see paved streets flowing like rivers of lava and real rivers boiling away in great gouts of steam. I see human figures dancing like burning insects. like obscene praying mantises sputtering and bursting against a fiery red background of total destruction.

The city is Calcutta. The dreams are not unpleasant.

Some places are too evil to be allowed to exist.
—Dan Simmons, Song of Kali
 
The dead have highways. They run, unerring lines of ghost trains, of dream carriages, across the wasteland behind our lives, bearing an endless traffic of departed souls. Their thrum and throb can be heard in the broken places of the world, through cracks made by acts of cruelty, violence and depravity. Their freight, the wandering dead, can be glimpsed when the heart is close to bursting, and sights that should be hidden come plainly into view. CLIVE BARKER THE BOOKS OF BLOOD
 
The very sight of the old man engendered vermin. The dung heap of his soul extended so far into his hands and face one could not possibly imagine a more frightful contact. When he walked the streets, the slimiest gutters, shuddering at the reflection of his image, seemed to flow back to their source.

-- Leon Bloy, "The Religion of Monsieur Pleur," Disagreeable Tales (trans. Erik Butler)
 
"California, Labor Day weekend. . . early, with ocean fog still in the streets, outlaw motorcyclists wearing chains, shades and greasy Levi's roll out from damp garages, all night diners and cast-off one-night pads in Frisco, Hollywood, Berdoo and East Oakland, heading for the Monterey peninsula, north of Big Sur. . . The Menace is loose again, the Hell's Angels, the hundred-carat headline, running fast and loud on the early morning freeway, low in the saddle, nobody smiles, jamming crazy through traffic and ninety miles an hour down the center stripe, missing by inches. . . like Genghis Khan on an iron horse, a monster steed with a fiery anus, flat out through the eye of a beer can and up your daughter's leg with no quarter asked and none given; show the squares some class, give em a whiff of those kicks they'll never know. . . Ah, these righteous dudes, they love to screw it on. . . Little Jesus, the Gimp, Chocolate George, Buzzard, Zorro, Hambone, Clean Cut, Tiny, Terry the Tramp, Frenchy, Mouldy Marvin, Mother Miles, Dirty Ed, Chuck the Duck, Fat Freddy, Filthy Phil, Charger Charley the Child Molester, Crazy Cross, Puff, Magoo, Animal and at least a hundred more. . . tense for the action, long hair in the wind, beards and bandanas flapping, earrings, armpits, chain whips, swastikas and stripped-down Harleys flashing chrome as traffic on 101 moves over, nervous, to let the formation pass like a burst of dirty thunder. . . "

-- Hell's Angeles: A Strange and Terrible Saga, by Hunter S. Thompson
 
There was a dull ache, a kind of hollowness, in the general area of his liver - the seat of the intelligence according to the Psychology of Aristotle - a feeling that there was someone inside his chest blowing up a balloon or that his body was that balloon. Stuck here at this desk, it tethered him. It was a swollen gum he must again and again be probing with his tongue or his finger. Yet it wasn't, exactly, the same as being sick. There was no name for it.

- Thomas M. Disch, 334
 
Incredible the first animal that dreamed of another animal. Monstrous the first vertebrae that succeeded in standing on two feet and thus spread terror among the beasts still normally and happily crawling close to the ground through the slime of creation. Astounding the first telephone call, the first boiling water, the first song, the first loincloth.

Terra Nostra by Fuentes
 
"A-hind of hill, ways off to sun-set-down, is sky come like as fire, and walk I up in way of this, all hard of breath, where is grass colding on I's feet and wetting they."

The opening to Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire, written from the perspective of a neolithic cave-boy.
 
'All we ever get is Lord fucking Lucan and wingless bloody crows,' smiled Gilman, like this was the best day of our lives:
Friday 13 December 1974.

-David Peace, 1974
 
A vision had seized hold of me, like the demented fury of a hound that has sunk its teeth into the leg of a deer carcass and is shaking and tugging at the downed game so frantically that the hunter gives up trying to calm him. It was the vision of a large steamship scaling a hill under its own steam, working its way up a steep slope in the jungle, while above this natural landscape, which shatters the weak and the strong with equal ferocity, soars the voice of Caruso, silencing all the pain and all the voices of the primeval forest and drowning out all birdsong. To be more precise: bird cries, for in this setting, left unfinished and abandoned by God in wrath, the birds do not sing; they shriek in pain, and confused trees tangle with one another like battling Titans, from horizon to horizon, in a steaming creation still being formed. Fog-panting and exhausted they stand in this unreal misery--and I, like a stanza in a poem written in an unknown foreign tongue, am shaken to the core.

-- Werner Herzog, Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo (trans. Krishna Winston)
 
Where now? Who now? When now?

-- Beckett, The Unnnameable

Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap.

-- Beckett, Endgame
 
Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth high shouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors none shall walk save you.

-- Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
 
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