Best opening lines

this is tryhard and bad.

Alas, she blows

Goddess, sing about Achilles' anger.

>I sign of warfare and a man of war.
opening line of a play for deaf people?

*record scratch* *freeze frame*
yep, thats me. youre probably wondering how I got here.

Ah, it's the classical epic "in medias res" approach to storytelling.

>All happy families are alike when they go to bed early today, or maybe yesterday. See the kid? Call him Ishmael. He is a sick moocow, a wicked moocow. He was the best of ungeziefer, the worst of ungeziefer.

this sentence makes no sense

actually well done, I kek'd user.
what's the "going to bed early" one from?

>Tell me, Muse, of a complicated man

proust

>See the child.
McCarthy alluding to
Great first line

sing was misspelled

>This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.

>Now, Muses, throw open the gates of Helicon, and grant me a voice of brass and lungs of iron, that I may sing of a complicated man

It just doesn't stop being funny

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, "If on a winter's night a Colonel Aureliano Buendia". All this happened, more or less. It is the saddest story I have ever heard. You don't know about Colonel Aureliano Buendia without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where Colonel Aureliano Buendia was born, and what his lousy childhood was like, and how his parents were occupied and all before they had him, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. If you really want to know, however, he is an invisible man, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and goes at things as he has taught himself, free-style, and will make the record in his own way. He is a sick man ... he is a spiteful man. He was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Buendia. In his younger and more vulnerable years, his father gave him some advice that he'd been turning over in his mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told him, "just remember that happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way".

Many years later (or maybe it was yesterday, I don't know), as he faced the firing squad (someone must have slandered him, for, without having done anything truly wrong, he woke up in bed from uneasy dreams to find himself arrested), Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when a screaming came across the sky, the screaming of Lolita, light of his life, fire of his loins. It was the afternoon of his eighty-first birthday, and he was in bed with his catamite when Ali announced that a nymphet had come to see him. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good catamite, must also be in want of a nymphet. "Call me Ishmael," the nymphet said, on that bright cold day in April as the clocks were striking thirteen, stately coming from the staircase, bearing a bowl of fondue in which the hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch.

It was a queer, sultry April, the April they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, with the sun shining, having no alternative, on the nothing new, and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills, and Colonel Aureliano Buendia didn't know what he was doing in New York. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. "Now is the spring of our discontent," he said.

"You better not tell nobody but God," the nymphet went on. Colonel Aureliano Buendia remembered that time that he was seated in an office surrounded by heads and bodies, and through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, he could see them hitting Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

Vergil was a rhetorical genius and it’s about goddamn time Veeky Forums start showing him more respect

Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc'd by fate,
And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate,
Expell'd and exil'd, left the Trojan shore.
Long labors, both by sea and land, he bore

>Virgil
>Virgin
Hmmmm

In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit.

in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattract-
ive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know
nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for cer-
tain what ails me. I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never
have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Be-
sides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect
medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be su-
perstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult
a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand.
Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can’t explain who
it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite:
I am perfectly well aware that I cannot ‘pay out’ the doctors
by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by
all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still,
if I don’t consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad,
well—let it get worse!

When on high the heaven had not been named,
Firm ground below had not been called by name,
Naught but primordial Apsu, their begetter,
And Mummu-Tiamat, she who bore them all,
Their waters commingling as a single body

Cosiest opening

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful.

>The day the Sun never rose, cold swept the world.

Ok, let's see how much I score without googling:
If on a Winter's Night
One Hundred Years
Slaughterhouse
Huck Finn
Notes from Underground
Gatsby
Anna Karenina
The Stranger
The Trial
Metamorphosis
Gravity's Rainbow
Lolita
Pride and Prejudice
Moby Dick
1984
Ulysses
The Bell Jar
Murphy (it was it some other Beckett?)
Two Cities
Infinite Jest
I missed at least eight others which sounded familiar but which I cannot name.

my fave too, in the best novel ever

Nel mezzo di cammin di nostra vita

Is that Notes from Underground?

yes

What's ungeziefer?

Could you guys explain the joke to a pleb like me?

lmao this pleb hasn’t read Narnia

Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
Che la via diritta era smarrita.
As far as memory goes.

It’s that new Odyssey translation by Emily Wilson.

Pest, malcreature, sometimes "cockroach"
A reference to Kafka's Metamorphosis

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo.

You missed Augie March.

What was she thinking