Post your favorite opening sentence from a novel

>The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

Do ye recognize it?

>I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot", or "That Claudius", or "Claudius the Stammerer", or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius", am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled.

>human mind
Doesn't exist. Garbage book.

What's your favorite sentence from a book, then?

You mean you can't explain why you like anything that you like?

I haven't the faintest.

The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.

It was only towards the end that I realized my foot was pregnant; my toes all bulged outward and none of my shoes fit - and where were I going to keep the babies?

what did he mean by this?

I have toes instead of teeth.

Then why the fuck are you fagging around in this thread? I was going to advise you to go read a book instead, but since you don't remember anything, I advise you to go fuck yourself.

Neuromancer. Classic.

> I genuinely don't understand. Why not just your favourite sentence from a book? Why teh first?

First sentences don't have to be anything special, but they can be awesome when use by the author as an artistic flourish to set the tone for what follows. Take my example This first sentence:

>tells you straightaway the artificial (technology) is encroaching on/into nature
>tells you the protagonists environment is somewhat oppressive
>at the same time, it's not quite right. no one sees television static when they look up at the sky. this tells us something about the mental wellbeing of our protagonist (who it turns out is always on drugs or craving them)
>thematics aside, it's lovely imagery. gibson's prose is efficient and poetic at the same time, that's one of the best examples

That is both untrue and completely unrelated to my post.

all you fucking degenerates need the Greeks in your life.

Μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ / Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾿ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾿ ἔθηkε,
πολλὰς δ᾿ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν
ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε kύνεσσιν
οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι· Διὸς δ᾿ ἐτελείετο βουλή,
ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε
Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν kαὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς.

Another of my favourites, poetic in a different way:

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;

I remember lots of books I've read, I just don't particularly recall loving a handful of sentences out of the, well, I can't even begin to guess how many I've read. But why are you so angry?
No, I asked why you care about this thread's topic, to which you greentexted
>why do you guys care about anything at all?
which either means you think I meant that or that it's equivalent to what I asked, or that you think it's never a relevant question to ask why you care about somethig, no matter the subject.

It was meant to be equivalent to what you asked because what you asked was similarly retarded.
You are on a literature board where people who like books discuss various aspects of books. In the literature community the openings and conclusions of books are often romanticized and lauded as representative of the entire books, with many recognizable ones entering pop culture and sometimes being even more widely known than the books themselves. It's entirely reasonable that people who like books have a handful of favorite openings that they might enjoy discussing.
I genuinely think your inability to understand something like this and defensive confusion is a good indication that you're somewhere on the autism spectrum and you should look into that if you haven't already.

the whole first page of Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveller

sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/00/pwillen1/lit/winter.htm

It was a dark and stormy night.

Those are actually the first words of the opening sentence of that Bulwer-Lytton book.

>It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

I guess it wasn't such a meme back in the day

>Those are actually the first words of the opening sentence of that Bulwer-Lytton book.
No shit, do you even know what the thread is about?
Obviously, I just picked that to subvert the OP.

It's been so long since I read a novel / genre fiction.
Every time I pick up a book like that I end up thinking, unironically, 'I could be reading something about the real world that teaches me and helps me 50 years down the line' and I pick up another non-fiction book.
I feel such a fucking brainlet for doing this.

>It was meant to be equivalent to what you asked because what you asked was similarly retarded.
So me asking why you care about first sentences is particular is the same as asking why you care about, say, keeping clean?

>*in particular

>No shit, do you even know what the thread is about?
Woah calm down bro we cool, we cool

>Obviously, I just picked that to subvert the OP.
You certainly subverted me... 'lmao', as they say.

he probably meant that posting just to say WHO CARES THIS IS DUMB GUYS is stupid, because it is

I'm not angry, just taking the piss. This is Veeky Forums after all haha

haha

a way a lone a last a loved a long the -
- riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

the fist sentence is great on its own, but the rhythm of the last sentence is what really butters my eggroll

why does this sound so incredibly sad and melancholic
whats it about?

easy

>In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him: and without him was made nothing that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

Good one. I was trying to decide between this and "Once, if I recall correctly, my life was a banquet." from my preferred transation.

That makes you the opposite of a brainlet.

only dum dums can’t into art

Nope.

>I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.

>whats it about?
i-i don't know

>Only one enemy remained; two if you counted God.
a classic

holy...

>Only one enemy remained; two if you counted God

>Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., because one fine morning he was arrested without doing anything wrong.

Shit this was meant for:

>kids reading this today will imagine a bright blue sky

Today it seems to me Providential that Fate should have Chosen Braunau on the inn as my Birthplace.

I remember that shit. It was from an user or he copied it?

Its an Adolfdidit quote.

Duyuno Adolfdidit to be exact.

Name that is mine, Ishmael.

France, as a whole, is divided into three parts.

I really wish I never used the Dildo of Enlightenment +2.

From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that — a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.

This is baller.

Source?

I can tell why you'd think that.

Oh, alright, no harm done as it were anyway, I've been here for over a decade now. I'm honestly taking the piss quite a lot as well by being this obtuse about the topic.

But what if it's actually dumb?

...

I've read this but the only thing that comes to mind is Lovecraft

Last line is one of my all-time favourites too.

>"Like a dog!"

If it's actually dumb then you did little to actually prove it or to start an interesting discussion on the topic. All you really did was ask a dumb, dime a dozen question the likes of which you can find under any youtube video.

How should the same question have been phrased then to be "interesting enough"?

...

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—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

--Money...? in a voice that rustled.
--Paper, yes.

>
“I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss. I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy. I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”

Samus Hydus

start with the Greeks

The Odyssey
>Let me tell you about an interesting man.

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me.

It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future.

>And in that moment, I swear, we were infinite

I am an old man, a sick man.

...

The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel.