Name a better opening sentence

Name a better opening sentence

Bost it

Stately, plump screaming across the sky none of them knew the color of, which was the color of television tuned to a dead Ishmael.

...

Call me Ishmael

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

m-mother!

SEVERELY underrated
how do i upvote twice? enjoy Veeky Forums gold as well

I think the ending lines of that book are stunning, the way that it ties everything off really drives home to me how atomized people are in this emergent world, how they drift in and out of one another's lives with little or no fanfare.

"He spent the bulk of his Swiss account on a new pancreas and liver, the rest on a new Ono-Sendai and a ticket back to the Sprawl.

He found work.

He found a girl who called herself Michael. And one October night, punching himself past the scarlet tiers of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, he saw three figures, tiny, impossible, who stood at the very edge of one out the vast steps of data. Small as they were, he could make out the boy’s grin, his pink gums, the glitter of the long gray eyes that had been Riviera’s. Linda still wore his jacket; she waved, as he passed. But the third figure, close behind her, arm across her shoulders, was himself.

Somewhere, very close, the laugh that wasn’t laughter.

He never saw Molly again."

Sing to me of the television, Sky, the channel of static and grey
viewed time and again off air, one it had broadcast the last show of Today

What's this from? Tundra? Sounds like something you guys would put into a meme book.

>when the meme so supreme it exposes you for not having read any literature

Cover your spoilers next time, okay?

>the laugh that wasn't laughter
Still gives me chills. McCoy deserved better.

My bad, I'll be sure to check that next time.
You're not the only one who blows a gasket at that paragraph.

*kills your maman*
nothing personnel, kid

At least the sequels offer a sense of closure.

The ending to Neuromancer was much too jarring, considering sci-fi is traditionally pretty conservative, and intended for mass consumption. The Count Zero, and MLO were inevitable.

God I forgot that’s how IJ started. Literally sounds like something the people post in the Veeky Forums creative writing threads

>Ça a débuté comme ça. Moi j'avais jamais rien dit. Rien.

It began with a mistake.

why are you on Veeky Forums

Is this Burpkowski?
Love it. Never see it mentioned in any of the best opening line threads.
Nice, but this is better:

Translation?

Han kom som ett yrväder en aprilafton och hade ett höganäskrus i en svångrem om halsen

We have a winner

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 housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

>Here's how it started. I'd never said a word. Not one word.

>He came as an appetite an aprilafton and had a tall easter egg in a strap around his throat.
Truly the pinnacle of Swedish literature.

>Everything around it moves, as if just this one time and one time only, as if the message of Heraclitus has arrived here through some deep current, from the distance of an entire universe, in spite of all the senseless obstacles, because the water moves, it flows, it arrives, and cascades; now and then the silken breeze sways, the mountains quiver in the scourging heat, but this heat itself also moves, trembles, and vibrates in the land, as do the tall scattered grass-islands, the grass, blade by blade, in the riverbed; each individual shallow wave, as it falls, tumbles over the low weirs, and then, every inconceivable fleeting element of this subsiding wave, and all the individual glitterings of light flashing on the surface of this fleeting element, this surface suddenly emerging and just as quickly collapsing, with its drops of light dying down, scintillating, and then reeling in all directions, inexpressible in words; clouds are gathering; the restless, jarring blue sky high above; the sun is concentrated with horrific strength, yet still indescribable, extending onto the entire momentary creation, maddeningly brilliant, blindingly radiant; the fish and the frogs and the beetles and the tiny reptiles are in the river; the cars and the buses, from the northbound number 3 to the number 32 up to the number 38, inexorably creep along on the steaming asphalt roads built parallel on both embankments, then the rapidly propelled bicycles below the breakwaters, the men and women strolling next to the river along paths that were built or inscribed into the dust, and the blocking stones, too, set down artificially and asymmetrically underneath the mass of gliding water: everything is at play or alive, so that things happen, move on, dash along, proceed forward, sink down, rise up, disappear, emerge again, run and flow and rush somewhere, only it, the Ooshirosagi, does not move at all, this enormous snow-white bird, open to attack by all, not concealing its defenselessness; this hunter, it leans forward, its neck folded in an S-form, and it now extends its head and long hard beak out from this S-form, and strains the whole, but at the same time it is strained downward, its wings pressed tightly against its body, its thin legs searching for a firm point beneath the water’s surface; it fixes its gaze on the flowing surface of the water, the surface, yes, while it sees, crystal-clear, what lies beneath this surface, down below in the refractions of light, however rapidly it may arrive, if it does arrive, if it ends up there, if a fish, a frog, a beetle, a tiny reptile arrives with the water that gurgles as the flow is broken and foams up again, with one single precise and quick movement, the bird shall strike with its beak, and lift something up, it’s not even possible to see what it is, everything happens with such lightning speed, it’s not possible to see, only to know that it is a fish —

>an amago, an ayu, a huna, a kamotsuka, a mugitsuku or an unagi or something else — and that is why it stood there, almost in the middle of the Kamo River, in the shallow water; and there it stands, in one time, immeasurable in its passing, and yet beyond all doubt extant, one time proceeding neither forward nor backward, but just swirling and moving nowhere, like an inconceivably complex net, cast out into time; and this motionlessness, despite all its strength, must be born and sustained, and it would only be fitting to grasp this simultaneously, but it is precisely that, this simultaneous grasping, that cannot be realized, so it remains unsaid, and even the entirety of the words that want to describe it do not appear, not even the separate words; yet still the bird must lean upon one single moment all at once, and in doing so, must obstruct all movement: all alone, within its own self, in the frenzy of events, in the exact center of an absolute, swarming, teeming world, it must remain there in this cast-out moment, so that this moment as it were closes down upon it, and then the moment is closed, so that the bird may bring its snow-white body to a dead halt in the exact center of this furious movement, so that it may impress its own motionlessness against the dreadful forces breaking over it from all directions, because what comes only much later is that once again it will take part in this furious motion, in the total frenzy of everything, and it too will move, in a lightning-quick strike, together with everything else; for now, however, it remains within this enclosing moment, at the beginning of the hunt.

>They were all dead. The final gunshot was an explanation mark to everything that had let to this point. I released my finger from the trigger and then it was over.

that's three sentences

Counts as one in this context

Waking up to a loud crash rarely means something good is happening. It’s never “CRASH! Mom made pancakes!” or “CRASH! We decided to adopt a Golden Retriever!”

no it doesn't, it's three fucking sentences. the opening sentence is: "They were all dead."

It works in this context you fucking turboretard, it's not the same without the rest of it.

the three sentences do work together, i give you that, but that doesn't make them a sentence.

inb4 Lo-Lee-Ta

what a surprise, video game manchild doesn't know what a sentence is

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

I will never understand why the book doesn't start with the way more memorable "I am in here." one or two sentences after. That would have been perfect.

>There were prodigies and portents enough, One-Eye says. We must blame ourselves for misinterpreting them. One-Eye’s handicap in no way impairs his marvelous hindsight.

that's three sentences

>Literally babby's first crisis of ennui

Why do people rate DFW again?

Ishmael, dead television of my sky, presentiment of my future.

>Through the ruin of a city stalked the ruin of a man

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy."

that's two sentences
i know you guys are Veeky Forums but counting beyond the number one shouldn't be beyond you

Go to bed, Laszlo. You should've posted The Last Wolf.

not bad

no it isn't

Look at the three sentences. Maybe one; I am not pretty ugly feet.

how the fuck is that not three sentences?

came here to post this.

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree.

Agreed. First time I read it the ending really struck, especially the Molly part.

holy...

>explanation mark

what did he mean by this?

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

Brilliant, rewrite the entire book like that, a sort of scifi Ulysses. Id buy it.

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.

It wouldn't have worked if it started with that u dumby u

that would have seemed like DFW was cryptically saying that he is somehow hiding within the pages of IJ after he died, but like, no one can ever manage to find him because there's so many pages to hide in and you can't open them all at once

En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor.

Probably pleb-tier to you fellas but this is one of my faves
> Though men in their hundreds of thousands had tried their hardest to disfigure that little corner of the earth where they had crowded themselves together, paving the ground with stones so that nothing could grow, weeding out every blade of vegetation, filling the air with the fumes of coal and gas, cutting down trees and driving away every beast and every bird -- spring, however, was still spring, even in the town.

For sale; one Ishmael, never a dead television

> CRASH!
Makes me say "Holy... I want more..." every time.

>newfags that dont know about tundra thinking theyre not newfags
He literally said "meme book," how'd you manage to miss the point?

One enemy remained. Two if you count God.

hehehehehehe :)

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way

I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles), having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, write this sitting in the kitchen sink somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert: In my younger and more vulnerable years my father was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and many years later, as he faced the firing squad, it was a bright cold day in April, and through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see stately, plump Lolita, light of my life, alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream, and it was love at first sight, if you really want to hear about it, the saddest story I have ever heard; you better not never tell nobody but God.

In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing someone," he said, "Just remember that they haven't had all the advantages that you've had."

>the sky was black?

Yeah, because it was night-time.

Pretty good but you need Ishmael and colour of television/dead channel

Gibson was actually thinking of very old televisions where the untuned channel was blue. The better static imagery comes from the readers.

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

>criticizes people immediately into the next paragraph.
Based Nick

Were it not for the Terror which captured France in 1793 and which at length caused me to flee Paris, I might never have discovered an exquisite love, nor ventured to the city in the Autumn Stars, where, with wits, sword and the remnants of Faith, I fought for the world's future, and lost my own.

ADVENTURE is the vitaminizing element in histories both individual and social. But its story is unsuitable for a Sabbath School prize book. Its adepts are rarely chaste, or merciful, or even law- abiding at all, and any moral peptonizing, or sugaring, takes out the interest, with the truth, of their lives.

anglo linguistic knowledge people

>A screaming comes across the sky.

>I came to Comala for they told me my father lived here, a certain Pedro Páramo.

I always thought he was referring to white noise channels which are grey.

>Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Done. You're hooked.

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Ishamel, light of my life, fire of my loins told me mother died today".

8/10 made me kek

The colour of television tuned to a dead channel comes across the sky. It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future, but there is nothing to call me Ishmael now.