ITT God-tier opening lines

ITT God-tier opening lines
>Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery.

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It's a truth universally acknowledged ...
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins ...

Gregory Berrycone had found the evening pleasant...

Isn't that the Da Vinci code?

“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”

It was thirty five years after a birth bereft of good fortune that Roberto found himself lost for the first time.

"to be or not to be, that is the question"

Call me the screaming stately scullery fire, across the stairhead I carry a truth universally acknowledged: that a bowl of monstrous vermins discovered ice in the fire of my loins.

God Tier
>The

Good Tier
>A

Meh Tier
>It

Shit Tier
>One

A memeing comes across the sky.

Bane?

>Stately,

Recitation by Nût, the greatly benificent: The king is my eldest son who split open my womb; he is my beloved, with whom I am well pleased.

>To begin at the beginning

>implying all great works by the philosopher Snoopy don't start with "it"

>it was a cold dark morning

"See the child."

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...

this actually is great, it's just a shame that the rest of the prologue is so fucking godawfully boring

Stately, fatass Buck Mulligan came waddlin' on the stairs, big ass bowl in his hans wit shavin shit in it. A pussy ass bathrobe or sum shit was fluttrin round by the windo. Fattie picked up the bowl:

-- Blah blah some pig latin gay shit.

Then the fatass lookin down da stairs, yells again:

-- Come up bitch! Come up you pussy ass faggot!

Lardass walked to a railin. Be dancin aroun in a circle like jesus. He spies the nigga Deadlis and throws up some gang signs. Deadlis ty'yad as fuck an looks up at the fatass thinkin why da fuk dis horse-faced bitch be screamin bout jesus 8 in the morn'? It aint even ihop day

"Awoke Gregor Samsa, one morning;
found he: himself in a monstrous vermin--transformed."

This is probably the only good one, all the other ones we only think of as good because they're from iconic books, apart from the books they don't stand very well.

We don't realize how damn good and comical Kafka's first line is here because we've been exposed it too much, but it's good.

>It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

>Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.

What a beautiful duwang

idk what that means, that line was written by Raymond Chandler, it's the opening of The Big Sleep, a fairly famous American detective novel written in 1939. Now, can you just blow into this here and recite the alphabet backwards with your hands behind your head while you walk on the straight line, please? Thanks.

I'll give you a whole page...

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

>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

Surprisingly good.

I'd never given much thought to how I would die – though I'd had reason enough in the last few months – but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this.

>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.

"The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed."

Tief ist der Brunnen der Vergangenheit

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

>God-tier

Long hot weary still dead afternoon line from A,A!
I should have it memorized.

>... ¡Alumbra, lumbre de alumbre, Luzbel de piedralumbre! Como zumbido de oídos persistía el rumor de las campanas a la oración, maldoblestar de la luz en la sombra, de la sombra en la luz. ¡Alumbra, lumbre de alumbre, Luzbel de piedralumbre, sobre la podredumbre! ¡Alumbra, lumbre de alumbre, sobre la podredumbre, Luzbel de piedralumbre! ¡Alumbra, alumbra, lumbre de alumbre... , alumbre... , alumbra... , alumbra, lumbre de alumbre... , alumbre... , alumbra... , alumbra, lumbre de alumbre... , alumbra, alumbre... !

It's one of his worst books even if it's his best opener though.

that's what thought too. is that what it is? nobody else seems to have noticed.

I think we've all noticed it.

It's just such an inane subject with which a thread could be derailed, we're actively ignoring it.

I fucking love this line. It immediately introduces two characters, the setting, story action, and genre, it's a shame the rest of the book had to exist.

Pleb af senpai

based on the opening line you mention here in addition to glorifying Kafka's its clear we have completely different taste (Hammett was the better hard boiled writer btw) but:

>It's a truth universally acknowledged ...

is not renowned simply because its from an iconic book. it's an INCREDIBLE opening line

The opening few paragraphs to Hadji Murat. Too long to post here, but it's the greatest opening to anything I've ever read.

>For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say to myself: "I'm falling asleep." And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me.

you're talking about the thistle-brush? i agree; probably Tolstoy's best opening

Recognized it immediately
Good taste user, but Murphy's opening line is better

Yeah, when he's crossing the field and sees a mown-down thistle. So beautiful.

>Homo sum; nihil humani a me alienum puto, said the Latin playwright. And I would rather say, Nullum hominem a me alienum puto: I am a man; no other man do I deem a stranger.

>translation

what I'm currently reading:

As I climb the mountain path, I ponder~
if you work by reason you grow rough-edged, if you choose to dip your oar in sentiment's stream, it will sweep you away. Demanding your own way only serves to constrain you. However you look at it, the human world is not an easy place to live.
And when its difficulties intensify, you find yourself longing to leave that world and dwell in some easier one- and then, when you understand at last that difficulties will dog you wherever you may live, this is when poetry and art are born.

>the ending didn't make that sentence make any more fucking sense

The sentence makes perfect sense you cuck

Sunset found her squatting in the grass, defecating.

"What are you doing, Twilight?" Sunset said. "There's bathrooms in the castle."

>It was a clear black night, a clear white moon

The first paragraph after it is surprisingly okay. Then it goes downhill to the garbage dump

>it was a dark and stormy night

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

What book is this?

Samuel Beckett- Molloy

I used to stay up late.

telegraph.co.uk/culture/10049454/Dont-make-fun-of-renowned-Dan-Brown.html

>be 400 lb 39 yo NEET
>wake up at early hour of 3pm and scream for tendies

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.

my name is ismal