ITT we post first lines, can be from books you've read, books you've made or just off the top of your head

ITT we post first lines, can be from books you've read, books you've made or just off the top of your head.

Can be as attention grabbing as you like, or as utterly shit as you like, just be creative.

I'll start with something I just made up.

>The downpour outside splattered across the windows like a crowd against a market stall. Or at least it did on half of the house, the other half lacking such a luxury as intact glass.

>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!”

Here they come, marching into American sunlight.

>It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.

It wasn't the first time I saw a bloody penis hanging from a tree branch, but it was the first time I'd seen that at a quiet, suburban, daycare.

et comme diogène, celui qui a conquis le conquérant, je me branle.

The meme has been besieging my mind for days now, trying to burst through with a rush or weaselling its way in through subterfuge. It is my only enemy, two of you count God. CRASH!

When she came to the square she aimed for the pigeons huddled in groups.

Crash! Pancakes!

About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet's lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income.

interest. is this a meme?

Dear my diary desu

Not a meme. Its from a story I'm working on. Not really sure what it's about though. Lots of conflicting ideas, but the main theme is childhood (I think?). The girl in the line is like 15 or so

>Doritos, light of my life, cheese on my fingers. My hunger, my munchies. Do-ree-toes: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Do. Ree. Tos. It was chips, plain chips, during lunch, weighing one-point-eight ounces in one hand. It was Nacho Cheese for snacks. It was Cool Ranch at school. It was Salsa Verde in the shopping line. But in my mouth it was always Doritos.

please critique the first sentence of my novel

*record scratch* *freeze frame* - So you're probably wondering how I got here.

It was love at first sight.
The first time Yossarian sa the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.

- Catch-22 (surprisingly not about homosexuality)

...

Did you write this? It's honestly "brettygud.png"

Nah, it's from the first chapter of Jerusameme. (I didn't post the Prelude since it's a bit rambly.)

>Jerusameme
I'm not familiar with this new meme? When did it spawn?

Sir Rudi, that's Jerusalem by Alan Moore - Veeky Forums latched onto it since it's extremely long and he did an interview praising DFW and Zizek, but then it turned out to be an actually decent novel with dank Blake and Joyce references. (At least I think so, there's plenty of anons who'll tell you it's pleb shit because "muh Watchmen".)

*no idea why autocorrect thought "sorry" needed to become "Sir Rudi".

"We're naming the disease after you."

Every single opening sentence from every single John Swartzwelder story:

"As my amazing story begins, I am being punched in the stomach."

"First off, I'd like to apologize for the billions of dead"

These are the two that best spring to mind.

Holy..I want more..

>The weather-beaten trail wound ahead into the dust racked climes of the baren land which dominates large portions of the Norgolian empire.

I must've been eight or nine the first time I masturbated to a microwave oven.

"Mine has been a life of much shame"

>Nabokov time

"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged-the same house, the same people- and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated."

They told me to believe in my self; to believe in God. That I have done.

There is honestly nothing better than throwing a viscious fist at the jaw of a slut while you fuck her. Nothing more animalistic or primal. What makes it better is when it is a bitch you had romantic feelings for. Beyond the thought of hate fucking a former lover imagine their bloody mouth spitting out a tooth or two as tears start to form. Nothing combines sexual and physical power quite like it. The unification of her fear and my pleasure heightened every instinct within me. From my pineal gland to my heels I was in cimplete control. To finish off the job I throw her to the floor, grab her by the throat and drag my nails on her tit until she opens wide. From that ripped mouth comes a scream silenced by my finishing.

This summer I killed an eleven year old child.

what book is this?

These days only the reindeer will let me spank them.

I just started writing it four hours ago.

i'd say u'd have a chance to get it published if the narrator's (your) family was hispanic or jewish, but nobody is going to publish a story about an italian

>It was on that quiet Sunday morning at the family table, where Philly sat with an ear in his bowl, creamed and listening for iron speck crackles somewhere deep in his milk and Cherrios tm, when he admitted he'd gone mad. Listening for that molecular low crackling atom torture of every morning since the day he had started, the secret sound that any person bowlwardly always heard always, he thought, but that even his closest neighbor couldn't, the one that was ignored as to spare his fellow diners of the fixations of discovery; listening to that, he knew. He was alone now at that family table and the whole room could hear that crackling clearly. "I must admit, I must be crazy." with all that milk swirling down his lobe draining into the inner parts and bringing with it all those little iron pieces that might spread through the tubes up a sinus and into his brain forever weighing on his subversive thoughts and making solid all the fluidinal energy that stirred in that great mind.

I... Holy more want

Santo... Yo quiero mas..

It was tempting to say that the next thing he knew, he was waking up in a hospital bed, but it was not nearly as simple as that. For a long time he drifted on the edge of consciousness. He was aware of the moment someone lifted him up off the sand and put him on a stretcher, and he'd heard him hurriedly telling the medic that he was unconscious. He remembered thinking this wasn't really true. He was perfectly conscious, he just couldn't seem to be bothered opening his eyes or responding to all the irritating people who kept calling his name and shaking him when all he wanted to do was sleep.

It’s 3am in the morning and I love you. Ava, I love you. For all eternity I will love you. Did you know
that? It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to love me back. You don’t even have to be alive for me to love
you. BECAUSE I LOVE YOU. And my love is greater than anything you could possibly ever give.

Happy birthday, my darling sweet Ava.

In a flash of mystic purple, she appeared behind him, chesty.

>chesty
im hooked.

Every time she sneezed he caught it in his mouth. It's my purpose, he thought.

>ancient grease
nice

oh i get it, i thought the italian shit was some "muh ethnic cooking" bullshit to get it on those big tables in the front of barnes and nobles, but it was about the european tradition, i didn't read it seriously

"So you want to disrespect anime, huh?" he spat, shaking his purple fedora. "Pathetic."

How did you infer "ethnic cooking"? It looked to me like he was trying to invoke "muh Americana" and how Americans all end up eating the same mass-produced shit.

i donno bro, it just seems like any book (and i was reading this as if it was an excerpt of a published book not a shitpost) that drops the ethnicity of the grandparents while the protagonist is having an erotic experience in the kitchen is just going to be "hey publishers can i be the junot diaz of my ethnicity?"

Sir Rudi is now the name of the main character in my Borges-inspired metafictional fantastic-realism science fiction short story.

Don't because it's also the name of some weebshit anime novel character.

As MacPherson aimlessly wandered the streets, he took in the scenery. The first thing he noticed was that the air smelled of spittle and burnt mothballs. Public housing projects in various states of disrepair stretched out as far as his mildly below-average nano-optics could visualize.

"The old professor had a rather simple thought."

"September 16, 1991. Today it finally began! After all these years of talking-and nothing but talking-we have finally taken our first
action. We are at war with the System, and it is no longer a war of words."

You stupid monkey!

Only one enemy left; Two If you count god.

UltraHitler and Captain Planet were fighting across the skies over MegaCity Three. And, this time, it was to the death.

oh my god where is this from i want to devour it

Underrated desu

ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn’t seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, “Be My Baby” on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.

what a ride
i tried to read american psycho though and i found it insufferably tedious. insufferable.

pff ha

The planet sparkled redly outside the port window, like a grain of ruby set amongst scattered diamonds.

>Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

no first line can match this

damn, beat me to it.

"Check out my sick new car, mom."