ITT: perfect opening lines

>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!”

>Call me Ishmael.

This is how you instantly connect the reader to the character in less than 3 words.

Imagine being in a bar and a very attractive guy just walks up to you and says, "Hi, My name's ____.", you instantly connect with them because of their confidence. Also, think about the authoritative barrier that gets knocked down when someone tells you to call them by their name. From the perspective of the japs, you only use their last name out of respect, until the person tells you to use their first name. In a way you connect with Ishmael for both of these reasons when he says "call me Ishmael."

Does anyone have a link to read Moby's Dick online?

"I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies" is unironically a fantastic line

"You're probably wondering"

Here's your (you) and your "holy... I want more," in that order exactly

I instantly knew that was DFW despite only reading ch1 of infinite jest briefly, and nearly a year ago. Holy shit, maybe he's not a meme after all. I gotta actually sit down and read that book. No idea how I was able to recall that almost instantly, I guess his writing really is memorable, even at a subconscious level.

quoting the first line of a classic or popular book makes you seem cultured and cool without effort

only well written sequence in the book

>The man in black fled across the desert and the Gunslinger followed.

That's pretty sick

"You're dead."

I always liked the first line of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

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

crash! only one golden retriever remained, two if you counted mom's pancakes.

One morning near the end of October not long before the first drops of the mercilessly long autumn rains began to fall on the cracked and saline soil on the western side of the estate (later the stinking yellow sea of mud would render footpaths impassable and put the town too beyond reach) Futaki woke to hear bells

>As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

Straight to the point, no bullshitting around it.

>It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realised, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn't sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it's all you've got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.

I honestly just learned today that this wasn't a John Green excerpt.

In the Game of Thrones, some win, some lose: WATCH OUT!

I honestly tried reading that book and got bored immediately. Is something wrong with me?

My favourite one
>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.

>I put on my robe and wizard hat.

>Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to score ice
Brilliant!

why are these threads the same 20 fucking lines every time

moby dick
100 yrs of solitude
kafka
mason and dixon
gravity's rainbow
the iliad / the aeneid (never the odyssey)
the fucking gunslinger
a bunch of memers
some faulkner
infinite jest
lolita
mrs dalloway
gatsby
notes from underground
the stranger
portrait of the artist
sometimes jane austen
sometimes calvino

like fuck
do we read any other books
do we read any books
god dammit lit
aren't you sick of this shit

just fucking google "iconic opening lines" and it's the same shit

alright and I'll share something so I'm not just complaining.
Coetzee's Disgrace
"For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well"

gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=moby dick&go=Go

See the child.

DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.

Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you.

>Midnight mass of dismembered members of the Low Lutheran Church; a flock disbanded by the Booming Bells, a scurried snow fight on the whitened steps of a Church not hundred years old, yet forgotten by the once-so-bold; and a priest awakens from his Red Sleep down in the crypt, covered in cold, red wine stains and - not his - shit.
Some user once posted this. Still think it's brilliant.

Have you ever tried to understand, its like 3 words?
1. He doesn't say "my name is Ishmael" he says "call me" suggesting that his name might not actually be ishmael, and because of this inauthentic persona presented, his narrative might be inauthentic or partly inauthentic as well.
2. call me also has the suggestion of intimacy, ie my name is robert, but call me bob, which sets the tone for his intimate and conversational tone throughout the rest of the narrative
3. Ishmael contains biblical significance

Thats just a surface level examination of the opening sentence,I'm sure if you sat down and applied yourself you could come up with more.

this.
fucking plebs on this board srsly!

isn't this from a pynchon novel?

o scholar where might this beautiful prose come from

Gives me that shitty 80s movie vibe.

alright alight mate, calm you yourselves, blimeh

Lil' Machinegun & He Crew

Is this a joke?

>-Money? in a voice that rustled.
From 'J R,' perfect opening

>Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster
From 'Laughter in the Dark,' by Nabokov. Very underrated btw

No.

>Jim not that way Jim. That's no way to treat a garage door, bending stiffly down at the waist and yanking at the handle so the door jerks up and out jerky and hard and you crack your shins and my ruined knees, son. Let's see you bend at the healthy knees. Let's see you hook a soft hand lightly over the handle feeling its subtle grain and pull just as exactly gently as will make it come to you. Experiment, Jim. See just how much force you need to start the door easy, let it roll up out open on its hidden greasy rollers and pulleys in the ceiling's set of spiderwebbed beams. Think of all garage doors as the well-oiled open-out door of a broiler with hot meat in, heat roiling out, hot. Needless and dangerous ever to yank, pull, shove, thrust. Your mother is a shover and a thruster, son. She treats bodies outside herself without respect or due care. She's never learned that treating things in the gentlest most relaxed way is also treating them and your own body in the most efficient way. It's Marlon Brando's fault, Jim. Your mother back in California before you were born, before she became a devoted mother and long-suffering wife and breadwinner, son, your mother had a bit part in a Marlon Brando movie. Her big moment. Had to stand there in saddle shoes and bobby sox and ponytail and put her hands over her ears as really loud motorbikes roared by. A major thespian moment, believe you me. She was in love from afar with this fellow Marlon Brando, son. Who? Who. Jim, Marlon Brando was the archetypal new-type actor who ruined it looks like two whole generations' relations with their own bodies and the everyday objects and bodies around them. No? Well it was because of Brando you were opening that garage door like that, Jimbo. The disrespect gets learned and passed on. Passed down. You'll know Brando when you watch him, and you'll have learned to fear him. Brando, Jim, Jesus, B-r-a-n-d-o. Brando the new archetypal tough-guy rebel and slob type, leaning back on his chair's rear legs, coming crooked through doorways, slouching against everything in sight, trying to dominate objects, showing no artful respect or care, yanking things toward him like a moody child and using them up and tossing them crudely aside so they miss the wastebasket and just lie there, ill-used. With the over-clumsy impetuous movements and postures of a moody infant. Your mother is of that new generation that moves against life's grain, across its warp and baffles. She may have loved Marlon Brando, Jim, but she didn't understand him, is what's ruined her for everyday arts like broilers and garage doors and even low-level public-park knock-around tennis. Ever see your mother with a broiler door? It's carnage, Jim, it's to cringe to see it, and the poor dumb thing thinks it's tribute to this slouching slob-type she loved as he roared by.

No.

Searching it in quotes on Google, I only find a Veeky Forums thread and a "veekyforums" thread.

I loved that bit. The Eschaton chapter was really fun too

damn. i always thought it was from, say, mason & dixon. never trust Veeky Forums.
it's pynchon-esque though...

>Yo what's up my name is Ishmael and we're going to hunt Moby Dick, or The Whale.

FUCKING REALLY

>CRASH, Pancakes, Golden Retrievers. Some called it the Unholy Trinity or an Omen. I called it business as usual.

>Call me CRASH.

>gigantic insect
>not "monstrous vermin"

This, gigantic insect is a trash translation

>There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

>The world is my idea : " — this is a truth
which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness.

>The world is everything that is the case

Stately, plump

>Crash! Only one Korean pancake remained; two, if you counted the Golden Retriever.

Do it. Some parts you'll have to power through but the book is immensely rewarding if you manage to complete it. It made me completely reevaluate and changed the way I treated people in my life.

>I am a sick man ... I am a spiteful man.

>My whole life I've been a fraulein

Fuck, that's beautiful

>spiteful

See the child.

Better than Moby Dick imho

go back

I really liked the opening dialogue in War and Peace.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

Literally the greatest sentence ever written.

underrated

>reading online
>reading moby dick online

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.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.

That sentence, man. It's the perfect example of three or four rhetorical figures. I wish I could remember them. Parataxis is one of them.

I'm sorry what

"I'm dead?"

Which version? The earlier copies are pretty bad - they're just stitched together from short stories that King got published in Playboy or some shit. The later editions (from ~2002 onwards) are more polished and have a more cohesive narrative.

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

Fucking beautiful.

from?

crashes rarely good
never CRASH! mom made pancakes
or CRASH!
mom adopt golden retriever

>All this happened, more or less.
Spicy first line for a spicy ass book

I'm searching I'm searching I'm trying to understand

>saying "spicy"
>Liking that dumb lmao so randumb meme book
Please go back to plebbit

yeah you're right, probably should have written a novel on why "Call me Ishmael" is the greatest thing a human has ever written

Atleast then you wouldn't have come off as 15 year old wannabe memester

>It was a pleasure to burn.
I hated F451 but I'll never forget that opening line.

like a bad neochmia

>Boo!

Nearly shit my pants with that one.

Who is John Galt?

>
shit, I have to read this

>I am a product of Don Smith's balls

>I am an invisible man.

Honestly I gotta wonder if Melville actually thought about shit like this or just started started the narrative with the main character's name in mind

>What should be the opening line?.....
>Whatever its not like I'm writing the greatest novel in my country's history, just a story about whales
>hmmm, fuck it. Call me Ishmael!

>OOGA BOOGA!

All this talk about Call Me Ishmael reminds me of the book Memoir From Antproof Case which starts in this manner:
>"Call me Oscar Progresso."
only to be followed by
>"Or, for that matter, call me anything you want, as Oscar Progresso is not my name. Nor are Baby Supine, Euclid Cherry, Franklyn Nuts, or any of the other aliases that, now and then over the years, I have been forced to adopt. No one knows my real name anymore: it’s been too long. And all the things that I myself once knew are like a ship glittering in the dark, moving away from me as I am left in homely silence. My time is drawing to a close, so I thought I would take one last shot."
The protagonist's name is never mentioned again after the opening.

Good fucking choice OP, that's epic

>melville doesn't know what to write
>oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck
>copy and pastes some 19th century whaling manual
>wew, that was a close one

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

C’était à Mégara, faubourg de Carthage, dans les jardins d’Hamilcar.

Moby Dick was just an adventure book first and foremost. He never had notions of making it some intelligent literary piece.

That's just not true. He started writing it as a whaling adventure, then drastically revised and altered his approach after befriending Hawthorne and reading Shakespeare.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby-Dick