100 Best First Lines

In any case, the first line of The Voyage of the Dawntreader was always my favourite. I could have sworn it was "There once was a boy named..." rather than "There was a boy named...", but I could have made that up just because it scans better in my head.

Hey! We should play the first lines game!

60. What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?
—Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971)

can anyone tell me more about this one?

The opening line of GR is, at least, memorable, and/or famous, famous enough to be parodied (was it referenced on the Simpsons once?).

Somebody must have been telling lies about Gary L, for suddenly one morning, without doing anything, he was shown the red card.

It was very funny at the time. Perhaps it still is. In fact, this is why I like Gary L on MOTD.

Didn't even have to change this one.

BTW, my favourite Gary L comment was during that crappy World Club Championship a few years ago when Man Utd were allowed to duck out of the FA Cup to play pointless matches in Brazil.

Raja Casablanca were on the attack and the ball hit the bar, shot down over the line and bounced out again. The referee waved play on. Cut back to the studio and a deadpan Gary L saying "poor Casablanca, of all the bars in all the world..."

TWO LINES!!

Yes, Ken L. can.

Ha! I just got around to buying Lunar Follies, his latest, this weekend and he is still up to his same hijinks- lampooning bohemia and the art world. Although that is perhaps a simplification.

(The Trial is on the list!)

A lot of these you need the whole book to "make it work!" Though that's the difference in the ones I agree with on the list and the ones I don't - there are several where I haven't read the book myself but now I want to because the first line is so foreboding/exciting and there's tension built right off the bat. (then there's James & Federman & Pynchon reassuring me that I'm not missing anything but then again that's me, isn't it?)

I like first lines where
a. An nameless character is pronounced the recipient of great misfortune, if not flat-out dead
b. Love is declared
c. The reader is forced to assume a wild ride because the circumstances described make no goddamned sense, certainly not as the beginning of a 20,000+-word narrative

First post to ILB!

It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it’s all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it’s night. He’s afraid of the way the glass will fall -- soon -- it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.

Nice to see you.

I like the dark and stormy night one. Because I never knew where it came from.

The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.

-- Flann O'Brien, The Hard Life: An Exegesis of Squalor (Yes. That's two lines. I know.)

"He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."

-- Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

I did get the distinct sense that the list was a messy hodge-podge, without any idea of why any line there was included. Some were mediocre lines from excellent books. Others were diffuse and discursive while others were brief and sought to jar the reader. One could read all of them a hundred times over and not know much more about how to write a good first line than one did before starting, because they so often 'contradict' one another.

I haven't read Take It Or Leave It, but I've read a few other Federman books, and they haven't had the magic.

12. You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. — Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

The excellence of this as an opening sentence eludes me. Sure, I read that book with great pleasure and it is an almost unanimous pick by critics as one of the best and most influential American books of all time. But this first sentence? Meh.

remarkable things about it: i) someone who talks like what huck being the narrator ii) refererencing that-book-Tom-Sawyer-by-that-guy-Mark-Twain

Wait, that's not quite right.