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hiss  ·  4148 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Authors' favorite first lines of books

Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins (master of opening lines):

    In the last quarter of the twentieth century, at a time when Western civilization was declining too rapidly for comfort and yet too slowly to be very exciting, much of the world sat on the edge of an increasingly expensive theater seat, waiting--with various combinations of dread, hope, and ennui--for something momentous to occur.

Also, I found this site in my hunt for the exact verbiage to that opening:

http://novelopenings.blogspot.com/