Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins (master of opening lines): Also, I found this site in my hunt for the exact verbiage to that opening: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.
From your link: Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins."The beet is the most intense of vegetables."
-That was a novel I really enjoyed reading. I went through a big Tom Robbins phase in high school/college.
I've never read these books, but the opening lines make me want to: -- Fred D'Aguiar, The Longest Memory -- Jane Austen, Pride and PrejudiceI found this site
The future is just more of the past waiting to happen.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
Hey I love that you said that one! Vonnegut is my favorite author. I've read nearly all his books. Slaughterhouse-Five is a real gem. Have you read Cat's Cradle?
I understand. It's really fantastic. I think it's his best. Couldn't recommend it enough.I've started it twice, but each time More Pressing Matters started demanding my attention, so I've never finished it.
I've started it twice, but each time More Pressing Matters started demanding my attention, so I've never finished it.
I've started it twice, but each time More Pressing Matters started demanding my attention, so I've never finished it.
My favorite excerpt: It was now lunch time and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had happened.
Years ago, I relished it as a reader, but since I've come to admire it as a story writer. He was so smart to put so much in the bank with that sentence. It suggests the inventory that he'll draw from as the tale unfolds. He's rich. I also like that detail of the "double green fly of the dining tent," offering us the specific place, a real thing, the beginning of the grounding credibility which was so often the earmark and method of his work.My choice is a famous sentence, that opening of Hemingway's The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. It reads:
Yeah, that's a good one. I was hoping to find something in there about Stephen King's first sentence in "The Gunslinger" that kicked off his Dark Tower series: "The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed."
This is my wife's favourite first line of a book :It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.
Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers
I've not read it. I loved A Clockwork Orange though, so I should. Pro tip to anyone reading A Clockwork Orange - there's a glossary in the back (which I didn't find until I'd finished the book).
Simon Sellers, High-Rise I haven't even read the book but I will always remember that line.Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.