I’d like to share some memorable and delightful first lines of books.
I’ve got Georgianne Ensign’s book Great Beginnings waiting for me at the library, but my shelves are already full of examples that I particularly love. I judge a book by it’s first page. How ‘bout you?

Here's the one that made me a convert:

"It is a question of method. Whether to rush you up to the girls pell-mell, leaving you to become acquainted as best you can; or, with elaborate slyness, to slip you so casually into their family life that they will not even glance up when you enter the room or leave it; or to present the three of them in solemn order according to age, epoch, and story."

-The Girls by Edna Ferber

Well, you can't beat the first line of The Crow Road by Iain Banks: "It was the day my grandmother exploded."

Yes! That's exactly what I mean!
Already on the hunt for The Crow Road, no matter what it is about.

Thanks.

In the days when spinning-wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses --- and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread-lace, had their toy spinning-wheels of polished oak --- there might be seen, in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race.

No fair! You have to tell where it's from!

Silas Marner :)

We used to play a game here, trying to guess a first line - and I think I let it drop - let me go and check (and oops if I did).

Wow, I haven't read that for decades. Time to re-visit.

I do not think I had read it at all - the first few pages were in a textbook that I was studying from more than a decade ago (always thought to actually track it down and read it, never got to it). :)

Bericht bewerkt door schrijver, feb 11, 11:23am.

That's almost as many words in a sentence as Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Here's one that's obscure, but sweet:

"Mrs. Penfield’s house had originally been a barn; but it had chanced to come up in the world as Mrs. Penfield went down, and they had met and joined forces to make a home where none had been intended."

-The Custard Cup by Florence Bingham Livingston

Here's a more recent one that I just loved I had to keep reading-

Burn This Book.
Go On.Quickly, while there's still time.Burn it.Don't look at another word.Did you hear me? Not.One.More.Word.

- Mister B. Gone by, Clive Barker

I've heard it said that the main argument for the Beatles being the most famous (note: 'famous', not 'best') pop group ever is that you can begin listing them by first name and do two - "John, Paul ..." - and the majority of people in the Western world will guess. Fewer now, no doubt, but I reckon no contemporary band comes near this level of fame.

Anyway, some openings have that level of fame, I'd say...

"In a hole..."

"It is a truth..."

"It was the best..."

>11
That could be a whole new guessing game - truncated first lines. Joyce would be good: if you omit Portrait of the artist, you can reduce the other major books to one word each:
"riverrun..." Finnegan's Wake
"Stately..." Ulysses

Virginia Woolf might be too much of a giveaway:
"Mrs Dalloway said..." Mrs Dalloway

Robert Graves might be willfully misleading:
"I, Tiberius..." I, Claudius

And Herman Melville becomes an advert for the telephone company:
"Call me..." Moby-Dick

(edited for touchstones)

Bericht bewerkt door schrijver, feb 15, 7:31am.

Like listening to just a few notes of a song. But do we play these lines in our heads all the time?

Sometimes a memorable first page takes it's time, and you are caught so smoothly, you don't even feel the jolt. In fact, it's love...

"This is the story of Danny and of Danny’s friends and of Danny’s house. It is a story of how these three things became one thing, so that in Tortilla Flat if you speak of Danny’s house you do not mean a structure of wood flaked with old whitewash, overgrown with an ancient untrimmed rose of Castile. No, when you speak of Danny’s house you are understood to mean a unit of which the parts are men, from which came sweetness and joy, philanthropy and, in the end, a mystic sorrow. For Danny’s house was not unlike the Round Table, and Danny’s friends were not unlike the knights of it. And this is the story of how that group came into being, of how it flourished and grew to be an organization beautiful and wise.
…It is well that this cycle be put down on paper so that in future time scholars, hearing the legends, may not say as they say of Arthur and of Roland and of Robin Hood – “There was no Danny nor any group of Danny’s friends, nor any house. Danny is a nature god and his friends primitive symbols of the wind, the sky, the sun.” This history is designed now and ever to keep the sneers from the lips of sour scholars."

Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck

Bericht bewerkt door schrijver, mrt 20, 1:33pm.

>13
Yes, definitely.
Flippancy aside, that's exactly how the openings of Mrs Dalloway and Portrait of the artist as a young man work.

One I particularly like is the opening of P.G. Wodehouse's Summer lightning. You get the best part of a page of gentle, lyrical description of an afternoon at Blandings Castle ("...that gracious hour of a summer afternoon, midway between luncheon and afternoon tea, when nature seems to unbutton its waistcoat and put its feet up."), the butler taking a nap in the shade of a laurel bush, and then, artfully placed at the very bottom of the first page, there is a new paragraph:

At this moment, the laurel bush, which had hitherto not spoken, said "Pssst!"

I defy anyone to read that without an irresistible urge to turn the page and find out what happens next.

But the best example I know of an opening that creeps up at you and drags you in is Under Milk Wood. Of course, that was written as a radio play, which is probably the toughest medium in which to grab the audience's attention. A single snappy first line is wasted if half your audience is boiling kettles and the other half rustling biscuit wrappers as they settle down in their comfy chairs. But by the time the First Voice gets to the "sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea", they're listening, and they keep on listening.
(Burton doing it on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuPO2Kvqlms )
Of course, most of us listening nowadays have grown up with Oliver Postgate's Ivor the Engine, which uses almost exactly the same tricks to get your attention, so the effect isn't quite the same as it was in 1954!

Bericht bewerkt door schrijver, feb 16, 7:05pm.

>15
Frankly, no. My eyes seem to wander agonisedly down the page.

er, ah, that was awkward. I like your response Susan.

Here's another of my favorites:

"Long ago, centuries perhaps, the village of Greenwillow had been stood in the corner and forgotten."

The rest of the first page describes the river: "By the time it passed the steepled and sober church, with its two pastors and its two front doors and its two ways of walking before the Lord, the Meander was as narrow as a needle and as polite as a pussycat."

Greenwillow by B.J. Chute.

I love it... the use of similies and alliteration really reaches out and captures my attention. I haven't read {Greenwillow} yet, but I will seek out a copy soon!

You will certainly enjoy it.

I got Great Beginnings from the library, and the author has systematized the types of beginnings. And of course, is using many well known books as examples. I think I will adopt her system for my own use for the more obscure novels in my collection. I've ordered another book along the same lines, but can't recall the title just now. I'll post my impressions here when I get it.

>16,17
Susan - thanks for taking it in the spirit in which it was intended! - I did feel a bit guilty about my comment afterwards. But you did ask. I'm obviously not in your target audience. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to read a whole book written in that Moody & Sankey style, however well it's done, and however appropriate it is to the time and place.

Memorable:

"Hello darkness, my old friend, I've come to talk with you again..." {Sound of Silence} {{Paul Simon}}

Also memorable:

"As summer wheat came ripe, so did I...."

{Out of the Dust} {{Karen Hesse}}

both use personification, metaphors, and alliteration to create memorable impressions that stay with the reader long after the "song/story" has ended.

I found and bought another book that catalogs first lines - In the Beginning; Great First Lines from Your Favorite Books.
It is alphabetic by book title, and has only the first sentence, whether it be 2 words or 100. It claims over 500 entries ranging from classic to obscure. Shall I share some with you?
There are definitely some that could easily be identified:

"All children, except one, grow up."

and then:
"When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere." - The Day of the Triffids

Lots of good stuff here, my lists just got much longer.

A couple memorable beginnings:

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. -{{ Leo Tolstoy}}, {Anna Karenina} (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl's underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self. - {{John Hawkes}}, {Second Skin} (1964)

and a most memorable last line.."Frankly Scarlett..."

Shirley Jackson is the master (mistress?) of great opening lines. Stephen King dissected the first paragraph of The Haunting of Hill House in his wonderful Danse Macabre. Here is the beginning of Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

John Crowley has some good beginnings too. This one is kind of a cheat: The Solitudes has two different prologues (The Prologue in Heaven and The Prologue on Earth!) but the book proper begins like this:

If ever some power with three wishes to grant were to appear before Pierce Moffett, he or she or it (djinn, fairy godmother, ring curiously inscribed) would find him not entirely unprepared, but not entirely ready either.

Hate to pick nits, moondance, but the last line of Gone With the Wind is actually "Tomorrow is another day."

Lots of praise for {We Have Always Lived in the Castle} in Girlybooks group. I'm intrigued by the first page, but I don't like horror. Would you classify it as such, revelshade?

A couple of really short ones from old novels:

"I admit I kissed her." The Way of A Man by Emerson Hough http://www.librarything.com/work/9114170

and
"Land hunger is so general that it may be regarded as a natural craving." The Home Acre by E.P. Roe.

2wonderY (great name, btw)- I would call it a psychological mystery story. Although there is no detective character it does revolve around past deaths that may or may not have been murders. There's no grue or gore, if that's what horror means to you. It is non-supernatural, although for one giddy moment in the middle of the book Jackson makes you wonder if you've been reading a ghost story without knowing it. It's hard to say anything meaningful about the book without spoiling it. It's very restrained and subtle. I wouldn't hesitate to offer it to a smart junior high student. Jackson's intent isn't to frighten but to fascinate. It even has a happy ending, of a sort, heh heh...

You've sold me. The suspense has already heightened.

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, and the perfect beginning to the quintessential private eye novel.

I hope this thread doesn't die out too soon. Great opening lines are a special kind of poetry, plus they give you an excuse to pull out old books!

I totally agree!
I won't be back on till next week, so the rest of you need to chime in here with some more lovelies.

I'll keep this thread going all by myself if I have to. I'm not proud. This is from A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle.

The baloney weighed the raven down, and the shopkeeper almost caught him as he whisked out the delicatessen door. Frantically he flapped his wings to gain altitude, looking like a small black electric fan. An updraft caught him and threw him into the sky. He circled twice, to get his bearings, and began to fly north.
Below, the shopkeeper stood with his hands on his hips, looking up at the diminishing cinder in the sky. Presently he shrugged and went back into his delicatessen. He was not without philosophy, this shopkeeper, and he knew that if a raven comes into your delicatessen and steals a whole baloney it is either an act of God or it isn't, and in either case there isn't very much you can do about it.

When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man. His knees pressed down on the interloper's back, his hands were clasped around his forehead. He heard the phone ring, distantly, in the house, as he jerked his forearms back; heard the neck snap; heard the phone's second ring, cut off, as Claire answered, somewhere in the house.

Firebreak by the late, great Richard Stark, pseudonym of the equally late, even greater Donald Westlake.

Amal wanted a closer look into the soldier's eyes, but the muzzle of his automatic rifle,pressed against her forehead,would not allow it.

Mornings in Jenin by, Susan Abulhawa

"Kidnapping is a fact of life. Always has been, always will be. Extorting a ransom is an age-old pastime, less risky and more lucrative than robbing banks."

pre-page 1 from The Danger by Dick Francis

page 1 actually says:

"There was a God-awful screw-up in Bologna."

both quotes are excellent.
love this book!!

This thread could be my downfall. TOO MANY wonderful choices!

And I'm thinking they can start to be catagorized by subject.
For instance:

"I thought about being dead." -Inferno, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

adding to #33 and #34 - Death or Near Death

Ha ha, Niven has some great hooks. We can keep the dead theme going with one of his solo works, A World Out of Time.

Once there was a dead man.
He had been waiting for two hundred years inside a coffin, suitably labelled, whose outer shell held liquid nitrogen. There were frozen clumps of cancer all through his frozen body. He had had it bad.
He was waiting for medical science to find him a cure.
He waited in vain. Most varieties of cancer could be cured now, but no cure existed for the billions of cell walls ruptured by expanding crystals of ice. He had known the risk. He had gambled anyway. Why not? He'd been dying.
The vaults held over a million of these frozen bodies. Why not? They'd been dying.

Here's the entire first chapter of Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal (warning: salty language)

I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess. Clad only in garter belt and one dress shield, I held off the entire elite of the Trobriand Islanders, a race who possess no words for "why" or "because." Wielding a stone axe, I broke the arms, the limbs, the balls of their finest warriors, my beauty blinding them, as it does all men, unmanning them in the way that King Kong was reduced to a mere simian whimper by beauteous Fay Wray whom I resemble left three-quarter profile if the key light is no more than five feet high during the close shot.

Bericht bewerkt door schrijver, mrt 16, 10:48am.

WOW!!!

"Mrs Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies' eardrops, and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde's Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs Rachel Lynde's door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof."

The first paragraph (of the first chapter, entitled 'Mrs Rachel Lynde is Surprised') of Anne of Green Gables. One of my favourite books; reading this gives me a little thrill, because the story isn't about Mrs Rachel, it's about a little red-headed orphan with a vivid imagination, and this is just the prelude to the treasures that follow. And I quite sympathise with the stream.

I canʻt give an idea of it in words alone, but the first 3 pages of McLuhanʻs The Medium is the Massage (sic) consists of (with a lot of illustrations) these 9 words:

The medium is the massage. -- The MASSAGE!!?? --
AND H O W !!!!!

Now that I'm sensitized to it, I'm 'wading through' all sorts of personification of water examples. Time for a new thread? Thanks humouress. I'd forgotten how wonderful Lucy Maude is.

"They're out there."
-One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey

I hate to hog this thread, but I've got several more to share.
As I'm cataloging now, I'm looking at first pages, cover art, frontespice, interesting inscriptions, interesting bookmarks, paper or otherwise (there is a thread on that)http://www.librarything.com/topic/63105
as well as publishing information so that I can contribute to CK etc.
I attend one REALLY good booksale every year, and buy by the car-full. So my shelves have lots of books I haven't read yet. I buy from the first page and also authors who have delighted me in the past.
I've only read one by Arnold Bennett, Buried Alive. But I opened this one yesterday and recall why he so delights me:

“Those two girls, Constance and Sophia Baines, paid no heed to the manifold interest of their situation, of which, indeed, they had never been conscious. They were, for example, established almost precisely on the fifty-third parallel of latitude. A little way to the north of them, in the creases of a hill famous for its religious orgies, rose the river Trent, the calm and characteristic stream of middle England. Somewhat further northwards, in the near neighborhood of the highest public-house in the realm, rose two lesser rivers, the Dane and the Dove, which, quarreling in early infancy, turned their backs on each other, and, the one by favour of the Weaver and the other by favour of the Trent, watered between them the whole width of England, and poured themselves respectively into the Irish Sea and the German Ocean. What a county of modest, unnoticed rivers! What a natural, simple county, content to fix its boundaries by these torturous island brooks, with their comfortable names – Trent, Mease, Dove, Tern, Dane, Mees, Stour, Tame, and even hasty Severn! Not that the Severn is suitable to the county! In the county excess is deprecated. The county is happy in not exciting remark. It is content that Shropshire should possess that swollen bump, the Wrekin, and that the exaggerated wildness of the Peak should lie over its border. “

-The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett
http://www.librarything.com/work/58156
touchstone is not working

This also qualifies as water personification! tee-hee

Bericht bewerkt door schrijver, mrt 17, 12:35pm.

Can't believe I didn't think of this one right off the bat. Imagine grabbing a 75 cent paperback off the spinner rack at your local drugstore circa 1970 and reading this:

There is entwined seven-tentacled lightning. It is fire-masses, it is sheets, it is arms. It is seven-colored writhing in the darkness, electric and alive. It pulsates, it sends, it sparkles, it blinds!
It explodes!
It is seven murderous thunder-snakes striking in seven directions along the ground! Blindingly fast! Under your feet! Now! At you!
And You! You who glanced in here for but a moment, you are already snake-bit!
It is too late for you to withdraw. The damage is done to you. That faintly odd taste in your mouth, that smallest of tingles which you feel, they signal the snake-death.
Die a little. There is reason for it.

Fourth Mansions by R. A. Lafferty.

high five!
Nice!

“Lord Orcis was on one of his tours of inspection. With Duke Agla his next in command, and Hifni his expert on authors, and a trio decked out like sirens strumming on lutes, and his humble servant (and yours) hobbling hindmost. We’d just come into Carmichael’s motor cortex, lit up by the spasmodic flashing of synapses directing his index fingers to poke at his typewriter, when the whole place went more or less dark, even the neuron chains hooked up to his eyeballs, leaving nothing but the regular dull flicker of his autonomous nervous system. The bank that worked his lungs surged in a sigh. Then muscle controls began to pulse all around us as Carmichael pushed back his chair and heaved himself upright.”
Carmichael’s Dog by R. M. Koster
http://www.librarything.com/work/983208

Bericht bewerkt door schrijver, mrt 17, 6:31pm.

I can't believe nobody's done this one yet:

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.

(One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez).

Not that I've ever read it, but it's been quoted so often, it's stuck in my brain at the moment:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it ws the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way."

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (sorry - touchstone behaving erratically. I confess, I got the quote from the internet)

Bericht bewerkt door schrijver, mrt 18, 11:32am.

Actually, this was the one I wanted to put in:

"The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend"

The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan

(and he continues this theme in the following books)

"The magic in that country was so thick and tenacious that it settled over the land like chalk-dust and over floors and shelves like slightly sticky plaster dust."

Spindle's End by Robin McKinley

"Women on their own run in Alice's family. This dawns on her with the unkindness of a heart attack and she sits up in bed to get a closer look at her thoughts, which have collected above her in the dark."

Why are these kinds of thoughts so partial to the dark?

The first lines of Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver.

Lovely stuff.

Kingsolver makes me think of Africa (The Poisonwood Bible) which always makes me (old-timer that I am) think of the great white hunter Allan Quatermain.

This is another cheat: a line buried in the third paragraph of King Solomon's Mines that would have made a great hook, but of course back in the 1880s novels tended to start with something like "My name is So-and-so and I was born in Blah-blah of such and such a family and I am writing this account because on a winter's evening in 18-- I was yadda yadda yadda..."

Anyway, if I had been a devil sitting on Haggard's shoulder he would have started his best known book like this:

"It is a hard thing that when one has shot sixty-five lions, as I have in the course of my life, that the sixty-sixth should chew your leg like a quid of tobacco. It breaks the routine of the thing, and, putting other considerations aside, I am an orderly man and don't like that."

A perfect introduction to Quatermain's oh-so-English understatement, his stoicism, his profession, and the reason he has time to record this adventure, being laid up with a bad leg.

Though I have to admit the book did pretty well for itself, even without my help :)

Hey! Unfair criticism of old books!!! There are several examples already posted here, revelshade.

Though I absolutely DO agree that the passage you quote would have been at it's best at the veriest beginning. But it's still on the FIRST PAGE.

I went back and looked at my Barbara Kingsolvers and found this one:

"I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign. I'm not lying."
from The Bean Trees.

I'll have you know some of my best friends are old books. But you don't want to live next door to one, they tend to be all Get off my lawn! and Watch your language! and Stream of consciousness? Unreliable narrators? Fiddlesticks! When I was first published...

Yeah, whatever, grandpa.

Someday I'll finish Moby Dick (God willing), but one thing I dug about the hundred or so pages I read was how Melville sidesteps the whole "who am I?" business with the first line (do I really need to type it?) and how, although ostensibly a first person narrator, once "Ishmael" gets on the Pequod he sort of diffuses throughout the ship, becoming impossibly aware not just of what everyone says and does but what they think - he even describes someone's dream! Then when the plot requires him to actually do anything he coalesces into an ordinary sailor again. Very pomo for the nineteenth century.

Bericht bewerkt door schrijver, mrt 20, 6:14pm.

"If only you could see me now."

Memoirs of an Invisible Man by H.F. Saint

your turn

why, thank 'ee.

"It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea."

Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve

I may not know where to stop, as this entire book flows along as it starts:

"On a Friday in April, Penrod Schofield, having returned from school at noon promptly, on account of an earnest appetite, found lunch considerably delayed and himself (after a bit of simple technique) alone in the pantry with a large, open, metal receptacle containing about two-thirds of a peck of perfect doughnuts just come into the world.
The history of catastrophe is merely the history of irresistable juxtapositions. When Penrod left the pantry he walked slowly. In the large metal receptacle were left a small number of untouched doughnuts; while upon the shelf beside it were two further doughnuts, each with a small bite experimentally removed - and one of these bites, itself, lay, little mangled, beside the parent doughnut.
Nothing having been discovered, he seated himself gently at the lunch-table, and making no attempt to take part in the family conversation, avoided rather than sought attention. This decorum on his part was so unusual as to be the means of defeating its object..."

-Penrod Jashber by Booth Tarkington

"You think you know about pain?" -
The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum, a hideous and tragic novel the likes of which I have not read again.

................took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirtcuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.

It's not a first page at all, but it's so delicious, I couldn't resist:

From "Anne of Green Gables" again "Anne Comes to Grief in an Affair of Honour" (Anne has been double dared to cross the ridge-pole of the kitchen roof, and has just fallen off)

If Anne had tumbled off the roof on the side up which she had ascended, Diana would probably have fallen heir to the pearl bead ring then and there. Fortunately she fell on the other side, where the roof extended down over the porch so nearly to the ground that a fall therefrom was a much less serious thing. Nevertheless, when Diana and the other girls had rushed frantically around the house - except Ruby Gillis, who remained as if rooted to the ground and went into hysterics - they found Anne lying all white and limp among the wreck and ruin of the Virginia creeper.

'Anne, are you killed?' shrieked Diana, throwing herself on her knees beside her friend. 'Oh, Anne, dear Anne, speak just one word to me and tell me if you're killed.'

To the immense relief of all the girls, and especially of Josie Pye, who, in spite of lack of imagination, had been seized with horrible visions of a future branded as the girl who was the cause of Anne Shirley's early and tragic death, Anne sat dizzily up and answered uncertainly:

'No, Diana, I am not killed, but I think I am rendered unconscious.'

'Where?' sobbed Carrie Sloane. 'Oh, where, Anne?'

No, we ARE NOT DONE with this thread.

"The evidence is that Benjamin Franklin, born in 1706, first "came alive," as the saying is, about the year 1718. Let us consider then, his small and somewhat pudgy person at the age of twelve."
-Benjamin Franklin, The First Civil American, by Phillips Russell

"As a baby, Tom Avery had twenty-seven mothers."
-Republic of Love, by Carol Shields

and my favorite of the day:

"My father was a connoisseur of wine; but times and incomes change and we with them; and now I am a connoisseur of weather."
-The Innocents, by Margery Sharp

"Personally I blame the Pope" from A Death In The Venetian Quarter by Alan R Gordon - this line opens up to a full introduction that assigns the blame for the Fourth Crusade's sack on Constantinople by degrees of importance, followed by a rather humorous description of the discussion within the Imperial Court of what to do when the Crusading Fleet is first sighted.

My copy of the previous book in the series Jester Leaps In had the first chapter of the next book at the end. I was hooked and Oh how I waited for the release of this next book, which was much delayed as the author changed publishers.

The wait was worthwhile - this is one of my favourite books still and the author's note at the end is also a great laugh.

Cheers

"Theodore is in the ground."

The Alienist by Caleb Carr

"There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb. And he almost deserved it."

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis

Skittles,

I meant to thank you for using Robin McKinley above.
For some reason, she doesn't stand out in my memory, but I always fall back in love with her each time I read her.

2wonderY: I love Robin McKinley!! She's absolutely "wonder"ful! I need to re-read her again, too!!

'It was nine o'clock at night and Tremaine was trying to find a way to kill herself that would bring in a verdict of natural causes in court when someone banged on the door.'

The Wizard Hunters by Martha Wells.

Not in the category of most of those already posted, but still promises to be an enjoyable read:

"Margaret Trevennon was young and beautiful. Her faithful biographer can say no less, though aware of the possibilty that, on this account, the satiated reader of romances may make her acquaintance with a certain degree of reluctance, reflecting upon the two well-worn types - the maiden in the first flush of youth, who is so immaculately lovely as to be extrememly improbable, and the maturer female, who is so strong-minded as to be wholly ineligible to romantic situations."

-Across the Chasm by Julia McGruder

reminds me a tiny bit of Jane Austen's attitude towards her heroines.

Here's an opener that's been a personal favourite of mine for many years. Since I'm new to this group, I checked all 67 previous messages in this thread, as I was sure someone would have included it, but it seems not to have been, so I've decided to remedy that situation.

I tend not to remember things like first sentences, but this one is impossible to forget (in my case, at least). It's from Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess.

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.

>69
I'm pretty sure it's been in every other "first lines" thread I've seen since joining LT.
I've always suspected that Burgess must have got that sentence from a game of "consequences" or something of the sort, then built a novel around it as a challenge. I don't think the novel quite lives up to the first line, but it's still pretty good.

I've been hearing this a lot lately, and it doesn't seem to be here, so (going from memory, I'm afraid, as I don't have a copy, much to my sorrow):

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

(Yay for the internet; I found the quote, so I didn't have to rely on memory - though I was within an ace, I must say.)

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

". . .built a novel around it as a challenge. . ."
( 70)

A related anecdote about submitting a novel to a publisher "on a bet":

Thereʻs a story that Ernest Hemingwayʻs unsuccessful Across the River and into the Trees was really written by a young unknown acquantance of his--and routinely rejected. The young unpublished writer griped that "My novel would be published - if my name were Ernest Hemingway." E H said, "OK, Iʻll let you submit it to another publisher under my name -- and youʻll see that it WON"T be published."
It was submitted -- the story says -- but neither side was really proved right: Hemingway was wrong that it wouldnʻt be published, (if he ever did "bet" that) but it was very badly reviewed and called not up to Hemingwayʻs usual writing.

Hard to believe this story is true. If such an arrangement were made, part of the "deal" would probably have been that, if it was published, Hemingway had to admit that another was the
real author.

Bericht bewerkt door schrijver, apr 15, 8:06pm.

>72
Isn't there a similar anecdote about Graham Greene (under another name) once winning third prize in a competition for the best Graham Greene parody?

ADVERTISEMENT
BY THE AUTHORESS
TO
NORTHANGER ABBEY

THIS little work was finished in the year 1803, and intended for immediate publication. It was disposed of to a Bookseller, it was even advertised, and why the business proceeded no farther, the author has never been able to learn. That any bookseller should think it worth while to purchase what he did not think worth while to publish seems extraordinary. But with this, neither the author nor the public have any other concern than as some observation is necessary upon those parts of the work which thirteen years have made comparatively obsolete. The public are entreated to bear in mind that thirteen years have passed since it was finished, many more since it was begun, and that during that period, places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes.

First Line:

Much later, as he watched his manservant,Perkins, eating the dog,Quimby gloomily reflected on the unusual events of the evening.

Queen Victoria Demon Hunter by, A.E. Moorat

How very wonderful to continue this thread. Thanks to you both. I've put the Moorat book on my wishlist to find for my daughter, who collects the Zombie genre. (ugh)

This one reminds me of Edna Ferber (as above) and also Jane Austen. The presumption of speaking directly to the reader!

This is from The Minister's Wooing.

“Mrs. Katy Scudder had invited Mrs. Brown, and Mrs. Jones, and Deacon Twitchel's wife to take tea with her on the afternoon of June second, A.D. 17--.

When one has a story to tell, one is always puzzled which end of it you begin at. You have a whole corps of people to introduce that you know and your reader doesn’t; and one thing so pre-supposes another, that, whichever way you turn your patchwork, the figures still seem ill-arranged. The small item which I have given will do as well as other to begin with, as it will certainly lead you to ask, “Pray, who was Mrs. Katy Scudder?” – and this will start me systematically on my story.”

I found another fun entry.

"Dear Pierrepont: Your Ma got back safe this morning and she wants me to be sure to tell you not to over-study, and I want to tell you to be sure not to under-study. What we're really sending you to Harvard for is to get a little of the education that's so good and plenty there. When it's passed around you don't want to be bashful, but reach right out and take a big helping every time, for I want you to get your share. You'll find that education's about the only thing lying around loose in this world, and that it's about the only thing a fellow can have as much as he's willing to haul away. Everything else is screwed down tight and the screw-driver lost."

From a classic of 1902, Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to his Son
Touchstone isn't working. The author is George Horace Lorimer. His page is here:
http://www.librarything.com/author/lorimergeorgehorace

Bericht bewerkt door schrijver, juli 7, 5:59pm.

yoo-hoo!

I found one that I've loved, but hadn't been able to recall where it was from. It's actually several pages long, but I've distilled it:

If old Jeremy Clapp had not sneezed his teeth into the fire that winter day this story might have had a more seemly beginning; but, being a true record, it must start with that sneeze, because it was the first happening in Georgina Huntingdon's life which she could remember distinctly….
If his eyes had suddenly dropped from their sockets upon the hearth, or his ears floated off from the sides of his head, she could not have been more terrified, for she had not yet learned that one’s teeth may be a separate part of one’s anatomy. It was such a terrible thing to see a man go to pieces in this un-dreamed of fashion, that she began to scream and writhe around in her high-chair until it nearly turned over….
It was the awful knowledge, vague though it was to her infant mind, that a human body could fly apart in that way….
It was several years before Georgina learned the truth, and the impression made by the accident grew into a lurking fear which often haunted her as time wore on. She never knew at what moment she might fly apart herself."
-Georgina of the Rainbows, by Annie Fellows Johnston, a vintage Kentucky writer.

Definitely recalls the theme way back in #2 that Sophie shared with us.

thorold, where are you????