I have compiled a list of the top 15 lines from scores of books I've devoured in my brief time on the planet. Each of these awakens something in me and, I imagine, any true lover of books. In no particular order:
1. Call me Ishmael. - Herman Melville, Moby Dick
2. Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure. - Albert Camus, The Stranger
3. The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed. - Stephen King, The Gunslinger
4. 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, Huckleberry Finn
5. 124 was spiteful. - Toni Morrison, Beloved
6. It was a pleasure to burn. - Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451
7. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. - George Orwell, 1984
8. All children, except one, grow up. - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
9. A screaming comes across the sky. - Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
10. All this happened, more or less. - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
11. Through the fence, between curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. - William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
12. Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. - Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca
13. As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. - Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
14. In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit. - J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
15. You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
Honorable mentions:
To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black. - Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. - Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY. - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Did I forget some? Got your own? Disagree? Let me know.
Two of my favorites:
ReplyDeleteChangeover.
The movie goes on.
Nobody in the audience has any idea.
- Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows.
-Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones
I am a dork. Those aren't opening lines. This is what happens when you try to read half asleep...
ReplyDelete"I sent one boy to the gas chamber in Huntsville."
ReplyDelete-Cormac McCarthy, "No Country for Old Men"
"We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold."
-Hunter Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"