Best First Lines

ManWithAnAgenda: No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

ManWithAnAgenda: My wound is geography.

ManWithAnAgenda: The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.

ManWithAnAgenda: I am thirty years old and that is nothing.

ManWithAnAgenda: Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

aethercowboy: It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.

aethercowboy: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

aethercowboy: In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

aethercowboy: I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

aethercowboy: The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

aethercowboy: They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.

aethercowboy: In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together.

aethercowboy: He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.

aethercowboy: Call me Ishmael.

aethercowboy: The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard.

aethercowboy: Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.

aethercowboy: If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

aethercowboy: You better not never tell nobody but God.

aethercowboy: There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it

aethercowboy: I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.

aethercowboy: 124 was spiteful.

aethercowboy: I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.

aethercowboy: Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.

aethercowboy: Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.

aethercowboy: Mother died today.

aethercowboy: A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

aethercowboy: I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho' not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call'd me.

aethercowboy: Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

aethercowboy: It was a pleasure to burn.

aethercowboy: All this happened, more or less.

aethercowboy: Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

aethercowboy: Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.

aethercowboy: 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.

aethercowboy: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

aethercowboy: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.

aethercowboy: One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.

aethercowboy: For a long time, I went to bed early.

aethercowboy: "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die."

aethercowboy: Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.

aethercowboy: He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.

hipdeep: In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

hipdeep: Taran wanted to make a sword, but Coll, charged with the practical side of his education, decided on horseshoes.