Wishing DCLOYCESMITH, & others well: And, 50
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First: Hope EVERYONE -- you included, DCLOYCESMITH -- is doing well. Wear your masks (my kid's a doctor of microbiology)! Keep social distancing!
Second: About that new article at the LOA site:"Fifty of the Most Memorable Lines"
https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/1594-read-discuss-fifty-of-the-most-memorable...
Personally, I think LOA could have found a LOT more great first lines from American novels -- John Irving is practically the King of First Lines! (I included some in my selections, below). But, everyone has there likes dislikes.
And I KNOW that LOA did a crummy job with their "50 More great first lines"
https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/1722-fifty-_more_-great-opening-lines-from-am...
How do I "know"? ANY-one who would actually include "My name is Frank Bascombe" as one of 50 great lines wouldn't know a great first line if it crawled up under the covers and bit them in the perineum.
And it's not just that Richard Ford is misogynist (or wimp) who once sent Alice Hoffman one of her novels with a bullet he'd personally shot into it (because he didn't like her review), or that he is likely what some refer to as a "polite" (old school Southern) racist because he spat on Colson Whitehead upon meeting him (once again, because he didn't like a review). It's because, although he is a capable writer, he also strains so hard to be a cross between Cormac McCarthy and John Updike he mostly just comes across as a bland, entitled white guy writing about the same.
Elmore Leonard -- just before passing away -- offered up THESE lines by Donald Westlake, writing under his Richard Stark byline:
----------------------------------
When the car stopped rolling, Parker kicked out the windshield and crawled through onto the wrinkled hood, Glock first. --Richard Stark, Backflash
When the guy with asthma finally came in from the fire escape, Parker rabbit-punched him and took his gun away. --Richard Stark, The Mourner
When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed. --Richard Stark, The Outfit
When the bandages came off, Parker looked in the mirror at a stranger. --Richard Stark, the Man with the Getaway Face
When the knock came at the door, Parker was just turning to the obituary page. --Richard Stark, The Jugger
-----------
HERE ARE more than a few of MY picks for great first lines -- including a batch, at the end, by John Irving, some from well-known writers, others from some that are more obscure (but in my library). :)
--------------------------------
"124 was spiteful." -- BELOVED, Toni Morrison
"Even in death, the boys were trouble." THE NICKEL BOYS, Colson Whitehead
"Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith." -- STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, Robert Heinlein
"I woke up in bed with a man and a cat." -- TO SAIL BEYOND THE SUNSET, Robert Heinlein
"As I left the Kenya Beanstalk capsule he was right on my heels." --FRIDAY, Robert Heinlein
"To put it simply as possible: This is the story of a polygamist who has an affair." -- THE LONELY POLYGAMIST, Brady Udall
"If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head." -- THE MIRACLE LIFE OF EDGAR MINT, Brady Udall
"By the time he graduated from college, John Smith had forgotten all about the fall he took on the ice that January day in 1953." -- THE DEAD ZONE, Stephen King
"The most important things are the hardest to say." --THE BODY, Stephen King
"My name is Cora Whitman and I spent three months in the underworld, the summer of 1974, a season when the rains failed." --INCUBUS, Anne Arensberg
"When Pearl tull was dying, a funny thought occurred to her." -- DINNER AT THE HOMESICK RESTAURANT, Anne Tyler
"If Samuel had known his mother was leaving, he might have paid more attention." --THE NIX, Nathan Hill
"The cell at Leavenworth was four feet by eight, barely large enough for Joe to sit at one end on an upended pail, but there was room in the dark for a circle of figures." --STALLION GATE, Martin Cruz Smith
"All nights should be so dark, all winters so warm, all headlights so dazzling." --GORKY PARK, Martin Cruz Smith
"The incredible strangeness of the universe was first made manifest to Anthony Van Horne on his fiftieth birthday, when a despondent angel named Raphael, a being with luminous white wings and a halo on and off like a neon quoit, appeared and told him of the days to come." -TOWING JEHOVAH, James Morrow
"Of all the newsworthy objects torn loose from the ice by the great Arctic earthquake of 1998, among them an intact Viking ship and the frozen carcass of a wooly mammoth, the most controversial by far was the two-mile-long body of God." -BLAMELESS IN ABBADON, James Morrow
"When God's skull went into geosynchronous orbit above the Western hemisphere, reflecting the sun by day and rivalling the moon each night, Nora Burkhart tried not to take it personally." -- THE ETERNAL FOOTMAN, James Morrow
"If she'd had a foot fetish Anna would have been an extremely happy woman." -FIRESTORM, Nevada Barr
"The Rambler's headlights caught a scrap of paper nailed to a tree, a hand written sign: REPENT." -- DEEP SOUTH, Nevada Barr
"Once upon a time there were two cities within a city." -- A GRAVEYARD FOR LUNATICS, Ray Bradbury
"First of all, it was October, a rare month boys." -- SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES, Ray Bradbury
"It was a pleasure to burn." FAHRENHEIT 451, by Ray Bradbury
"If you do not believe in evil, you are doomed to live in a world you do not understand." -- THE WORLD THAT WE KNEW, Alice Hoffman
"For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that goes wrong in town." PRACTICAL MAGIC, Alice Hoffman
"The last major crime in the town of Verity was in 1958, when one of the Platts shot his brother in an argument over a Chevy Nomad they bought together on time." -- TURTLE MOON, Alice Hoffman
"In the middle of the twentieth century, three men were charged with the task of removing that tension between minute and vast things." OH PURE AND RADIANT HEART, Lydia Millet
"When I got over to Leonard's Christmas Eve night, he had the Kentucky Headhunters turned way up oer at his place, and they were singing 'The Ballad of Davy Crockett', and Leonard, in a kind of Christmas celebration, was once again setting fire to the house next door." -- THE TWO-BEAR MAMBO (a Hap & Leonard mystery), Joe R. Lansdale
"News didn't travel the way it does now." --THE BOTTOMS, Joe R. Lansdale
"I didn't suspect the day Grandfather came out and got me and my sister, Lula, and hauled us off toward the ferry that I'd soon end up with worse things happening than had already come upon us or that I'd take up with a gun-shooting dwarf, the son of a slave, and a big angry dog, let alone find true love and kill someone, but that's exactly how it was." -- THE THICKET, Joe R. Lansdale
"One of the Sikorsky gunships, an element of the First Air Cavalry with the words Whispering Death painted on its sides, gave Mingolla and Gilbey and Baylor a lift from the Ant Farm to San Francisco de Juticlan, a small town located inside the green zone, which on the latest maps was designated Free Occupied Guatemala." -- LIFE DURING WARTIME, Lucius Shepard
"My name, Thomas Cradle, is not the most common of names, yet when I chanced upon a book by another Thomas Cradle while looking up my work on Amazon (a pastime to which I, like many authors, am frequently given), I thought little of it, and my over-riding reaction was one of concern that this new and unknown Cradle might prove the superior of the known." DOG-EARED PAPERBACK OF MY LIFE, Lucius Shepard
"We drove past Tiny Polski's mansion house to the main road, and then the five miles into Northampton, Father talking the whole way about savages and the awfulness of America -- how it got turned into a dope-taking, door-locking, ulverated danger zone of rabid scavengers and criminal millionaires and moral sneaks." --THE MOSQUITO COAST, Paul Theroux
"Weather is memory." -- MOTHERLAND, Paul Theroux
"The dream is always simple." --THE WOMEN OF COPPER COUNTY, Maria Doria Russell
"It was predictable, in hindsight." -- THE SPARROW, Maria Doria Russell
"He began to die when he was twenty-one, but tuberculosis is slow, and sly, and subtle." -- DOC, Maria Doria Russell
"When I think of my wife, I always think of her head." -- GONE GIRL, Gillian Flynn
"I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ." --DARK PLACES, Gillian Flynn
"When fair gold morning of April stirred Mary Hawley awake, she turned over to her husband and saw him, little pinkys pulling a frog face at her." -- THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT, James Steinbeck
"She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise." -- PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, Philip Roth
"Either forswear fucking others or the affair is over." --SABBATH'S THEATER, Philip Roth
"All this happened, more or less." -- SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, Kurt Vonnegut
"I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life." -- GIOVANNI'S ROOM, James Baldwin
"Her gynecologist recommended him to me." -- THE WATER-METHOD MAN, John Irving
"Garp's mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston, in 1942, for wounding a man in a movie theater." -THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, John Irving
"In the hospital of the orphanage -- the boy's division at St. Cloud's, Maine -- two nurses were in charge of naming the new babies and checking that their little penises were healing from the obligatory circumcision." -- THE CIDER HOUSE RULES, John Irving
"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice -- not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany." -- A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY, John Irving
"Usually, the dwarfs kept bringing him back -- back to the circus, and back to India." -- A SON OF THE CIRCUS, John Irving
"One night when she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed, Ruth Cole woke to the sound of lovemaking -- it was coming from her parents' bedroom." -- A WIDOW FOR ONE YEAR, John Irving
"Imagine a young man on his way to a less-than-thirty-second event -- the loss of his left hand, long before he reached middle age." --THE FOURTH HAND, John Irving
"The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long." -- LAST NIGHT IN TWISTED RIVER, John Irving
Second: About that new article at the LOA site:"Fifty of the Most Memorable Lines"
https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/1594-read-discuss-fifty-of-the-most-memorable...
Personally, I think LOA could have found a LOT more great first lines from American novels -- John Irving is practically the King of First Lines! (I included some in my selections, below). But, everyone has there likes dislikes.
And I KNOW that LOA did a crummy job with their "50 More great first lines"
https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/1722-fifty-_more_-great-opening-lines-from-am...
How do I "know"? ANY-one who would actually include "My name is Frank Bascombe" as one of 50 great lines wouldn't know a great first line if it crawled up under the covers and bit them in the perineum.
And it's not just that Richard Ford is misogynist (or wimp) who once sent Alice Hoffman one of her novels with a bullet he'd personally shot into it (because he didn't like her review), or that he is likely what some refer to as a "polite" (old school Southern) racist because he spat on Colson Whitehead upon meeting him (once again, because he didn't like a review). It's because, although he is a capable writer, he also strains so hard to be a cross between Cormac McCarthy and John Updike he mostly just comes across as a bland, entitled white guy writing about the same.
Elmore Leonard -- just before passing away -- offered up THESE lines by Donald Westlake, writing under his Richard Stark byline:
----------------------------------
When the car stopped rolling, Parker kicked out the windshield and crawled through onto the wrinkled hood, Glock first. --Richard Stark, Backflash
When the guy with asthma finally came in from the fire escape, Parker rabbit-punched him and took his gun away. --Richard Stark, The Mourner
When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed. --Richard Stark, The Outfit
When the bandages came off, Parker looked in the mirror at a stranger. --Richard Stark, the Man with the Getaway Face
When the knock came at the door, Parker was just turning to the obituary page. --Richard Stark, The Jugger
-----------
HERE ARE more than a few of MY picks for great first lines -- including a batch, at the end, by John Irving, some from well-known writers, others from some that are more obscure (but in my library). :)
--------------------------------
"124 was spiteful." -- BELOVED, Toni Morrison
"Even in death, the boys were trouble." THE NICKEL BOYS, Colson Whitehead
"Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith." -- STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, Robert Heinlein
"I woke up in bed with a man and a cat." -- TO SAIL BEYOND THE SUNSET, Robert Heinlein
"As I left the Kenya Beanstalk capsule he was right on my heels." --FRIDAY, Robert Heinlein
"To put it simply as possible: This is the story of a polygamist who has an affair." -- THE LONELY POLYGAMIST, Brady Udall
"If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head." -- THE MIRACLE LIFE OF EDGAR MINT, Brady Udall
"By the time he graduated from college, John Smith had forgotten all about the fall he took on the ice that January day in 1953." -- THE DEAD ZONE, Stephen King
"The most important things are the hardest to say." --THE BODY, Stephen King
"My name is Cora Whitman and I spent three months in the underworld, the summer of 1974, a season when the rains failed." --INCUBUS, Anne Arensberg
"When Pearl tull was dying, a funny thought occurred to her." -- DINNER AT THE HOMESICK RESTAURANT, Anne Tyler
"If Samuel had known his mother was leaving, he might have paid more attention." --THE NIX, Nathan Hill
"The cell at Leavenworth was four feet by eight, barely large enough for Joe to sit at one end on an upended pail, but there was room in the dark for a circle of figures." --STALLION GATE, Martin Cruz Smith
"All nights should be so dark, all winters so warm, all headlights so dazzling." --GORKY PARK, Martin Cruz Smith
"The incredible strangeness of the universe was first made manifest to Anthony Van Horne on his fiftieth birthday, when a despondent angel named Raphael, a being with luminous white wings and a halo on and off like a neon quoit, appeared and told him of the days to come." -TOWING JEHOVAH, James Morrow
"Of all the newsworthy objects torn loose from the ice by the great Arctic earthquake of 1998, among them an intact Viking ship and the frozen carcass of a wooly mammoth, the most controversial by far was the two-mile-long body of God." -BLAMELESS IN ABBADON, James Morrow
"When God's skull went into geosynchronous orbit above the Western hemisphere, reflecting the sun by day and rivalling the moon each night, Nora Burkhart tried not to take it personally." -- THE ETERNAL FOOTMAN, James Morrow
"If she'd had a foot fetish Anna would have been an extremely happy woman." -FIRESTORM, Nevada Barr
"The Rambler's headlights caught a scrap of paper nailed to a tree, a hand written sign: REPENT." -- DEEP SOUTH, Nevada Barr
"Once upon a time there were two cities within a city." -- A GRAVEYARD FOR LUNATICS, Ray Bradbury
"First of all, it was October, a rare month boys." -- SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES, Ray Bradbury
"It was a pleasure to burn." FAHRENHEIT 451, by Ray Bradbury
"If you do not believe in evil, you are doomed to live in a world you do not understand." -- THE WORLD THAT WE KNEW, Alice Hoffman
"For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that goes wrong in town." PRACTICAL MAGIC, Alice Hoffman
"The last major crime in the town of Verity was in 1958, when one of the Platts shot his brother in an argument over a Chevy Nomad they bought together on time." -- TURTLE MOON, Alice Hoffman
"In the middle of the twentieth century, three men were charged with the task of removing that tension between minute and vast things." OH PURE AND RADIANT HEART, Lydia Millet
"When I got over to Leonard's Christmas Eve night, he had the Kentucky Headhunters turned way up oer at his place, and they were singing 'The Ballad of Davy Crockett', and Leonard, in a kind of Christmas celebration, was once again setting fire to the house next door." -- THE TWO-BEAR MAMBO (a Hap & Leonard mystery), Joe R. Lansdale
"News didn't travel the way it does now." --THE BOTTOMS, Joe R. Lansdale
"I didn't suspect the day Grandfather came out and got me and my sister, Lula, and hauled us off toward the ferry that I'd soon end up with worse things happening than had already come upon us or that I'd take up with a gun-shooting dwarf, the son of a slave, and a big angry dog, let alone find true love and kill someone, but that's exactly how it was." -- THE THICKET, Joe R. Lansdale
"One of the Sikorsky gunships, an element of the First Air Cavalry with the words Whispering Death painted on its sides, gave Mingolla and Gilbey and Baylor a lift from the Ant Farm to San Francisco de Juticlan, a small town located inside the green zone, which on the latest maps was designated Free Occupied Guatemala." -- LIFE DURING WARTIME, Lucius Shepard
"My name, Thomas Cradle, is not the most common of names, yet when I chanced upon a book by another Thomas Cradle while looking up my work on Amazon (a pastime to which I, like many authors, am frequently given), I thought little of it, and my over-riding reaction was one of concern that this new and unknown Cradle might prove the superior of the known." DOG-EARED PAPERBACK OF MY LIFE, Lucius Shepard
"We drove past Tiny Polski's mansion house to the main road, and then the five miles into Northampton, Father talking the whole way about savages and the awfulness of America -- how it got turned into a dope-taking, door-locking, ulverated danger zone of rabid scavengers and criminal millionaires and moral sneaks." --THE MOSQUITO COAST, Paul Theroux
"Weather is memory." -- MOTHERLAND, Paul Theroux
"The dream is always simple." --THE WOMEN OF COPPER COUNTY, Maria Doria Russell
"It was predictable, in hindsight." -- THE SPARROW, Maria Doria Russell
"He began to die when he was twenty-one, but tuberculosis is slow, and sly, and subtle." -- DOC, Maria Doria Russell
"When I think of my wife, I always think of her head." -- GONE GIRL, Gillian Flynn
"I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ." --DARK PLACES, Gillian Flynn
"When fair gold morning of April stirred Mary Hawley awake, she turned over to her husband and saw him, little pinkys pulling a frog face at her." -- THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT, James Steinbeck
"She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise." -- PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, Philip Roth
"Either forswear fucking others or the affair is over." --SABBATH'S THEATER, Philip Roth
"All this happened, more or less." -- SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, Kurt Vonnegut
"I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life." -- GIOVANNI'S ROOM, James Baldwin
"Her gynecologist recommended him to me." -- THE WATER-METHOD MAN, John Irving
"Garp's mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston, in 1942, for wounding a man in a movie theater." -THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, John Irving
"In the hospital of the orphanage -- the boy's division at St. Cloud's, Maine -- two nurses were in charge of naming the new babies and checking that their little penises were healing from the obligatory circumcision." -- THE CIDER HOUSE RULES, John Irving
"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice -- not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany." -- A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY, John Irving
"Usually, the dwarfs kept bringing him back -- back to the circus, and back to India." -- A SON OF THE CIRCUS, John Irving
"One night when she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed, Ruth Cole woke to the sound of lovemaking -- it was coming from her parents' bedroom." -- A WIDOW FOR ONE YEAR, John Irving
"Imagine a young man on his way to a less-than-thirty-second event -- the loss of his left hand, long before he reached middle age." --THE FOURTH HAND, John Irving
"The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long." -- LAST NIGHT IN TWISTED RIVER, John Irving
