Opening Lines
 

What's the best opening line of a book you've ever read? You know... the one that just grabbed you by the eyelashes and said "You MUST read this book from cover to cover, and you will not stop until you have finished." Everybody's had at least one:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

or

"Elmer Gantry was drunk."

or

"We were near Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take effect."

What was yours?

Oh... for those of you who believe that Print Is Dead, go here and you can play, too.

This chapter provides an introduction to the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), and to the Structured Query Language (SQL) that MySQL understands.


You had me at "relational".

"<i>The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel</i>." -- Neuromancer

"<i>Snow, tenderly caught by eddying breezes, swirled and spun in to and out of bright, lustrous shapes that gleamed against the emerald-blazoned black drape of sky and sparkled there for a moment, hanging, before settling gently to the soft, green-tufted plain with all the sickly sweetness of an over-written sentence<i>." -- Steven Brust, To Reign In Hell

It was a dark and stormy night.

This opening sentence, composed by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton in his 1830 novel, Paul Clifford, has become the default opener for beginning writers trying to create atmosphere.

Now there's a contest in the name of Bulwer-Lytton for the worst opening sentence of a book not yet published ... obviously.

A small assortment of astonishingly loud brass instruments raced each other lustily to the respective ends of their distinct musical choices as the gates flew open to release a torrent of tawny fur comprised of angry yapping bullets that nipped at Desdemona's ankles, causing her to reflect once again (as blood filled her sneakers and she fought her way through the panicking crowd) that the annual Running of the Pomeranians in Liechtenstein was a stupid idea.

was the winner in 2001.

Its not technically an opening line, its the one that sets the tone on the first page and hooked me into a really good read -Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes

"Above all- we were wet."

I've always liked this one:

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. - Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

And this one isn't too bad, either:

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. - Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

He woke and remembered dying. Ken Macleod The Stone Canal Its an ambitious way to start a book but Macleod delivers.

It was a pleasure to burn. Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury Just to throw in a classic hook.

At 5:22 P.M. My eyes feel heavy as sewer grates. I lean against a USA Today paper box on Washington and Clark and think: Who the hell are you to make such a claim? Travis Hugh Culley The Immortal Class

"The C Programming Languge - Second Edition"

Got to be a classic, I mean just look at the authors introspective use of the world language, counterpointed so lavishly by the use of the word "second"

Sorry, It's been a loooong weekend, and I've just been reading the "censored posts" thread, that kinda thing can do nasty tricks to a person...

Angelas Ashes? Gah cannot stand that book.

I don't know about best ever, and it's more than one line, but I just started on a short story "Pussy Galore" by Liz Evans:

Oooh, zombie thread!
The Short Happy Life of Francis McComber, Ernest Hemmingway.

"When I stepped out into the bright sunlight, from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman, and a ride home."

http://www.pantagraph.com/news/artic...688ea3b6a.html

I like this book:

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. - Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)