30 Old Beginnings Become Anew
The first line. How many writers have stared at their computers/typewriters/paper/parchment and agonized over the first line of a novel? You're ready to write but nothing happens. You need the perfect first line; the hook that will pull the reader in. Writers want their first line to be engaging, compelling, shocking. Readers have been moved, provoked or appalled by a first line, so much so that the line stays in their memory; this is what all authors strive for.
It is rare to be hooked by the first sentence, but was there ever a greater opening line than 'A Tale Of Two Cities' by Dickens?...
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was 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 direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
In homage to the opening sentence, I have taken 30 of them at random out of great books, and combined them into a short story of sorts. Not the easiest endeavour. See how many you recognize. The list of the books where these first lines came from is posted in my 'comments' section.
p.s.
The opening line of this blog took me precisely 7 seconds to come up with.
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. 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.‘To be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die.’
Santiago, Chile, May 10, 1968: In April of 1966, a little more than two years ago, I tried to commit suicide. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. There was no hope for him this time: It was the third stroke. I’m a sick man…a mean man.
If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. Grandfather said: this is the kind of a man that Boon Hogganbeck was. Odd that mankind’s benefactors should be amusing people.
- - - - - - - - - -
“What’s it going to be then, eh?”
At nine o’clock in the morning, towards the end of November, the Warsaw train was approaching Petersburg at full speed.‘I have been here before,’ I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastien more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendor, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.
- - - - - - - - - -
During my recent journey back from Italy to England, not wishing to waste all the time I was obliged to be on horseback on ‘idle gossip’ and small talk, I preferred to spend some of it thinking over some topic connected with our common interests or else enjoying the recollection of the friends, as learned as they are delightful, whom I had left here. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
It was Wang Lung’s Marriage day. The writer, an old man with a white mustache, had some difficulty getting into bed.
When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister’s address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money. That old bell, presage of a train, had just sounded through Oxford station; and the undergraduates who were waiting there, gay figures in tweed or flannel, moved to the margin of the platform and gazed idly up the line.
It was love at first sight.
Good morrow, and well met.
- - - - - - - - - -
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. A wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea, and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace. To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new.
Who’s There? The knocking sounded again, at once discreet and peremptory, while the doctor was descending the stairs, the flashlight’s beam lancing on before him down the brown-stained stairwell and into the brown-stained tongue-and-groove box of the lower hall. It was clearly going to be a bad crossing.
‘Was anyone hurt?’
Dusk – of a summer night. Mother died today
- - - - - - - - - -
All this happened, more or less.
It is rare to be hooked by the first sentence, but was there ever a greater opening line than 'A Tale Of Two Cities' by Dickens?...
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was 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 direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
In homage to the opening sentence, I have taken 30 of them at random out of great books, and combined them into a short story of sorts. Not the easiest endeavour. See how many you recognize. The list of the books where these first lines came from is posted in my 'comments' section.
p.s.
The opening line of this blog took me precisely 7 seconds to come up with.
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. 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.‘To be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die.’
Santiago, Chile, May 10, 1968: In April of 1966, a little more than two years ago, I tried to commit suicide. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. There was no hope for him this time: It was the third stroke. I’m a sick man…a mean man.
If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. Grandfather said: this is the kind of a man that Boon Hogganbeck was. Odd that mankind’s benefactors should be amusing people.
- - - - - - - - - -
“What’s it going to be then, eh?”
At nine o’clock in the morning, towards the end of November, the Warsaw train was approaching Petersburg at full speed.‘I have been here before,’ I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastien more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendor, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.
- - - - - - - - - -
During my recent journey back from Italy to England, not wishing to waste all the time I was obliged to be on horseback on ‘idle gossip’ and small talk, I preferred to spend some of it thinking over some topic connected with our common interests or else enjoying the recollection of the friends, as learned as they are delightful, whom I had left here. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
It was Wang Lung’s Marriage day. The writer, an old man with a white mustache, had some difficulty getting into bed.
When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister’s address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money. That old bell, presage of a train, had just sounded through Oxford station; and the undergraduates who were waiting there, gay figures in tweed or flannel, moved to the margin of the platform and gazed idly up the line.
It was love at first sight.
Good morrow, and well met.
- - - - - - - - - -
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. A wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea, and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace. To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new.
Who’s There? The knocking sounded again, at once discreet and peremptory, while the doctor was descending the stairs, the flashlight’s beam lancing on before him down the brown-stained stairwell and into the brown-stained tongue-and-groove box of the lower hall. It was clearly going to be a bad crossing.
‘Was anyone hurt?’
Dusk – of a summer night. Mother died today
- - - - - - - - - -
All this happened, more or less.
posted by Kwazer at 3:00 PM
1 Comments:
List of first lines in order of appearance.
1. The end of the affair – Graham Greene
2. Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
3. The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
4. First Diary of The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below – Jose Maria Arguedas
5. Nineteen Eighty-four – George Orwell
6. James Joyce – Dubliners
7. Notes from the Underground. Dostoyevsky.
8. Herzog – Saul Bellow
9. The Reivers – William Faulkner
10. Ravelstein – Saul Bellow
11. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
12. The idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky
13. Evelyn Waugh – Brideshead Revisited
14. In Praise of Folly – Erasmus
15. Pride and prejudice – Jane Austen
16. The Good Earth. – Pearl Buck
17. Winesburg, Ohio – Sherwood Anderson.
18. Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser
19. Zuleika Dobson – Max Beerbohm
20. Catch – 22 – Joseph Heller
21. King Henry the Eight – Shakespeare
22. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
23. All the King’s men – Robert Penn Warren.
24. Ana Historic – Daphne Marlatt
25. The Wild Palms – William Faulkner
26. Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh
27. A handful of dust – Evelyn Waug
28. An American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser
29. The stranger – albert camus
30. Slaughter-house five – Kurt Vonnegut
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