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Great opening lines in literature

Discussion in 'Anything goes' started by Beaker, Oct 14, 2008.

  1. Wenders

    Wenders Well-Known Member

    "Maybe someday I'll have kids of my own. I hope so. If I do, they'll probably ask what part I played in the movement that changed the world. And because I'm not the person I once was, I'll tell them the truth. My part was nothing. I did nothing. I was just the guy in the corner taking notes."

    --Pay it Forward

    If you thought the movie was heart-wrenching, the book is even worse. I actually read it before I watched the movie.

    Also, A Tale of Two Cities is amazing, from the beginning to the end. "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to; than I have ever known."
     
  2. dooley_womack1

    dooley_womack1 Well-Known Member

    Dear Penthouse Forum,
     
  3. I Digress

    I Digress Guest

    "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."

    A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving.

    Maybe his best. If you saw the movie, but didn't read the book, read the book.
     
  4. I Digress

    I Digress Guest

    "Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith."

    Stranger in a Strange Land. Robert Heinlein, the master.
     
  5. Baron Scicluna

    Baron Scicluna Well-Known Member

    "Everything begins with the body of the father."

    -When Pride Still Mattered, David Maraniss
     
  6. EStreetJoe

    EStreetJoe Well-Known Member

    "It was a dark and stormy night" - every novel Snoopy begins to write

    "True! - nervous - very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; buy will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses - not destroyed - not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily - how calmy I can tell you the whole story."
    - The Tell-Tale Heart, Edgar Allen Poe
     
  7. ink-stained wretch

    ink-stained wretch Active Member

    Do not go gentle into that good night. Dylan Thomas

    The train went up the track out of sight, around one of the hills of burnt timber. Hemingway "Big Two-Hearted River"

    Already, beneath him, through thee golden evening, the shadowed hills had dug their furrows and the plains grew luminous with long-enduring light. Antoine de Saint-Exupery "Night Flight"
     
  8. JR

    JR Well-Known Member

    "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..."
     
  9. Double Down

    Double Down Well-Known Member

    "First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending. He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there. More than anything, he wanted Martha to love him as he loved her, but the letters were mostly chatty, elusive on the matter of love. She was a virgin, he was almost sure. She was an English major at Mount Sebastian, and she wrote beautifully about her professors and roommates and midterm exams, about her respect for Chaucer and her great affection for Virginia Woolf. She often quoted lines .of poetry; she never mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy, take care of yourself. The letters weighed ten ounces. They were signed "Love, Martha," but Lieutenant Cross understood that Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant. At dusk, he would carefully return the letters to his rucksack. Slowly, a bit distracted, he would get up and move among his men, checking the perimeter, then at full dark he would return to his hole and watch the night and wonder if Martha was a virgin."

    -- Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

    "James Bond, with two double bourbons inside him, sat in the final departure lounge of Miami Airport and though about life and death."

    -- Ian Fleming, Goldfinger

    "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."

    -- Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

    Two households, both alike in dignity,
    In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
    From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
    Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

    -- William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
     
  10. Goldeaston

    Goldeaston Guest

    "The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail."

    "Jaws" packs even more punch on pages than on screen.
     
  11. Ben_Hecht

    Ben_Hecht Active Member


    Don't need to. Like peanut butter, it sticks.
     
  12. outofplace

    outofplace Well-Known Member

    "Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board."
    --Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
     
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