Great opening lines in literature

Not the first line in the movie.

 

Fuck it, this is literature. One of the great opening lines ever written:

"Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again." -- Red Smith, Oct. 3, 1951

 

Correct. As I recall, the first line is Joe Pesci saying "What the fuck was that?," which is fitting, given that he went on to drop the F-bomb more than 100 times in a film in which he is killed about two-third of the way through ...

 

In its full form:

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."
-Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford

There's an annual contest named after the author where entrants compete by writing the worst, most flowery, original run-on sentence to begin a story.

 

I think "What the fuck was that?" might be a candidate too...

But to be fair, spnited's line was indeed Henry's first line of monologue after the foreshadowing.

 

"He nearly called you again last night. Can you imagine that, after all this time?" -- Elliot Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity

And I know it's a different topic, but the greatest closing line belongs to Hemingway:

"Isn't it pretty to think so?"

 

A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment.



Thanks to Monty Python, I can recite from memory one opening line from classic literature. I'll bet waterytart knows this one too.

 

The second best Hemingway walk-off line:

"There were plenty of days for him to fish the swamp."

 

Sirs, Madames,

From one of my favorites.

The epigraph: America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets ...

Chapter One: He always shot up by TV light.

Another:

My wonder upon discovering the Book of Fish remains with me yet, luminous as the phosphorescent marbling that seized my eyes that strange morning; glittering as those eerie swirls that coloured my mind and enchanted my soul--which there and then began the process of unravelling my heart and, worse still, my life into the poor scraggy skein that is the story you are about to read.

YD&OHS, etc

 

Aaagh......Man, I loved that book until the end and then, then, then, I wanted to rip my eyes out for having read it....

 

You could do a lovely mash-up on the heath: Over behind that bush is Mrs. B. J. Smegma, practicing the art of not being seen, and here we have Cathy and Heathcliff doing the semaphore Wuthering Heights. Speaking of which, though it's not one of the great opening lines, in order to get us back on-thread, "I have just returned from a visit to my landlord -- the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with."

 

"Marley was dead, to begin with." -- A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens.

Even though I hated A Tale Of Two Cities when I read it.