The first line of a book always stays with me. I like to devour books, somehow imagining that I can climb into the book, become a part of the story as the ink on the page seeps into my skin. And no matter how fantastic the book was, or how terrible, I am always depressed when it comes to an end. Often I will go back and re-read the first line of the story when I am finished. As a kind of salve to the wound that finishing a story can leave. And so the first line of a book becomes magical, the beginning of a journey and with each opening line I never know where the story is going to take me.
Below are some of my favorite first lines. Hopefully they will inspire you to pick up the book if you haven’t already read it, or remind you of the journey you took when you did read it. What are some of your favorite first lines? Which ones inspired you? Made you want to go back and read the book again or recommend it to a friend?
–What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask. (Play it as it Lays, Joan Didion)
–In the end she went out to the yard, almost enveloped in flames, leaned against the tamarind tree that no longer flowered, and began to cry in such a way that the tears seemed never to have begun, but to have been there always, flooding her eyes, producing that creaking noise, like the noise of the house at the moment when the flames made the strongest pots totter and the flashing frame came down in an enormous crackling that pierced the night like a volley of fireworks. (Old Rosa, Reynaldo Arenas)
–Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car. (Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor)
–They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz)
–The village of Holcolm stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.” (In Cold Blood, Truman Capote)
–The first time he saw heaven came exactly six hours and fifty seven minutes after the very moment an entire generation fell in love with him. (Heavier than Heaven, Charles R. Cross)
–The two men appeared out of nowhere, a few yards apart in the narrow, moonlit lane. (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, JK Rowling)
–In accordance with the law the death sentence was announced to Cincinnatus C. in a whisper. (Invitation to a Beheading, Vladimir Nabokov)
–A few months after my twenty-first birthday, a stranger called to give me the news. (Dreams of my Father, Barack Obama)
–First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. (The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien)
-It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. (The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath)
12thstreetonline's Weblog 
February 25, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Kathryn- what a great post! Right now I am currently balking at the idea of finishing David Gates’ short story collection, The Wonders Of The Invisible World, I just cannot bring myself to read the last story because then it will all be over.
But you have me up off the couch flipping through the pages of my favorite novels and I wonder how biased I am by having read the entire book. Nevertheless, some of the ones I turned to were:
The taxi driver seemed embarrassed to find there was no one – not even a clerk behind the reception desk – waiting to welcome me. (The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro)
We’re taken to a place with no roots. (outline of my lover, Douglas A. Martin)
I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well. (My Name Is Red, Orhan Pamuk)
Jody was already dialing when Harry came up from behind and put his fat thumb down on the hook, disconnecting her. (in a country of mothers, A.M. Homes)
February 25, 2009 at 5:40 pm
“All this happened, more or less.” Slaughterhouse Five
“To whom it may concern:
It is springtime. It is late afternoon.” Slapstick
“It was love at first sight.
The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.
Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it wasn’t quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn’t become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused them.” Catch-22
“I get the willies when I see closed doors. Even at work, where I am doing so well now, the sight of a closed door is sometimes enough to make me dread that something horrible is happening behind it, something that is going to affect me adversely; if I am tired and dejected from a night of lies or booze or sex or just plain nerves and insomnia, I can almost smell the disaster mounting invisibly and flooding out toward me through the frosted glass panes. My hands may perspire, and my voice may come out strange. I wonder why.
Something must have happened to me sometime.”
Something Happened
“In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual “There!”—yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor or slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.” The Beautiful And Damned
“I am in a car park in Leeds when I tell my husband I don’t want to be married to him anymore.” How To Be Good
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” The Gunslinger
February 26, 2009 at 10:19 am
“Stella, cold, cold, the coldness of hell.” – The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick
“Though brilliantly sunny, Saturday morning was overcoat weather again, not just topcoat weather, as it had been all week and as everyone had hoped it would stay for the big weekend–the weekend of the Yale game.” – “Franny” by J.D. Salinger
“The young mothers were telling each other how tired they were. This was one of their favorite topics, along with the eating, sleeping, and defecating habits of their offspring, the merits of certain local nursery schools, and the difficulty of sticking to an exercise routine.” – Little Children by Tom Perrotta
February 27, 2009 at 8:55 am
“Boom, bloom, alum-bright, Lucifer of alunite!”- The President by Miguel Angel Asturias.
“On this Sunday morning in May, this girl who later was to be the cause of a sensation in New York, awoke much too early for her night before.” – BUtterfield 8 by John O’Hara
“Weidmann appeared before you in a five o’clock edition, his head swathed in white bands, a nun and yet a wounded pilot fallen into the rye one September day like the day when the world came to know the name of Our Lady of the Flowers.” -Our Lady of the Flowers, by Jean Genet
“We tore out of Paris in a red Citroën 2CV6 with the roof rolled back and the window flaps up.” -The Cheese Smuggler.
June 14, 2009 at 12:37 am
Look at this….
Sweet site dude, check out mine when you get a min……