Best opening lines to a novel

[vietnammer]

Alright, let's get instelletual.

"It was the afternoon of my 81st birthday and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali told me that the Archbishop was here to see me"


('riverrun' is not allowed)

[S-H]

“When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.”

[Junco Partner]

The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling...

[old fart]

''My first act on entering this world was to kill my mother."

William Boyd New Confessions

[southbrishammer]

When Reginald Iolanthe Perrin set out for work on the Thursday morning, he had no intention of calling his mother-in-law a hippopotamus. Nothing could have been further from his thoughts.

[last.caress]

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.

-Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

[hammer etc]

To begin at the beginning:

It is spring, moonless night in the small town
Starless and bible-black
The cobblestreets silent and the hunched
courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible
down to the sloeblack slow, black, crowblack,
fishingboatbobbing sea.

[WCpete]

Call me Ishmael.

[Rocketron]

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

[ageing hammer]

No one would have believed.................

[Monkeybubbles]

All this happened, more or less.

(Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut)

[Bobbysgirl]

Marley was dead: to begin with.

(Seasonal)

[Metal Hammer]

When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.

[Plashet Grove Pete]

"The sheep lay across the whole rear seat of the car, its front and back legs tied securely with thick green cord - in struggling to free itself it had shat and pissed over the upholstery. On the outskirts of Harwich it vomited, let out a moan, farted once more as if to say farewell and died with its legs in the air".

Unfortunately I've only written one chapter so far, but it's gonna be a belter.

[Polaroid]

I returned from the City about three o'clock on that May afternoon pretty well disgusted with life.

[Chicken Run Supreme]

My father's family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

[ironsonthebrain]

"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..."

Charles Dickens ' A Tale of Two Cities'

[fjthegrey]

Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair. The doctor told him there were no bugs in his hair. After he had taken a shower for eight hours, standing under hot water hour after hour suffering the pain of the bugs, he got out and dried himself, and he still had bugs in his hair; in fact, he had bugs all over him. A month later he had bugs in his lungs.

[simon hammer]

"To be encumbered with a corpse is to be in a difficult position, especially when the corpse is without benefit of death certificate."


Running Blind by Desmond Bagley.

[northiron]

Kafka had a couple of great ones:

"Somebody must have made a false accusation against Joseph K., for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong." The Trial

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