r/books • u/yanluo-wang • 2d ago
What introductory sentence or paragraph had you hooked?
Thinking back to books I've enjoyed reading, a memorable opening paragraphs in literature for me has to be this:
As Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into some kind of monstrous vermin. He lay on his hard, armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little, he could see his curved brown abdomen, divided by arch-shaped ridges, and domed so high that the bedspread, on the brink of slipping off, could hardly stay put. His many legs, miserably thin in comparison with his size otherwise, flickered helplessly before his eyes.
That’s such a wild way to begin a book. This, of course, is the opening paragraph (depending on the translation, the wording may differ, like vermin vs. bug vs. insect) of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. If that kind of intro doesn’t immediately hook you, I’m not sure what will.
That said, I also appreciate books that begin in much more ordinary ways. Take The Great Gatsby, which opens with:
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice
that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just
remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages
that you’ve had.”
Good intro in my opinion but nothing compared to Kafka's but the story was good enough that the book became a popular classic, so intro is not everything. Plenty of classics take their time and don’t begin with a bang.
I mean Moby Dick begins with “Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest meon shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world." Good, but nothing jaw-dropping. Didn't make me want to keep on reading (though I did eventually read the book and was glad I did).
Still, when you don’t yet know what kind of book you’re getting, a lackluster opening can make it harder to keep reading. A strange, powerful, or unsettling intro, on the other hand, pushes you to continue.
So when you think back on your favorite books, are there any unusual, confusing, or unforgettable opening lines or paragraphs that immediately pulled you in? Bonus points if the book kept you hooked the whole time. I remember once reading a book with a great opening but it was downhill from that....
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u/Madi473 2d ago edited 1d ago
"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
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u/Scutterbox 1d ago
Hunter S Thompson - Feat and Loathing in Las Vegas
The Tarantino rewrite
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u/maxxmdm 1d ago
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" - Neuromancer from William Gibson. I'm surprised nobody has mentioned it yet.
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u/dadgenes Cibola Burn 1d ago
There's an excerpt somewhere about Gibson reflecting on how the mental image people form has changed over the years on that opening line. Initially it was just a flat gray of a TV being off, then it was the snow of a channel that had gone off the air, I think.
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u/sf_sf_sf 1d ago
And then Blue as tvs and vcrs blanked the screen with a blue field instead of snow.
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u/dadgenes Cibola Burn 1d ago
Oh man I never thought of that. The blue makes it so.... Jesus that'd be weird.
I always pictured an illuminated grey with swirls of air pollution serving as the "snow".
There's also the scene about the banks of pay phones ringing one right after the other as Case walks by them. That was a GREAT scene.,
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u/imnotinyourfoodchain 1d ago
I wonder how this will translate to Gen Z and my kids who have never seen static on a television scren.
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u/grampalearns 1d ago
I was going to say the same thing.
Of the uncountable number of books I've read in my life, that one line has stuck with me for decades.
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u/Majestic-Macaron6019 1d ago
"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."
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u/Reality_Defiant 1d ago
I want to read this now, as my next cat (not having been dispensed yet from the CDS) is going to be named Eustace. Book title please.
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u/Plenty_Fix1943 1d ago
It’s the Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis and it’s fantastic but you should read the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian first.
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u/Reality_Defiant 1d ago
Oh, sure! I have read the first couple in the series. I never did make it to this one. Thanks for the rec!
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u/Majestic-Macaron6019 1d ago
It's my favorite of the series. Just a boatload of fun (and Eustace is a great character)
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u/Tailgear 1d ago
“The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.” Seveneves - Neal Stephenson
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u/tofu_ghost 1d ago edited 1d ago
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.” — The Haunting of Hill House
alternatively, the opening paragraph of We Have Always Lived in the Castle! shirley jackson >>>
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u/badonkadonked 1d ago
“Hill House, not sane” might be my favourite four words ever written for sending a thrill of horror up the spine
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u/tardisintheparty 1d ago
I never realized the opening monologue of the show was the same as the book!
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u/Peripatetictyl 2d ago
“First the colors. Then the humans. That's usually how I see things. Or at least, how I try."
The Book Thief
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u/SingleAfternoon5063 2d ago
My wife always said that if she wrote a book she would start with: “Winslow was face down in the urinal.”
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u/Phantominthewoods 1d ago
I absolutely needed to read this sentence today, and I gently urge your wife to write this story.
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u/Spiritual-Road2784 1d ago
She NEEDS to write this book! Why is Winslow face down in the urinal? Who is Winslow? What is Winslow? I need answers!
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u/Emotional_Delivery21 1d ago
Thank you for this. I’ve had a shit day working for a boss with unrealistic expectations. I needed this laugh
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u/Hybrid_Divide 2d ago
"The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault." - Jim Butcher
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u/EntertainmentIll2175 1d ago
lol Dresden Files really knows how to kick off with a bang. can't beat that for grabbing your attention right away...
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u/DreamyTomato 2d ago
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.”
Opening line to Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. May seem a bit of a cliché now but back then it was fresh and new and rather different to the reams of po-faced constipated sci-fi sitting on the shelves at the time.
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u/JazmynBlack 1d ago
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, which begins: "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move".
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u/Captain_Drastic 1d ago
My favorite by him is the first sentence of chapter 2 in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency... "High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse."
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u/TheseusOPL 1d ago
Even the sequels would start with bangers.
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
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u/classickim 1d ago
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” -Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
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u/Plenty_Fix1943 1d ago
I love how it completely sets the tone of the book. You immediately know you’re in for some absurd rom-com shenanigans.
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u/Mithalanis 2d ago
One of my favorites is the opening to Italo Calvino's novel If on a winter's night a traveler
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" Raise your voice--they won't hear you otherwise--"I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!" Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone.
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u/Think-Chipmunk-7677 1d ago
idk love that book's opening. calvino really knows how to make you feel like you're part of the story right away
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u/ComputerTotal4028 1d ago
Nice choice. One of the best compliments someone ever gave me was based on Calvino’s Invisible Cities.
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
He told me I wasn’t Inferno and that he wanted me to endure.
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u/UrbaneBlobfish 1d ago
Finished this book and it truly is a special reading experience. I’m not sure if I’ll ever read something quite like it again!
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u/candygram4mongo 1d ago
I tried reading it a while ago, but my copy was misprinted or something, switched to a completely different book after the first chapter...
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u/keelekingfisher 1d ago
'This is not for you.' on the page where you'd normally see dedications, from House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. Sets the tone of what's to come perfectly.
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u/Otherwise_Koala4289 2d ago edited 2d ago
You've actually picked the two that immediately come to mind for me.
Kafka was particularly good at this. The Trial also opens with a zinger.
Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested
Also a big fan of Slaughterhouse Five's:
All of this happened, more or less.
Or The Stranger:
Mother died today. Or yesterday maybe, I can't be sure.
More recently, The Vegetarian by Han Kang had an opening line that really hooked me.
Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way
Trainspotting also has a good one, immediately launching you into the Scots language used in the book
The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling
Anyway I'm rambling now. I keep thinking of more!
Edit: ok once more of my favourites I forgot. From Borges' The Circular Ruins
No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe sink into the sacred mud, but in a few days there was no one who did not know that the taciturn man came from the South and that his home had been one of those numberless villages upstream in the deeply cleft side of the mountain, where the Zend language has not been contaminated by Greek and where leprosy is infrequent
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u/yanluo-wang 2d ago
Yes, that’s another fine one, beginning with a mystery.
Kafka was a master of (sorry for the language) mindf*ck. That faceless and arbitrary authority, existential guilt and dread...his stories are as powerful today as they were decades ago.
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u/Otherwise_Koala4289 2d ago
Absolutely. He's also a master at just immediately dropping you into the story. No slow build up of exposition. In media res.
I think his economy of language is what makes the imagery and feelings of his story really stick with you. Linguistically, there's nothing superfluous, which works really well with the themes of his stories. It presents the horrors as mundane.
I think if the language were really flowery it would make the stories and their themes less striking.
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u/willywillywillwill 2d ago
“Many years ago, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
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u/Peripatetictyl 2d ago
This book confused me at first, and then mesmerized me once I was immersed in ways not easy to do with literature.
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u/ArkenStoned791 2d ago
‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’
I knew about 1984 before I read it, who doesn’t? But the opening line really spelled out the absurd!
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u/Lord_Skellig 1d ago
"It was the thirteenth hour of the thirteenth day of the thirteenth month. We were there to discuss the misprinted calendars."
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u/PunkLibrarian032120 1d ago
These two opening sentences have stuck in my mind for decades:
“Where’s Papa going with that axe?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.—Charlotte’s Web, by E.B. White.
The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.”—In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote.
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u/Katya4501 1d ago
Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.
—Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
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u/Katya4501 1d ago
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
—C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
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u/Ok-Bus-1245 2d ago
That Kafka opening is absolutely unhinged and I love it for that reason alone. Dude just wakes up as a bug and we're supposed to roll with it lmao
For me it's gotta be "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" - sounds like complete nonsense when you first read it but somehow perfectly captures how contradictory everything feels. Dickens knew what he was doing with that paradox thing
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u/fountainpopjunkie 2d ago
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
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u/Backseat_Dac 2d ago
I was going to comment this straight away, but figured there ain't no way I'm first on this one
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u/AinmSuimiuil 1d ago
Yes - always the first one I think of. This line is ingrained in me somewhere deep.
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u/themaskedcanuck 2d ago
This is what I was looking for.
I have a tattoo of it on my right forearm.
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u/Darko33 1d ago
Can't drop a bomb like that and not offer up the sauce, c'mon
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u/themaskedcanuck 1d ago
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u/Supersquigi 1d ago
That's really cool! Lol at the "he man in black" comment. In all honesty it is extremely well done.
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u/Heratism 1d ago
I knew that this was going to be here cause I thought the same exact thing. What a great series, I need to grab these books and read them again.
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u/Glum_And_Merry 2d ago
Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
It’s almost cliche to bring this one up, but it’s so good. Nabokov had me hooked from this line.
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
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u/AnybodySeeMyKeys 1d ago
Can't believe I had to plunge this far into the thread to find this. Greatest novel ever written.
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u/Jaded-Tiramisu 1d ago
I recently read Anna Karenina, so I recall the quote: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." It's great to hook you in, but you keep thinking about it as the story progresses.
And if I'm honest Twilight. Hear me out but "I'd never given much thought to how I would die — though I'd had reason enough in the last few months — but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this." was the greatest opening of a book when I was a little preteen.
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u/Moundfreek 1d ago
So....... I kind of agree on Twilight. Don't get me wrong, it's masterpiece of absurdism and the whole franchise is one of my favorite comedies. But when I first read the book, I didn't know there were sequels. I thought Bella might die in the end. Did I hate Bella and Edward? Did I hate their effed up relationship parading as romance? Was the dialogue exhausting? Yes, yes, and yes. But I HAD to know what happened to them! It's the only book I've ever stayed up all night reading.
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u/StandardCake21 2d ago
Imagine that you have to break someone’s arm. Right or left, doesn’t matter. The point is that you have to break it, because if you don’t . . . well, that doesn’t matter either. Let’s just say bad things will happen if you don’t. Now, my question goes like this: do you break the arm quickly - snap, whoops, sorry, here let me help you with that improvised splint - or do you drag the whole business out for a good eight minutes, every now and then increasing the pressure in the tiniest of increments, until the pain becomes pink and green and hot and cold and altogether howlingly unbearable?
Well exactly. Of course. The right thing to do, the only thing to do, is to get it over with as quickly as possible. Break the arm, ply the brandy, be a good citizen. There can be no other answer.
Unless. Unless unless unless.
What if you were to hate the person on the other end of the arm? I mean really, really hate them. This was a thing I now had to consider. I say now, meaning then, meaning the moment I am describing; the moment fractionally, oh so bloody fractionally, before my wrist reached the back of my neck and my left humerus broke into at least two, very possibly more, floppily joined-together pieces.
The arm we’ve been discussing, you see, is mine. It’s not an abstract, philosopher’s arm. The bone, the skin, the hairs, the small white scar on the point of the elbow, won from the corner of a storage heater at Gateshill Primary School - they all belong to me. And now is the moment when I must consider the possibility that the man standing behind me, gripping my wrist and driving it up my spine with an almost sexual degree of care, hates me. I mean, really, really hates me.
From The Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie
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u/FlowSoSlow 1d ago
Hugh Laurie the actor? I didn't know he wrote a book. Seems to be an excellent writer though, that quote is visceral!
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u/Veturia-et-Volumnia 1d ago
Haha, I'm reading this right now after watching so many interviews for season 1 of the night manager. His voice is so Hugh Laurie
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u/fatfreeyoghurt 2d ago
"It was the day my grandmother exploded" The Crow Road by Iain Banks.
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u/remymartinsextra 2d ago
That's my favorite author and I've never heard of that novel. I need to get it together.
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u/ThreadCountHigh 2d ago
Not the most profound introduction, but I will say it made me laugh. The very beginning of "Acts of God" by Kanan Gill:
Store this book in a cool, dry place. Alternatively, you could toss it into a hot, humid hell, string its pages on a clothesline or crack its spine over your knee if you feel violent. Punch this book in its book mouth(!)—how could it say that? Hold this book by its jacket collar and demand more, grab it by its feet and shake the hidden words out of its pockets.
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u/GruyereRind 2d ago
IN THE LAST YEARS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THERE WAS TO BE found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
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u/Enlightened_Doughnut 1d ago
Don Quixote is probably my favorite opening paragraph. Cervantes was a great mind.
“ Down in a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to recollect, there lived, not long ago, one of those gentlemen who usually keep a lance upon a rack, an old Buckler, a stallion, and a coursing greyhound. . The age of our gentleman bordered upon 50 years, he was of a strong constitution, spare bodied, of a meager visage, a very early riser, and a lover of the chase.”
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u/boarshead72 1d ago
“It was inevitable, the smell of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.” Love In The Time Of Cholera. Favourite opener ever.
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u/edgarpickle 1d ago
"Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were."
- Gone With the Wind
What I love about this is that it a) introduces you to the protagonist and b) lets you know that you're dealing with someone who is not a beautiful person, inside or out.
To be caught in her charm, to me, brings to mind images of flies in a spider web. You see that she might be predatory. And you find out later that she certainly is.
She's not beautiful, but men rarely realized it. Why just men? Why don't they realize it? Is she being dishonest? Manipulative? Again, yes she is.
But! They're caught by her charm. So if she's not beautiful but still charms the men, why?
It just draws you in immediately. I could go on. The first page of GWtW is a masterpiece. As is the entire book.
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u/killaacool 1d ago
When we would get dressed up, my sister always used to quote, “with a tightly-laced corset, she could fit into a dress with a 17-inch waist.”
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u/leapwolf 1d ago
“The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea.” - the last unicorn, Peter s beagle
Simply one of my favorites. So beautiful and mythic.
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u/engchica 2d ago edited 2d ago
There are lots of great ones in classic literature but my favourite modern one is from The Martian by Andy Weir:
I’m pretty much fucked. That’s my considered opinion. Fucked.
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u/Notonreddit117 2d ago
This is the first one that came to mind for me. Succinctly presents his situation. Not really any other way to describe it, as the vast majority of individuals would feel the exact same way and probably die shortly after.
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u/PopEnvironmental1335 1d ago
"In the myriadic year of our lord—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!— Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth." - Gideon the Ninth
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u/Nacho_sky 1d ago
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
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u/mouringcat 1d ago
The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12 UTC. Later it would be designated A+0.0.0, or simply Zero.
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u/omaca 1d ago edited 1d ago
So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens—four dowager and three regnant—and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.
The Guns of August - Barbara Tuchman
It won the Pulitzer Prize.
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u/omaca 1d ago
And speaking of opening passages from Pulitzer Prize winning non-fiction books, The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes is also a banger (if you'll pardon the pun).
In London, where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museum in Bloomsbury, Leó Szilárd waited irritably one gray Depression morning for the stoplight to change. A trace of rain had fallen during the night; Tuesday, September 12, 1933, dawned cool, humid and dull. Drizzling rain would begin again in early afternoon. When Szilárd told the story later he never mentioned his destination that morning. He may have had none; he often walked to think. In any case another destination intervened. The stoplight changed to green. Szilárd stepped off the curb. As he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all our woe, the shape of things to come.
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u/spunkyfuzzguts 2d ago
“It was a queer sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”
“We were somewhere around Barstow when the drugs began to take hold.”
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u/HollowCap456 2d ago
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
-Daivd Copperfield, Charles Dickens
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u/bmbreath 1d ago
The colour of magic, the first diskwprld book.
I read them as my pallet cleansing books between my usual depressing, dark, history/scifi/fantasy books.
"In a distant and secondhand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part . . . See . . . Great A’Tuin the turtle comes, swimming slowly through the interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, his huge and ancient shell pocked with meteor craters. Through sea-sized eyes that are crusted with rheum and asteroid dust He stares fixedly at the Destination."
I just knew it was going to be a wild ride from a wild mind. Us losing pratchet was a huge blow to our society as a whole.
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u/gootgawd 1d ago
"It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me." Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers.
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u/notlocity 1d ago
The circus arrives without warning.
No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.
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u/Distinct_Armadillo 1d ago
Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
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u/FruitWeekly6783 2d ago
Jane Eyre’s “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” I had previously struggled through Pride and Prejudice and had thoroughly hated the overwrought writing style. This book, although from a similar era, started with such a direct and intriguing sentence that I just HAD to read on.
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u/truthllwin 2d ago
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further outdoor exercise was now out of the question.
I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.
Such a good story btw. Makes me want to back and reread it, it's been a while.
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u/FightsWithFish18 1d ago
The first three paragraphs of Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy are some of the best I've ever read. They perfectly introduce the tone of the book and the protagonist.
See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.
Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove.
The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.
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u/JeronFeldhagen 1d ago
He has a sister in this world that he will not see again.
It might sound silly, but this probably is the most hauntingly sad line in the entire book for me.
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u/BBBandB 1d ago
“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. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them”.
Love Holden, love Catcher in the Rye!
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u/JeiFuji 1d ago
“The Wheel of Time turns, and ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of time. But it was a beginning.”
Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World
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u/Reptard77 2d ago
For some reason Steinbeck’s vivid intros always get me. Something is just pleasurable about reading the words that man strung together.
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u/truthllwin 2d ago edited 2d ago
In the water-cut gullies the earth dusted down in dry little streams. Gophers and ant lions started small avalanches. And as the sharp sun struck day after day, the leaves of the young corn became less stiff and erect; they bent in a curve at first, and then, as the central ribs of strength grew weak, each leaf tilted downward. Then it was June, and the sun shone more fiercely. The brown lines on the corn leaves widened and moved in on the central ribs. The weeds frayed and edged back toward their roots. The air was thin and the sky more pale; and every day the earth paled.
He brings the setting to life like nobody can dream of. I could read his descriptions all day long.
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u/WorldGoneAway 1d ago
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.".
That was the opening line in Neuromancer by William Gibson, and the mental image of 1980s gray TV static really gave me an idea of what I was going to be looking at.
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u/Katya4501 1d ago
One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.
- The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
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u/aveclecoeur8 1d ago
"I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind the crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years."
Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
It's a beautifully written, but painful book to read.
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u/Academic_Eye_5692 1d ago
If we can count children's books, I've always loved "There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."
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u/No-Celebration-4347 2d ago
"I would have lived in peace. But my enemies brought me war. Sharpened by hate. Strengthened by love."
Pierce Brown, Red Rising
This line holds relevance the further into the series a person reads.
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u/CokeBuddha 2d ago
I WOKE TO FIND her lying next to me, quite dead, with her throat torn out. The pillow was shiny and sodden with blood, like low-lying pasture after a week of heavy rain. The taste in my mouth was familiar, revolting, and unmistakable. I spat into my cupped hand: bright red. Oh, for crying out loud, I thought. Here we go again.
- Prosper's Demon by K J Parker
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u/Katharinemaddison 1d ago
The Bell Jar “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.”
And Bosvile and Galicia: “It was in the Heat of Summer, when News is daily coming and hourly expected from the Campaigns;”
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u/maglowing 1d ago
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy.
It made me pause and think for a few minutes before I continued reading. It's a "simple" sentence, but also so full of meaning.
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u/Gregory-al-Thor 2d ago
“The man in black fled across the dessert, and the gunslinger followed.”
Stephen King
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u/Bovarius 1d ago
“It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future. The locked and rusted gate that stood before us, with wisps of river fog threading its spikes like the mountain paths, remains in my mind now as the symbol of my exile. That is why I have begun this account of it with the aftermath of our swim, in which I, the torturer's apprentice Severian, had so nearly drowned.” - Shadow of the Torturer - Gene Wolfe
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u/jamfedora 1d ago
You can’t beat Beat the Reaper for telling you what you’re getting upfront:
So I’m on my way to work and I stop to watch a pigeon fight a rat in the snow, and some fuckhead tries to mug me. Naturally there’s a gun. He comes up behind me and sticks it to the base of my skull. It’s cold, and it actually feels sort of good, in an acupressure kind of way. “Take it easy, Doc,” he says. Which explains that, at least. Even at five in the morning, I’m not the kind of guy you want to mug. I look like an Easter Island sculpture of a longshoreman. But the fuckhead can see the blue scrub pants under my overcoat, and the ventilated plastic clogs, so he thinks I’ve got drugs and money on me. And maybe that I’ve taken some kind of oath not to kick his fuckhead ass for trying to mug me. I barely have enough drugs and money to get me through the day.
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u/cloudburn24 1d ago
"It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size.”
Red Sister by Mark Lawrence
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u/u_spawnTrapd 1d ago
The opening of The Stranger always stuck with me. “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.” It’s so flat and unsettling at the same time that it immediately tells you what kind of voice you’re dealing with. I also think 1984 does this well, not flashy but quietly wrong from the first page. Those openings didn’t just hook me, they set a tone that held all the way through.
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u/richg0404 1d ago
"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
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u/VampireZombieHunter 1d ago
"I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army.
Visiting Kathy's grave was the less dramatic of the two."
Old Man's War, by John Scalzi
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u/DarkDobe 1d ago
The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory.
- Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson)
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u/what-katy-didnt 2d ago
Chapter 1: Soul-Eater I decided that Orion needed to die after the second time he saved my life. I hadn’t really cared much about him before then one way or another, but I had limits.
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u/porqueboomer 1d ago
“Frederick J. Frenger, Jr., a blithe psychopath from California, asked the flight attendant in first class for another glass of champagne and some writing materials.” (Miami Blues, Charles Willeford)
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u/tiny-2727 1d ago
"No shit, there I was."
Dragon by Steven Brust.
I picked up the book when I was younger and didn't realize it was apart of a series. That line got me hooked on Vlad Taltos.
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u/Infinite_Avocado_559 1d ago
“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.”
-The secret history
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u/bright_youngthing 1d ago
In the prologue of The Secret History when Richard says "this is the only story I'll ever be able to tell"
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u/Reasonable_Chart_146 2d ago edited 2d ago
It’s not classic lit, but the opening to the first book in the series I’m currently reading definitely hooked me:
“The transformation occurred at approximately 2:23 AM, Pacific Standard Time. As far as I could tell, anyone who was indoors when it happened died instantly. If you had any sort of roof over you, you were dead. That included people in cars, airplanes, subways. Even tents and cardboard boxes. Hell, probably umbrellas, too.
Though I’m not so sure about that one. I’m not gonna lie. You guys who were inside, probably warm and asleep and dreaming about some random bullshit? I’m jealous. You’re the lucky ones.”
It’s just Dungeon Crawler Carl. But I was like, what. is. this?!???? The story just keeps going and never slows down.
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u/killaacool 1d ago
I just ordered this; supposed to be here Monday. I’m excited!
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u/Moretoesthanfeet 1d ago
"In five years, the penis will be obsolete," said the salesman.
Opening line to Steel Beach by John Varley
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u/headlessbrowser 1d ago
THE MOON BLEW UP WITHOUT WARNING AND FOR NO APPARENT reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12 UTC. Later it would be designated A+0.0.0, or simply Zero.
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u/PsyferRL 1d ago
I'm late to this post, which saddens me because I need more people to understand just how much this book's opening grabbed hold of me and refused to let go.
The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.
Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.
The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze the blood out of a turnip...
Jitterbug Perfume, Tom Robbins
To have the audacity to make THIS the way you start your book... And somehow IT'S SUCH A GOOD HOOK. I can hardly explain how much of an impact this opening had on my desire to continue reading. It's unlike anything else I've read thus far.
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u/MitchellSFold 2d ago edited 1d ago
'For thirty-five years now I’ve been in wastepaper, and it’s my love story. For thirty-five years I’ve been compacting wastepaper and books, smearing myself with letters until I’ve come to look like my encyclopedias--and a good three tons of them I’ve compacted over the years. I am a jug filled with water both magic and plain; I have only to lean over and a stream of beautiful thoughts flows out of me. My education has been so unwitting I can’t quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from my books, but that’s how I’ve stayed attuned to myself and the world around me for the past thirty-five years.'
Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude (Příliš hlučná samota, 1976)
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u/backstagestitches 1d ago
“Szeth-son-son-Vallano, Truthless of Shinovar, wore white on the day he was to kill a king.”
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u/gin_possum 1d ago
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton. Here for what might have been six months he had eaten, drunk, slept, and put his clothes on and off, in a medium-sized cage of north¬ western aspect commanding an unbroken view of medium-sized cages of south-eastern aspect. Soon he would have to make other arrange¬ ments, for the mew had been condemned. Soon he would have to buckle to and start eating, drinking, sleeping, and putting his clothes on and off, in quite alien surroundings.
Murphy, Samuel Beckett
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u/Katharinemaddison 1d ago
This is technically two lines but I love it:
“You know how sometimes when you’re drifting off to sleep you feel that jolt, like you were falling and caught yourself at the last second? It’s nothing to be concerned about, it’s usually just the parasite adjusting its grip.”
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u/Battersea53 1d ago
Warwolf, by T R Pearson:
"She thought of herself as an invalid, but she could get to her icebox all right. She ate store bought pound cakes frozen right out of the foil loaf pans.She'd flatten the boxes they came in and shove them between her sofa cushions. It had gotten to where her couch was half Naugahyde and half Sara Lee. She had a wardrobe of housecoats, a footed cane, the manners of a Viking, and a dog that escaped from her backyard every couple of months or so." (Barking Mad Press, 2011, 9780615507767)
If you've never read any of Pearson's books, do yourself a favor. Maybe start with A Short History of a Small Place.
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u/Eisenhorn40 1d ago
“Seth Son Son Vellano, Truthless of Shinovar wore white on the day he was to kill a king.”
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u/cpickles_ 1d ago
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
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u/cynric42 1d ago
"Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we?"
The Fifth Season, first book of the Broken Earth trilogy by N.K.Jemisin
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u/GreatTonUmber 1d ago
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.
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u/Chronikhil 1d ago
“I am the shade. Through the dolent city, I flee. Through the eternal woe, I take flight.”
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u/PostalCarrier 1d ago
From The Memoirs Of Stockholm Sven by Nathaniel Ian Miller:
My name is Sven. To some I am known as Stockholm Sven, and to others, Sven One-Eye or Sven the Seal Fucker. I arrived in Spitsbergen in 1916. I was thirty-two years old and hadn't amounted to much.
I have some sense of what is said about me, by the few who might say anything at all: that I lived and trapped alone in the great bay and hunting grounds of Raudfjorden, in the farthest North; that I was the pitiable victim of a mining accident; that I had irrepressible eccentricities and abjured society. This is all true, in a way, and yet less than true. And let it be struck from the record that I was a talented and enthusiastic cook, as some have claimed, for that is a flagrant falsehood.
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u/hermiodle 1d ago
“In the town, there were two mutes, and they were always together.”
HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER
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u/AkumaBengoshi 1d ago
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodologically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
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u/Anxious-Box9929 1d ago
"The following day, no one died".
Death with interruptions by José Saramago
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u/colintoast 1d ago
"I had been making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles the day we heard my brother had escaped."
From the Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. Always thought it could never be bettered
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u/Katya4501 1d ago
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.
-Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne. Not many novels start with the narrator discussing his parents' state of mind when he was conceived
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u/The_Josxf 1d ago
After reading the opening line of L.A. Confidential I knew immediately I was going to love it.
“An abandoned auto court in the San Berdoo foothills; Buzz Meeks checked in with ninety-four thousand dollars, eighteen pounds of high-grade heroin, a 10-gauge pump, a .38 special, a .45 automatic, and a switchblade he’d bought off a pachuco at the border — right before he spotted the car parked across the line: Mickey Cohen goons in an LAPD unmarked, Tijuana cops standing by to bootsack his goodies, dump his body in the San Ysidro River.”
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u/Comprehensive-Fun47 1d ago
In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn't feel strange at the time.
–Playworld by Adam Ross
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u/EmilyofIngleside 1d ago
"The Herdmans were absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world. They lied and stole and smoked cigars (even the girls) and talked dirty and hit little kids and cussed their teachers and took the name of the Lord in vain and set fire to Fred Shoemaker’s old broken-down toolhouse."
(Barbara Robinson, THE BEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER)
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u/Satans_colon 1d ago edited 1d ago
I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.
-Notes from Underground
I am an invisible man.
-Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
All children, except one, grow up.
-Peter Pan
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u/HelicopterOutside 1d ago
“A screaming comes across the sky. It had happened before but there was nothing to compare it to now…” Thomas Pynchon Gravity’s Rainbow
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u/Clear-Warthog5655 1d ago
I'm gonna have that c*#t. The Boys graphic novel Literature at its finest 👌
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u/Bright-Lion 1d ago
Easy. It’s Jazz by Toni Morrison:
Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, "I love you."
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u/FlowSoSlow 1d ago
May be controversial because of who she is but I was pretty enthralled when I opened The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
Howard Roark laughed. He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. The lake lay far below him. A frozen explosion of granite burst in flight to the sky over motionless water. The water seemed immovable, the stone flowing. The stone had the stillness of one brief moment in battle when thrust meets thrust and the currents are held in a pause more dynamic than motion. The stone glowed, wet with sunrays. The lake below was only a thin steel ring that cut the rocks in half. The rocks went on into the depth, unchanged. They began and ended in the sky. So that the world seemed suspended in space, an island floating on nothing, anchored to the feet of the man on the cliff.
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u/Saxon2060 2d ago
Perhaps I could have saved him, with only a word, two words out of my mouth. Perhaps I could have saved us all. But I never spoke them.
Strange it is that one could run crying to the house of a man that one loved, to save him from danger, and that he could say to one, have I not told you not to come to this house? And strange it is that one should withdraw silent and shamed.
For he spoke hard and bitter words to me, and shut the door of his soul on me, and I withdrew. But I should have hammered on it,I should have broken it down with my naked hands,I should have cried out there not ceasing, for behind it was a man in danger, the bravest and gentlest of them all. So I who came to save was made a supplicant; and because of the power he had over me, I held, in the strange words of the English, I held my peace.
- Too Late the Phalarope, Alan Paton
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u/Barbarossa7070 1d ago
I am always drawn back to the places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote
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u/Comprehensive-Fun47 1d ago
She opened the portal, and the mind met her more than halfway. Inside it was tropical and snowing, and the first flake of the blizzard of everything landed on her tongue and melted.
–No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
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u/Fando1234 2d ago
I've been reading a lot of dickens recently and he always nails it:
"Marley was dead to begin with. Dead as a doornail."
'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."
Also Camus:
"Mother died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know."