Best opening paragraphs

boogle

Which opening paragraphs stick in your mind? The ones that grabbed your attention from the outset. I can usually tell if I am going to enjoy a book from it's opening paragraph. Similarly, a turkey is easily identifiable from the first few sentences.

For me, the opening paragraph of the first book of the Gormenghast Trilogy; Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake is the most memorable. I was immediately immersed. The imagery is spectacular.


"Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of original stone, taken by itself
would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it
possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that
swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the
sloping earth, each one half way over its neighbor until, held back by the
castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great
walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets of a rock. These dwellings,
by ancient law, were granted the chill intimacy with the stronghold that
loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the
seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow."


I'm also a big fan of the opening paragraph of Catch 22.

mcgovern

I'm sure these two will be mentioned:

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 . . .

and

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

John

I was just about to post that Dark Tower one, probably one of the best opening lines ever. I'll post more when I get home to my books.

Beruthiel

This one from Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities, keeps popping up in my mind every so often.

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 directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way.

Lizzykins

Thanks for that Beruthiel. I love that Dickens novel.
One of my favourites is Jane Eyre. There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.....
And Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. Last night I dreamed I went to Manderlay.....

boogle

Yes to the Dark Tower. Just finished the seventh book, and it makes that first paragraph really stand out.

kovski

I've always loved the opening paragraph of The Butcher Boy. You get straight into Francie's rhythm and style of talking.

'When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent. I was hiding out by the river in a hole under a tangle of briars. It was a hide me and Joe made. Death to all dogs who enter here, we said. Except us of course. You could see plenty from inside but no one could see you. Weeds and driftwood and everything floating away downstream under the dark archway of the bridge. Sailing away to Timbuctoo. Good luck now weeds, I said.'

Lemon

"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.

AJG

"I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead."

Henry Miller - 'Tropic of Cancer'.

ZorbaTehZ

From Voltaire's Candide

In the country of Westphalia, in the castle of the most noble Baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh, lived a youth whom Nature had endowed with a most sweet disposition. His face was the true index of his mind. He had a solid judgment joined to the most unaffected simplicity; and hence, I presume, he had his name of Candide. The old servants of the house suspected him to have been the son of the Baron's sister, by a very good sort of a gentleman of the neighborhood, whom that young lady refused to marry, because he could produce no more than threescore and eleven quarterings in his arms; the rest of the genealogical tree belonging to the family having been lost through the injuries of time.

John

The beginning of a very big headache:

James Joyce wrote:

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

A perfect mood setting paragraph, you can feel the atmosphere from the beginning:

Edgar Allen Poe wrote:

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country ; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was - but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable ; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me - upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain - upon the bleak walls - upon the vacant eye-like windows - upon a few rank sedges - and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees - with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium - the bitter lapse into everyday life - the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart - an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it - I paused to think - what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher ? It was a mystery all insoluble ; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression ; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down - but with a shudder even more thrilling than before - upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.

RonMexico

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive..." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"

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

macgowan

RonMexico wrote: »

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive..." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"

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

No more of that talk or I'll set the f*cking leeches on you, understand?

Zaph

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

- Neuromancer by William Gibson

boobookitty

I am a vampire. For centuries I believed I was the last vampire on Earth, that I was the most powerful creature in existence. That belief gave me great self-confidence. I feared nothing because nothing could harm me. Then one remarkable day, my supposedly dead creator, Yaksha, came for me, and I discovered I was not omnipotent. A short time later, another vampire appeared, one Eddie Fender. He had Yaksha's strength, and once again I was almost destroyed. Yet I survived both Yaksha and Eddie, only to give birth to a daughter of unfathomable power an incomprehensible persuasion---Kalika, Kali Ma, the Dark Mother, the Supreme Goddess of Destruction. Yes, I believe my only child to be a divine incarnation, an avatar, as some would describe her. In a devastating vision he showed me her infinite greatness. The only problem is that my daughter seems to have been born without a conscience.

Actually I do have three other small problems.

I don'u know where Kalika is.

I know I must destroy her.

And I love her.

okmqaz42

Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. We would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe.The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Cafe des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside. It was a sad, evilly run cafe where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together and I kept away from it because of the smell of dirty bodies and the sour smell of drunkenness. The men and women who frequented the Amateurs stayed drunk all of the time, or all of the time they could afford it, mostly on wine which they bought by the half-liter or liter. Many strangely named aperitifs were advertised, but few people could afford them except as a foundation to build their wine drunks on. The women drunkards were called poivrottes which meant female rummies.

A Moveable Feast-Ernest Hemingway

Tar.Aldarion

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

Ah, good times.

Dades

"It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realised, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn't sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it's all you've got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life."

-Shantaram
(Gregory David Roberts)

EamonnKeane

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. 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.

!

fated2pretend

Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.

At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O' Brien

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 the world haven't had the advantages you've had.' He didn't say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgements.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Bret Easton Ellis has great opening paragraphs as well, as can be seen by the fact that his latest, Lunar Park, opens with him discussing his previous openings!

Heinrich

Kim - Kipling

He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher - the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that 'fire-breathing dragon', hold the Punjab, for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror's loot.

Photi

okmqaz42 wrote: »

A Moveable Feast-Ernest Hemingway

+ 1

I really love this book, evoked Paris completely for me.


As for me, once I read this paragraph I know I wasn't going to be able to stop reading..

A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius J. Reilly's supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D. H. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress. Several of the outfits, Ignatius noticed, were new enough and expensive enough to be properly considered offenses against taste and decency. Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person's lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one's soul.


A Confederacy Of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Shryke

"Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars--Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet."

The Phoenix and the Sword (Conan) - Robert E. Howard.

toomevara

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.

Nabokov, Lolita.

Dades

Photi wrote: »

As for me, once I read this paragraph I know I wasn't going to be able to stop reading.

There's enough purple prose in there for me to put it straight back on the shelf!

john77

"When the women found milk in her breasts, and other secret feminine tokens, Scaife, the constable's man, an archdolt, was dispatched across the windswept moors and icy mountains to fetch Mr. John Brigge, coroner in the wapentakes of Agbrigg and Morley." Ronan Bennett, Havoc, in its Third Year.

"It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not" Paul Auster, City of Glass

Also the opening scene of Kafka's The Trial, don't have a copy to hand, but that scene always sticks in my mind.

The Mad Hatter

boogle wrote: »

Which opening paragraphs stick in your mind? The ones that grabbed your attention from the outset. I can usually tell if I am going to enjoy a book from it's opening paragraph. Similarly, a turkey is easily identifiable from the first few sentences.

For me, the opening paragraph of the first book of the Gormenghast Trilogy; Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake is the most memorable. I was immediately immersed. The imagery is spectacular.


"Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of original stone, taken by itself
would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it
possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that
swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the
sloping earth, each one half way over its neighbor until, held back by the
castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great
walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets of a rock. These dwellings,
by ancient law, were granted the chill intimacy with the stronghold that
loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the
seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow."


I'm also a big fan of the opening paragraph of Catch 22.

That's a wonderful opening paragraph alright - one of my favourite books, too. You really got the sense that he was an artist as much as a writer in his descriptions.

Beruthiel wrote: »

This one from Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities, keeps popping up in my mind every so often.

Shame it's been so overquoted, though. 'It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?! You stupid monkey!'

Here's my contribution, from Watchmen by Alan Moore.

Rorschach's journal. October 12th, 1985.
Dog carcass in alley this morning. Tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up around them and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout 'Save us!'

And I'll look down and whisper 'No.'

Gonzovision

RonMexico wrote: »

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive..." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"

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

"Just tell me about the goddamn golf shoes!"

Joycey

Bleak House ftw, just started reading it the other day.



London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor
sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As
much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from
the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a
Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine
lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots,
making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as
full-grown snowflakes--gone into mourning, one might imagine, for
the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses,
scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers,
jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill
temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of
thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding
since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits
to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points
tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits
and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the
tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and
dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights.
Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on
the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping
on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and
throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides
of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of
the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching
the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck.
Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a
nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a
balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

2 paragraphs I know, but sure....

Amirani

"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
-- Introibo ad altare Dei." (Ulysses)

Bearhunter

'Friday, in the evening, the landlady shouted up the stairs: "Oh God, oh Jesus, oh Sacred Heart. Noy, there's two gentlemen to see you."
I knew by the screeches of her that these gentlemen were calling to inquire after my health, or to know if I'd had a good trip.'

And thus begins Brendan Behan's Borstal voyage.