Good opening lines, passages or paragraphs

Eliot Rosewater

There was a thread on this a few years ago, but in my inscrutable vanity and my determination to widen the scope of the topic to also include lines and passages I decided to start a new thread.


One of my favorites is from Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess:

"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."

It love it because it so immediately sets the personality of the narrator and protagonist as old, rich so presumably successful, homosexual so presumably arty and controversial, and a man of high living (having a catamite, a servant (Ali), and being called upon by the Archbishop).


And also the opening paragraph to A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

At first we get an impression of an intimate couple living in a serene wilderness, but that is suddenly destroyed with the mention of troops moving across the valley. The "we" is found to be his army medical platoon, giving us from the start an impression of the fraternity of men at war.

fontanalis

The Road
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patters that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

The Dead
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Sergeant

Flann O'Brien. At Swim-Two Birds.

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.

Denerick

Rob Roy by Walter Scott:

You have requested me, my dear friend, to bestow some of that leisure, with which Providence has blessed the decline of my life, in registering the hazards and difficulties which attended its commencement. The recollection of those adventures, as you are pleased to term them, has indeed left upon my mind a chequered and varied feeling of pleasure and pain, mingled I trust, with no slight gratitude and veneration to the Disposer of human events, who guided my early course through much risk and labour, that the ease with which he has blessed my prolonged life, might seem softer from remembrance and contrast. Neither is it possible for me to doubt, what you have often affirmed, that the incidents which befell me among a people singularly primitive in their government and manners, have something interesting and attractive for those who love to hear an old man's stories of a past age.

Why aren't people so eloquent any more?

Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley

Along this particular stretch of line no express had ever passed. All the trains - the few that there were - stopped at all the stations. Denis knew the names of those stations by heart. Bole, Tritton, Spavin Delawarr, Knipswich for Timpany, West Bowlby, and finally, Camlet-on-the-Water. Camlet was where he always got out, leaving the train to creep indolently onward, goodness only knew whither, into the green heart of England

A great opening sentance. The last line being the most resonant.

I'll dig up some of my favourite lines in books (Not just the opening sentances) when I get the chance...

xoxyx

"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore..."
This poem hums to me. From the beginning the rhythm pleases every aesthetic bone in my body.

Bog

The Dead
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. ..His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead

Hardly the opening lines, in fairness

For me, it has to be this:

To the red country and part of the gray country of
Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did
not cut the scarred earth. The plows crossed and
recrosscd the rivulet marks. The last rains lifted the corn
quickly and scattered weed colonies and grass along the sides
of the roads so that the gray country and the dark red coun-
try began to disappear under a green cover. In the last part
of May the sky grew pale and the clouds that had hung in
high puffs for so long in the spring were dissipated. The sun
flared down on the growing corn day after day until a line
of brown spread along the edge of each green bayonet. The
clouds appeared, and went away, and in a while they did not
try any more. The weeds grew darker green to protect them-
selves, and they did not spread any more. The surface of the
earth crusted, a thin hard crust, and as the sky became pale,
so the earth became pale, pink in the red country and white
in the gray country.