What is your favorite opening line?

[gully_foyle]

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

- William Gibson, Neuromancer

​

You know what, I haven't read that book since 86 or whenever it hit our shores. I have it sitting in my TBR pile. But the moment I read that quote, I knew what it was. I can only think of cliched opening lines (best of times, worst of times), but that one stuck in my subconscious. I had better read it again.

 

[Lioness]

"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-Eye of the World

That one grabbed me as well, but its not my favourite of all time.

 

[Lucien21]

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

- William Gibson Neuromancer

The gunslinger one is great but my favourite King opening is:

The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years - if it ever did end - began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.

- Stephen King : IT

 

[j d worthington]

I can't really say that I have one single favorite opening line. There are far too many excellent first lines to choose from, and the ones from Nineteen Eighty-four, Fahrenheit 451, and Moby-Dick are certainly among them (and high on my list). Some others that come to mind are:

The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man.

-- Lord Dunsany, "The Hoard of the Gibbelins"

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

-- H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

and the understated and really quite subtle

It was the design of Angelo Ricci and Joe Czanek and Manuel Silva to call on the Terrible Old Man.

which, by its very phrasing, subtly intimates that the purpose of that call is for nothing good, while the sobriquet given to the recipient of said call makes it evident that "the biter bit" is describing the situation rather mildly....

 

[Lucien21]

For non Genre opening lines I don't think you get much better than...

It was the day my Grandmother exploded.

- Iain Banks : The Crow Road

 

[Thadlerian]

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

I was about to dig through my books to see what I could find, but then this was posted, and I just can't agree more.

 

[Grimward]

"Larry drove fast. He had to. He was being chased by lightning."

It almost has a Zelazny-like feel to it, but this is actually Eric Nylund, from "Dry Water". Something about the image of trying to out-drive lightning intrigues me...

 

[chopper]

For non Genre opening lines I don't think you get much better than...

It was the day my Grandmother exploded.

- Iain Banks : The Crow Road

class. and genre-linked anyway.....

 

[Switchback]

I always liked the way Hyperion began:

"The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-Sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below."

 

[Tillane]

Difficult to disagree with some of the suggestions here, 1984 and Neuromancer in particular (and The Crow Road, which made me laugh out loud the first time I read it). There are a few I really like that haven't been mentioned yet, though. A couple are really simple, one-line set ups:

The room is full of ghosts.

Paul J. McAuley, Fairyland​

There was a razorstorm coming in.

Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space
​

And a couple...aren't.

My father told me I would live as many years as the grains of dust I could hold in one hand. Consequently I have lived to such an advanced age that now, when my body is ravaged by time, and powerless, all I have left to me is this voice, this shadow, this urge to tell.

Jeff Noon, Pollen

'Tell me, what is happiness?'
'Happiness? Happiness...is to wake up, on a bright spring morning, after an exhausting first night spent with a beautiful...passionate...multi-murderess.'
'S***. Is that all?'

Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons
​

 

[Switchback]

and also, to be technical, the opening line from the Wheel of Time is from the prologue, and sets the mood perfectly. This is the one that got be started on one of the best reading experiences I've ever had:

"The palace still shook occasionally as the earth rumbled in memory, groaned as if it would deny what had happened."

 

[Spade]

"The only thing that I remembered was that I had seen extraordinary sights on the morning of the day I died" - The Dark Beyond the Stars by Frank M. Robinson

 

[clovis-man]

Here's one I just thought of:

"Two minutes before he disappeared forever from the face of the Earth he knew, Joseph Schwartz strolled along the pleasant streets of suburban Chicago quoting Browning to himself."

Isaac Asimov, Pebble in the Sky 1950.

 

[Connavar]

This one was a surprisingly nasty and cool way to start a Noir book.


"When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell."

Richard Stark , Hunter 1962

 

[nixie]

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

Those first few words made me realise I had found something spectacular,

 

[Quokka]

Non SFF it's more the opening paragraph and hospital scene:

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

From SFF:

THERE was a wall. - The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin

I had to stop and think a moment before it clicked how the whole universe was inside that wall but it sets the scene beautifully for the rest of the story.

 

[Mark Robson]

To say that I met Nicholas Brisbane over my husband's dead body is not entirely accurate. Edward, it should be noted, was still twitching upon the floor.

The opening line from Silent in the Grave by Deanna Raybourn.

From a children's book, however, the biscuit has to go to Morris Gleitzmann for this cracker at the start of his book, Bumface:

"Angus Soloman! Is that a penis you've drawn in your exercise book?"

 

[woodsman]

Dickens may no longer be greatly admired by many but the start to A tale of two cities is my favourite, even if it is (as expected) somewhat longer than many mentioned.

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 oh light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair......

After that consice opening he starts to blether somewhat.

 

[D_Davis]

This one was a surprisingly nasty and cool way to start a Noir book.


"When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell."

Richard Stark , Hunter 1962

Excellent!

 

[Werthead]

"It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen."
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

"When a man you know to be of sound mind tells you his recently deceased mother has just tried to climb in his bedroom window and eat him, you only have two basic options."
Richard Morgan, The Steel Remains

"These are the tales of the 21st Aeon, when Earth is old and the sun is about to go out."
Jack Vance, Rhialto the Marvellous

"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 kings lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with giantic melancholies and gigantic mirths, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet."
Robert E. Howard, The Phoenix on the Sword (actually two lines, but WTH?)