Best Opening Line for a Novel (that is, an actual BOOK, for the dolts)

[detroit]

I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Harbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign.
Barbara Kingsolver
The Bean Trees


It was a pleasure to burn.
Farenheit 451
Ray Bradbury



"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
'One Hundred Years of Solitude'

"It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression “as pretty as an airport”.
Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk, and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs."
Douglas Adams
The Long Dark Tea Time Of The Soul


"My female friends had told me that giving birth was like shitting a water melon. They lied. It's like excreting a block of flats - complete with patios, awnings, clothes-lines, television aerials, satellite dishes, backyard barbecues, kidney-shaped swimming pools, gazebos and double garage extensions with the cars parked outside.'
Kathy Lette
Foetal Attraction

 

[wildonion]

& I can't wait to read Bangkok Tattoo

The African American marine in the grey Mercedes will soon die of bites from Naja siamensis, but we don't know that yet, Pichai and I (the future is impenetrable, says the Buddha).

Bangkok 8 by John Burdett

------------

Best opening run-on sentence:

‘ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Misérables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn't seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, "Be My Baby" on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.’

Surpassed only by the last run-on sentence of the novel:

‘Someone has already taken out a Minolta cellular phone and called for a car, and then, when I'm not really listening, watching instead someone who looks remarkably like Marcus Halberstam paying a check, someone asks, simply, not in relation to anything, "Why?" and though I'm very proud that I have cold blood and that I can keep my nerve and do what I'm supposed to do, I catch something, then realize it: Why? and automatically answering, out of the blue, for no reason, just opening my mouth, words coming out, summarizing for the idiots: "Well, though I know I should have done that instead of not doing it, I'm twenty-seven for Christ sakes and this is, uh, how life presents itself in a bar or in a club in New York, maybe anywhere, at the end of the century and how people, you know, me, behave, and this is what being Patrick means to me, I guess, so, well, yup, uh…" and this is followed by a sigh, then a slight shrug and another sigh, and above one of the doors covered by red velvet drapes in Harry's is a sign and on the sign in letters that match the drapes' color are the words THIS IS NOT AN EXIT.’

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho
(no, it is not the Bush authorized biography)

Perhaps Ellis could take lessons in being more succinct, like:

My mother died today, or perhaps it was yesterday.
Albert Camus, L’etranger (The Stranger)

or

This is the story of Achilles' rage.
Homer, The Iliad

 

[Bakermn]

Best opening Line

Marley was dead.

Charles Dickens
Christmas Carol

 

[Coops]

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

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

 

[S.G. Gibson]

"Women adore him and men want to be him."

The autobiography of SG Gibson - in stores soon. Reserve now so not to be disappointed.

 

[wildonion]

"It was love at first sight."

Catch 22
Joseph Heller

Well, some books require a bit more than the opening line, i think

one. THE TEXAN
It was love at first sight.
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.
- Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (whom, when he got tired of hearing people ask, “Why haven’t you written anything as good as Catch-22 since it was published?” finally came up w/ the reply, “Well, who has?”)


Other Americana:

I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road.
- Jack Kerouac, On the Road [1957]

They're out there.
Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them.
- Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest [1962]

When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem's fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury. His left arm was somewhat shorter than his right; when he stood or walked, the back of his hand was at right angles to his body, his thumb parallel to his thigh. He couldn't have cared less, so long as he could pass and punt.
When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.
- Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird [1960]

Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk.
- Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry [1927]

Garp's mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theatre. This was shortly after the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and people were being tolerant of soldiers, because suddenly everyone was a soldier, but Jenny Fields was quite firm in her intolerance of the behavior of men in general and soldiers in particular.
- John Irving, The World According to Garp [1978]

They sprawled along the counter and on the chairs. Another night. Another drag of a night in the Greeks, a beatup all night diner near the Brooklyn Armybase. Once in a while a doggie or seaman came in for a hamburger and played the jukebox. But they usually played some goddam hillbilly record. They tried to get the Greek to take those records off, but hed tell them no. They come in and spend money. You sit all night and buy notting. Are yakiddin me Alex? Ya could retire on the money we spend in here. Scatah. You dont pay my carfare...
- Hubert Selby, Last Exit to Brooklyn


I was leaning against the bar in a speakeasy on Fifty-second Street, waiting for Nora to finish her Christmas shopping, when a girl got up from the table where she had been sitting with three other people and came over to see me. She was small and blonde, and whether you looked at her face or at her body in powder-blue sports clothes, the result was satisfactory. "Aren't you Nick Charles?" she asked.
- Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man [1934]

It's perhaps fitting that I write this introduction in jail- that graduate school of survival.
- Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book


"TOM!"
No answer.
"TOM!"
No answer.
"What's gone with that boy, I wonder? You TOM!"
No answer.
The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the room; then she put them up and looked out under them. She seldom or never looked through them for so small a thing as a boy; they were her state pair, the pride of her heart, and were built for "style," not service--she could have seen through a pair of stove-lids just as well. She looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, not fiercely, but still loud enough for the furniture to hear: "Well, I lay if I get hold of you I'll--"
- Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens),
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer [1876]

I am Sam
I am Sam
Sam I am
That Sam-I-am!
That Sam-I-am!
I do not like
that Sam-I-am!
- Dr. Seuss (pseudonym of Theodore Seuss Geisel), Green Eggs and Ham [1960]

If those don't grab you, nothing will.