In an interview with recently deceased author Paul Auster, he says the following:
When I was 9 or 10, my grandmother gave me a six-volume collection of books by Robert Louis Stevenson, which inspired me to start writing stories that began with scintillating sentences like this one: “In the year of our Lord 1751, I found myself staggering around blindly in a raging snowstorm, trying to make my way back to my ancestral home.”
This encouraged me to browse my bookshelf and search for those scintillating first sentences. As it turns out, many of the books that I loved the most really do pack a punch before the end of their first paragraph. Here’s my personal selection. Unlike Auster’s example, the ones I am sharing do not immediately drop you in the middle of the action, as the number of adventure books on my bookshelf is marginal. However, I do feel they capture a lot about the protagonist and set the tone for the novel.
I would love for you to share yours.
The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster:
I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn, and so the next morning I traveled down there from Westchester to scope out the terrain.
Moon Palace by Paul Auster:
It was the summer that men first walked on the moon. I was very young back then, but I did not believe there would ever be a future.
The Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, 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.
The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin by David Nobbs
When Reginald Iolanthe Perrin set out for work on the Thursday morning, he had no intention of calling his mother-in-law a hippopotamus.
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In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
I was so disappointed this one wasn’t in OP’s post, it’s amazing!
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Came here for this one. Perfect.
“The man in Black fled across the Desert, and the Gunslinger followed.”
Stephen King - The Gunslinger
“I’m pretty much fucked.”
The Martian Andy Weir
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
W. Gibson - Neuromancer
Genuinely one of the greatest opening lines ever written.
I’m picking up this book on account of that sentence alone. Thank you!
That’s what I immediately thought of, for me this opening sets the tone of the whole book.
Beautiful line. I feel it.
I think about this line a lot and try to work in a bit of the same vibe into my own descriptions
What’s funny is that, nowadays, young readers are likely to think “ok so a perfect cloudless blue, gotcha” instead of envisioning an ominous salt and pepper static.
It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size. For Sister Thorn of the Sweet Mercy Convent Lano Tacsis brought two hundred men.
Red sister by Mark Lawrence.
“In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit.”
*When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age.In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked."
John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley.
Wow. This couldn’t have come at a better time… Thanks for sharing this!
it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want for a wife.
Pride & Prejudice - Jane Austen
Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn’t easy, I know. In fact,I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.
Bill Bryson - A short history of nearly everything
Neal Stephenson doesn’t waste a second with the opener to Seveneves:
The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.
He’s not going to explain why or how, he just gets it out of the way: it happens, now let’s get on with the story.
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He absolutely explains how, like did you read the book? It was a mini black hole
But not the opening, that shit goes hard
Not the very first lines, but Terry Pratchetts “The Colour of Magic” intro is a lore about the world and universe, and ends with this absolute gem:
There was, for example, the theory that A’Tuin had come from nowhere and would continue at a uniform crawl, or steady gait, into nowhere, for all time. This theory was popular among academics. An alternative, favoured by those of a religious persuasion, was that A’Tuin was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as were all the stars in the sky which were, obviously, also carried by giant turtles. When they arrived they would briefly and passionately mate, for the first and only time, and from that fiery union new turtles would be born to carry a new pattern of worlds. This was known as the Big Bang hypothesis
Easily Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas for me.
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?”
Most books start off fairly slow but this one hits the ground running after doing cocaine and jumping out of a fuckin’ jet.
“The boys were early for the hanging.” (from memory, not sure about the exact wording, as I read this book 20 years ago)
The small boys came early to the hanging.
Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth
Correct!
As much as I have soured on the series due to it never finishing and due to the 400 page sex god romp in the second book, the opening line of Name of the Wind pulled me in instantly. I’m not going to paste it all here, but it was the stuff about the three silences.
“The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts. The most obvious part was a hollow, echoing quiet, made by things that were lacking. If there had been a wind it would have sighed through the trees, set the inn’s sign creaking on its hooks, and brushed the silence down the road like trailing autumn leaves. If there had been a crowd, even a handful of men inside the inn, they would have filled the silence with conversation and laughter, the clatter and clamor one expects from a drinking house during the dark hours of night. If there had been music…but no, of course there was no music. In fact there were none of these things, and so the silence remained. Inside the Waystone a pair of men huddled at one corner of the bar. They drank with quiet determination, avoiding serious discussions of troubling news. In doing this they added a small, sullen silence to the larger, hollow one. It made an alloy of sorts, a counterpoint. The third silence was not an easy thing to notice. If you listened for an hour, you might begin to feel it in the wooden floor underfoot and in the rough, splintering barrels behind the bar. It was in the weight of the black stone hearth that held the heat of a long dead fire. It was in the slow back and forth of a white linen cloth rubbing along the grain of the bar. And it was in the hands of the man who stood there, polishing a stretch of mahogany that already gleamed in the lamplight.”
Also, the back of the book summary for Name of The Wind deserves mention too, because it’s literally just a quote from a little way into the book, and it’s absolutely incredible;
“I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep. My name is Kvothe. You may have heard of me.”
“Nothing but stars, scattered across the blackness as though the Creator had smashed the windshield of his car and hadn’t bothered to stop to sweep up the pieces.”
-Pyramids, by Terry Pratchett
