Lily Dooner's question got me thinking about great opening lines.
Phil Rogers quoted a cracker from JG Ballard. Excellent!
One of my favourites is JD Salinger's Catcher In The Rye:
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and 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.
Orwell's 1984 is also mind boggling:
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
Anyone else have any favourite opening lines?
'Later, as he sat on the balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous months.'
J G Ballard - High Rise
'In the hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.' Is perhaps my favourite opening line of all time however I do like the opening line to Pride and Prejudice and I also like the first page of Sense and Sensibilty simply because she writes the word 'Dashwood' so many times it makes me laugh.
'I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three: and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.
The June grass, amongst which I stood, was taller than I was, and I wept. I had never been so close to grass before. It towered above me and all around me, each blade tattooed with with tiger-skins of sunlight.......From this daylight nightmare I was awakened, as from many another, by the appearance of my sisters. Faces of rose, familiar, living; huge shining faces hung up like shields between me and the sky; faces with grins and white teeth (some of them broken).. ..There, there, it's all right, don't you wail any more. Come down 'one and we'll stuff you with currants..'
(Laurie Lee, Cider than Rosie) Perhaps the greatest first page of a book ever written, far better in my view than the much-quoted but brilliant J.D.Salinger opening which, for all its genius, is negative, cynical, ant-this, anti-that.. Lee's is pro-family, pro-sisters, positive, showing love between brothers and sisters, not enmity which is encouraged by some of today's trends.