Microblog Memes

The first concussion cut the rocket up the side with a giant can opener. The men were thrown into space like a dozen wriggling silverfish. They were scattered into a dark sea; and the ship, in a million pieces, went on, a meteor swarm seeking a lost sun.

-Bradbury, Kaleidoscope

The first line of James Ellroy's LA Confidential is what immediately moved me from solely reading fantasy and sci-fi as a young man and opened the door a world of hard-boiled crime that would go on to include the classics like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

There's something about Ellroy's clipped, staccatto writing rhythm (he calls it "shotgun prose") that grabbed me from the very first moment.

An abandoned auto court in the San Berdoo foothills; Buzz Meeks checked in with ninetyfour thousand dollars, eighteen pounds of high-grade heroin, a 10-gauge pump, a .38 special, a .45 automatic and a switchblade he'd bought off a pachuco at the border--right before he spotted the car parked across the line: Mickey Cohen goons in an LAPD unmarked, Tijuana cops standing by to bootjack a piece of his goodies, dump his body in the San Ysidro River.

An evocative one which has stayed with me: “I had barely regained the ability to walk. I could not chase women, but could slowly make my way up the stairs to the whorehouse.”

I can’t remember where it’s from. Perhaps Bukowski or one of his contemporaries?

I don’t think it’s technically the very first line in the book, but The Way of Kings’ “Szeth-son-son-Vallano, Truthless of Shinovar, wore white on the day he was to kill a king.” still gives me chills.

"When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there."

From The Dinosaur by Augusto Monterroso.

It's the opening like, the closing line and everything in between.

"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."

Call me Ishmael.

One of the all time greats.

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

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.

One I've recently re-read. Not quite as catchy as some of the others here, but manages to capture the world and mood of the setting remarkably well in just one sentence.

"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."

In Germany, "Ilsebill salzte nach." ("Ilsebill added more salt.") from the novel The Flounder, written by author Günter Grass, has been voted the best opening line of all time.

See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.

• Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy.

"Somebody warned them that we were coming. The sympathisers left nothing behind but an empty apartment and a few volumes of illegal verse."

• Blackwing, by Ed McDonald

The following lines are even better in terms of raw world building but it's an excellent open.

He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.

Scaramouche, by Rafael Sabatini