Favourite First Lines for 1/11/11

We’re all ones today. 

In honour of the number one, here are a few of my favourite first sentences (or two).

So.

In the beginning, there was nothing.  Just water.

Coyote was there, but Coyote was asleep.  That Coyote was asleep and that Coyote was dreaming.  When that Coyote dreams, anything can happen.

          I can tell you that.

Thomas King

Green Grass, Running Water

 

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.  Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

J.R.R. Tolkien

The Hobbit

 

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

L.P. Hartley

The Go-Between

 

The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.

Stella Gibbons

Cold Comfort Farm

 

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.

Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre

 

If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.  In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle.

Lemony Snickett

The Bad Beginning

 

Greta was at the stove.  Turning hotcakes.  Reaching for the coffee beans.  Grinding away James’s voice.

Sheila Watson

The Double Hook

 

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book”, thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”

Lewis Carroll

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

 

This is a story a young girl gathers in a car during the early hours of the morning.  She listens and asks questions as the vehicle travels through darkness.  Outside, the countryside is unbetrayed.  The man who is driving could say, “In that field is a castle,” and it would be possible for her to believe him.

Michael Ondaatje

In the Skin of a Lion

 

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.

J.D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye

 

The birth was quick but the christening took forever.  Baby Stink was practically walking by the time everybody got their cowlicks battened down and the shit scraped off their heels.

Terry Griggs

The Lusty Man

 

Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father.  My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle; it didn’t matter what.  She was in the white corner and that was that.

Jeanette Winterson

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

 

My lifelong involvement with Mrs. Dempster began at 5:58 o’clock p.m. on 27 December 1908, at which time I was ten years and seven months old.

Robertson Davies

Fifth Business

 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice

 

Does such a thing as “the fatal flaw,” that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?  I used to think it didn’t.  Now I think it does.  And I think mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

Donna Tartt

The Secret History

 

I can’t believe I’m on this road again, twisting along past the lake where the white birches are dying, the disease is spreading up from the south…. 

Margaret Atwood

Surfacing

 

I don’t know whether you know Mariposa.  If not, it is of no consequence, for if you know Canada at all, you are probably well acquainted with a dozen towns just like it.

Stephen Leacock

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

 

When April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root, and bathed every vein of earth with that liquid by whose power the flowers are engendered; when the zephyr, too, with its dulcet breath, has breathed life into the tender new shoots in every copse and on every heath, and the young sun has run half its course in the sign of the Ram, and the little birds that sleep all night with their eyes open give song (so Nature prompts them in their hearts), then, as the poet Geoffrey Chaucer observed many years ago, folk long to go on pilgrimages.  Only, these days, professional people call them conferences.

David Lodge

Small World

What are your favourite first lines?

Here are some others.