One reader writes, “I had a student assistant from Georgia (the country, not the state) who loved two things dearly: American jazz and Rafael Sabatini. He could not understand why jazz was not more popular in the country of its birth, and I had no answer for him.
“As for Sabatini, this line from Scaramouche is a total classic: ‘He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.’
“It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.” George Orwell, 1984
“I wasn’t doing anything that day, just catching up on my foot dangling.” A Raymond Chandler short story
A reader writes, “The one I have remembered for over 65 years is: ‘The last man on earth sat alone in a room. A knock came on the door.’”
(They are, “It was a morning when all nature shouted Fore,” from P. G. Wodehouse’s “The Heart of a Goof”;
“High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.”
David Lodge, Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses
“I was never so amazed in my life as when the Sniffer drew his concealed weapon from its case and struck me to the ground, stone dead.”
Robertson Davies, Murther and Walking Spirits
“It was the day my grandmother exploded.”
Iain Bainks, The Crow Road
“The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed.”
Stephen King, The Gunslinger
“It was my devil’s own temper that brought me to grief, my temper and a skill with weapons born of my father’s teachings.”
Louis L’Amour, Sackett’s Land
“Ryan was nearly killed twice in half an hour.”
Tom Clancy, Patriot Games
“All beginnings are hard.”
Chaim Potok, In the Beginning
“Five friends I had, and two of them snakes.”
Frederick Buechner, Godric
‘She was naked.’ The Tomorrow Files
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, General Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Hundred Years of Solitude
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
“Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.”
Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
“Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
“Marley was dead: to begin with.”
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (Nice timing.)
“Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.”
George Eliot, Middlemarch
“For forty years my act consisted of one joke. And then she died.”
George Burns, Gracie: A Love Story
And now, eight opening lines from Peter DeVries:
“It wasn’t until I had become engaged to Miss Piano that I began avoiding her.”
Into Your Tent I’ll Creep
“‘The last place to have a ball, my dear Mrs. DelBelly, is at a formal dance.’”
Peckham’s Marbles
“Man is vile, I know, but people are wonderful.”
Let Me Count the Ways
“For as long as I can remember, my father hibernated.”
Consenting Adults
“Like most irritable people I rarely lose my temper (a dog that’s let out for regular exercise isn’t apt to run away when it does escape), but I was losing it this morning.”
The Mackerel Plaza
“I had just been through hell and must have looked like death warmed over walking into the saloon, because when I asked the bartender whether they served zombies he said, ‘Sure, what’ll you have?’”
I Hear America Swinging
“We must love one another, yes, yes, that’s all true enough, but nothing says we have to like each other.”
The Glory of the Hummingbird
“The trouble with treating people as equals is that the first thing you know they may be doing the same thing to you.”
The Prick of Noon
“The Sun rose slowly, as if it wasn’t sure it was worth the effort.”
Terry Patchett, The Light Fantastic
So much better than Atlas Shurgged’s first line, Who is John Galt? Is the The Fountainhead’s ‘Howard Roark laughed.’
“I always get the shakes before a drop.”
Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers
“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, Catcher in the Rye
Margaret Mitchell: Gone with the Wind: “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.”
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.”
“Hi, Jay: One of my favorite first lines is from Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale (1953), the first of the James Bond novels (making these words, of course, the first words presented in the lore of James Bond): ‘The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.’
From Charlotte’s Web: “‘Where’s Papa going with that ax?’ said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.”
As a longtime P. G. Wodehouse fan, I especially appreciated your personal choices. May I recommend another from the master? It’s from the hilarious The Luck of the Bodkins: ‘Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.’”
Catch 22: “The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.”
Donald ‘Skip’ Hays in The Dixie Association: ‘I sat in my cell, packing my sh** in a cardboard box.’
From Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea: “The year 1866 was signalised by a remarkable incident, a mysterious and puzzling phenomenon, which doubtless no one has yet forgotten.”
Max Shulman, Sleep till Noon: “Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Four shots ripped into my groin, and I was off on the biggest adventure of my life . . . But first let me tell you a little about myself.”
“Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk” (two again — sorry).
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: “We were an hour outside of Barstow when the mescaline kicked in.”
“I was born in the house my father built” (Richard Nixon, Memoirs)
William Gibson’s 1983 sci-fi classic Neuromancer: ‘The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.’”
Charles Portis, True Grit: “People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day.”
LAST LINES
“Overhead, one by one, the stars were going out” (Arthur C. Clarke, The Nine Billion Names of God)
The end of Jim Bouton’s Ball Four: “You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”
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