Favourite opening lines of a novel?

[AB Editor]

I can't think of mine.

Maybe "This is not for you" printed on a blank page at the beginning of Mark Z Danielewski's "House of Leaves"?

Or maybe any of McCarthy's run-on lines, like in Child of God:

"They came like a caravan of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and across the hill in the morning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and the musicians on chairs in the truckbed teetering and tuning their instruments, the fat man with guitar grinning and gesturing to others in a car behind and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with a wrinkled face"

I know Lolita is suggested a lot.

What's yours?

[LazyGun]

And I thought I was going to be original, offering the opening line of Ian Banks "Crow Road" :)

Probably my all-time favourite author...

[Wharton]

The Outsider by Albert Camus.

"Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday. I don't know."

[DTCwordfan]

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun."

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

[seadogg]

and for the non-existentialists, Alistair Mclean's description of a .45 revolver which happens to be pointing at the hero's head in "When 8 Bells Toll.

[Canary42]

The Catcher in the Rye, as already quoted.

[DTCwordfan]

Venator: The Apotheosis - as its length is now of novel dimensions:

"I proclaim a great revelation to all those who turn to AB in their search for truth."

[naomi24]

Oldies but goodies ……………..

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again"
– Daphne du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’.

"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’s ‘Pride & Prejudice’.

[lady-janine]

There was more commotion going on than a Tipperary bath night.
Big Bonce was clogging around with Lady Godiva; Curly Hayloft, as bald as an egg, was doing a bull-fight with Tilly; Skin-Crone, the cook, was beating time to the shriek of the fiddle, and the navvy hut was alive with dancers of Kerry and County Mayo.

[bert_h]

Well, as an instant declaration of its stupendous scale, starting a novel with "The Galactic Empire was falling" is kind of hard to beat.

[erin-x]

"Jack Torrance thought: Officious little prick."

It just cracks me up!!

[maggiebee]

"My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973." Opening lines of The Lovely Bones.

[mike11111]

Can't remember the title of the novel but the opening lines are spoken by the Pope:

"It was the afternoon of my eighty-third birthday and I was in bed with my catamite".

[Traci66]

Once upon a time .....

[emmie]

my mother is scraping a piece of burnt toast of of the kitchen window, a crease of annoyance across her forehead. This is not an occasional occurrence, a once-in-a-while hiccup in a busy mother's day. My mother burns the toast a surely as the sun rises each morning.

Nigel Slater - Toast
great book, very sad in a way.

[Tom Braider]

THERE are moments of great luxury in the life of a secret agent.

THERE were four of us - George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself,
and Montmorency.

As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the
sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.

[bensmum]

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God

"A Prayer for Owen Meaney" John Irving (my favourite book as well)

[granny grump]

I am packing my belongings in the shawl my mother used to wear when she went to the market. And I'm going from my valley. And this time, I shall never return. I am leaving behind me my fifty years of memory.

[granny grump]

Sorry 'How Green was my valley'

[dogspit]

"He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish."

Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea". Not sure exactly why that has stuck with me... but somehow has. It does set the mood and scene precisely.