Some of the best opening lines in literature - Part 2

Here are some more opening lines of certain books that i've liked in the recent past.

 

 

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea." - The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams

 

 

 

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." - Neuromancer by William Gibson

 

 

"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me." - Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

 

 

"I am a sick man . . . I am a wicked man. An unattractive man, I think my liver hurts." - Notes From The Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

 

 

 

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like 'I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive . . .' And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming, 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?" - Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

 

 

 

 

“You would think they’d be used to me by now. I mean don’t they know that after fourteen hundred years the charade of blackness is over? That we blacks, the once eternally hip, the people who were as right now as Greenwich Mean Time, are, as of today, as yesterday as stone tools, the velocipede, and the paper straw all rolled into one? The Negro is now officially human. Everyone, even the British, says so.” - Slumberland by Paul Beatty

 

 

 

“You could touch for a couple of bucks. The window of the booth went up and you stuck out the bills. They might tell you not to pinch, but I was a stroke type anyway. Some guys, I guess they want to leave a mark. Me, I just like the feel.” -  “Old Souls” by Sam Lipsyte (from Venus Drive)

 

 

 

 

“She brought him what she had promised and they did it in his car, on the top floor of the car park, looking down onto the black flat roofs of buildings, and she said, or she thought she said, ‘I like your skin,’ when what she really liked was the color of her father’s skin, the mottled white of his arms, and the clay color at the roots of the hairs along his arms.” - “You Drive” by Christine Schutt (from Nightwork)

 

 

 

“Though brilliantly sunny, Saturday morning was overcoat weather again, not just topcoat weather, as it had been all week and as everyone hoped it would stay for the big weekend — the weekend of the Yale game. Of the twenty-some young men who were waiting at the station for their dates to arrive on the ten-fifty-two, no more than six or seven were out on the cold, open platform. The rest were standing around in hatless, smoky little groups of twos and threes and fours inside the heated waiting room, talking in voices that, almost without exception, sounded collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident, conversational turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue, one that the outside, non-matriculating world had been bungling, provocatively or not, for centuries.” - Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

 

 

 “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” - Murphy by Samuel Beckett

 

 “We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen.” - Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

 

 

“You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by a Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.” - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

 

 

 

“Discuss the regulars. They sit in a line like ugly, huddled birds, eyes wet with alcohol.” – Ablutions by Patrick Dewitt

 

 

 “Father died last year. I don’t subscribe to the theory by which we only become truly adult when our parents die; we never become truly adult.” – Platform by Michel Houellebecq

 

 

“If I am out of my mind, it’s alright with me, thought Moses Herzog.” – Herzog by Saul Bellow

 

 

 

“July 1, 1996

I had such a wonderful meal in every sense of the word. I especially liked the ordering of the food. IT asserts an altogether proper dominance. And how do you manage to hire such attractive people!! Often I visit Wendy’s just to take a gander at your employees. Thank you! (for being there)” - Letters to Wendy’s by Joe Wenderoth

 

 

 

 

“Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I’m a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. I’ve got Tourette’s. My mouth won’t quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I’m reading aloud, my Adam’s apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghosts of themselves, husks of empty breath and tone.” - Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

 

 

“I have a dream of working a combination lock that is engraved on its back with the combination. Left 85, right 12, left 66. “Well shit, man,” I say in the dream.” - Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison

 

 

 

 “I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library.

Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified.

He said, What? What life? No life of mine.” - “Wants” by Grace Paley (from Enormous Changes at the Last Minute)

 

 

“I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”  - The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow