Best First Lines

hipdeep: Marley was dead, to begin with.

aethercowboy: This is the saddest story I have ever heard.

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

aethercowboy: The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

hipdeep: Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

aethercowboy: All this happened, more or less.

aethercowboy: 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.

aethercowboy: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

aethercowboy: It was a pleasure to burn.

aethercowboy: Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.

hipdeep: I am old now, and have not much to fear from the anger of gods.

hipdeep: Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, [...]

hipdeep: This is my favorite book in all the world, though I've never read it.

hipdeep: No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were being scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

hipdeep: Taran wanted to make a sword, but Coll, charged with the practical side of his education, decided on horseshoes.

hipdeep: Once upon a time on a small, watery, excitable planet called Earth, in a small, watery, excitable country called Italy, a soft-spoken, rather nice-looking gentleman by the name of Enrico Fermi was born into a family so overprotective that he felt compelled to invent the atomic bomb.

hipdeep: In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

aethercowboy: Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.

hipdeep: I don't know what I should talk about - about death or about love? Or are they the same?

hipdeep: My old eighth-grade teacher, Miss Maggie Doubloon, said she was half Spanish, half French, and half Irish, a plethora of halves not entirely unnoticed by some of the brighter pupils.

hipdeep: From the top of the large boulder he sat on, Ensign Tom Davis looked across the expanse of the cave toward Captain Lucius Abernathy, Science Officer Q'eeng, and Chief Engineer Paul West and thought, "Well, this sucks."

aethercowboy: Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

aethercowboy: There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it

aethercowboy: 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.

aethercowboy: I am an invisible man.

Aquila: All children, except one, grow up.

Aquila: I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.

hipdeep: We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.

hipdeep: When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.

aethercowboy: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

aethercowboy: A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

aethercowboy: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

hipdeep: Dirk Moeller didn't know if he could fart his way into a major diplomatic incident.