Urban75 Home About Offline BrixtonBuzz Contact

Best Opening Paragraphs

D

Diamond

The Red Baron
I've just read this beauty and am minded not to continue for fear that the remainder won't live up to its introduction:

The war tried to kill us in the spring. As grass greened the plains of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer. When we pressed onward through exhaustion, its eyes were white and open in the dark. While we ate, the war fasted, fed by its own deprivation. It made love and gave birth and spread through fire.

Click to expand...


Do you have a favourite introduction? The Go-Between's is a simple great sentence that reels you in immediately.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
Click to expand...
I'm also very keen on the opening of The Magus, cheating a bit here because it's more than one paragraph but justified nonetheless by the humour and brilliant distillation of character in such a few words.

I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria. I was sent to a public school, I wasted two years doing my national service, I went to Oxford; and there I began to discover I was not the person I wanted to be.
I had long before made the discovery that I lacked the parents and ancestors I needed. My father was, through being the right age at the right time rather than through any great professional talent, a brigadier; and my mother was the very model of a would-be major general's wife. That is, she never argued with him and always behaved as if he were listening in the next room, even when he was thousands of miles away. I saw very little of my father during the war, and in his long absences I used to build up a more or less immaculate conception of him, which he generally — a bad but appropriate pun — shattered within the first forty-eight hours of his leave.
Like all men not really up to their jobs, he was a stickler for externals and petty quotidian things; and in lieu of an intellect he had accumulated an armory of capitalized key words like Discipline and Tradition and Responsibility. If I ever dared — I seldom did — to argue with him he would produce one of these totem words and cosh me with it, as no doubt in similar circumstances he coshed his subalterns. If one still refused to lie down and die, he lost, or loosed, his temper. His temper was like a violent red dog, and he always had it close to hand.
Click to expand...
 
One of my favourites: Dylan Thomas (Under Milk Wood)
It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and- rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.

Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. .......
Click to expand...
 
"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". —Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
 
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
Click to expand...


or

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta:
the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap,
at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one
sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on
the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact,
there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a
certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as
many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always
count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the
seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this
tangle of thorns.
Click to expand...


or


the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.

It was a warm night at Castle Caladan, and the ancient pile of stone that had served the Atreides family as home for twenty-six generations bore that cooled-sweat feeling it acquired before a change in the weather.

The old woman was let in by the side door down the vaulted passage by Paul's room and she was allowed a moment to peer in at him where he lay in his bed.

By the half-light of a suspensor lamp, dimmed and hanging near the floor, the awakened boy could see a bulky female shape at his door, standing one step ahead of his mother. The old woman was a witch shadow - hair like matted spiderwebs, hooded 'round darkness of features, eyes like glittering jewels.

"Is he not small for his age, Jessica?" the old woman asked. Her voice wheezed and twanged like an untuned baliset.

Paul's mother answered in her soft contralto: "The Atreides are known to start late getting their growth, Your Reverence."

"So I've heard, so I've heard," wheezed the old woman. "Yet he's already fifteen."

"Yes, Your Reverence."

"He's awake and listening to us," said the old woman. "Sly little rascal." She chuckled. "But royalty has need of slyness. And if he's really the Kwisatz Haderach . . . well . . ."

Within the shadows of his bed, Paul held his eyes open to mere slits. Two bird-bright ovals - the eyes of the old woman - seemed to expand and glow as they stared into his.

"Sleep well, you sly little rascal," said the old woman. "Tomorrow you'll need all your faculties to meet my gom jabbar."

And she was gone, pushing his mother out, closing the door with a solid thump.

Paul lay awake wondering: What's a gom jabbar?

In all the upset during this time of change, the old woman was the strangest thing he had seen.

Your Reverence .

And the way she called his mother Jessica like a common serving wench instead of what she was - a Bene Gesserit Lady, a duke's concubine and mother of the ducal heir.

Is a gom jabbar something of Arrakis I must know before we go there? he wondered.

He mouthed her strange words: Gom jabbar . . . Kwisatz Haderach .

There had been so many things to learn. Arrakis would be a place so different from Caladan that Paul's mind whirled with the new knowledge. Arrakis - Dune - Desert Planet .
Click to expand...
 
Someone had to

James Joyce said:
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passen-core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer’s rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County’s gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all’s fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface. The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur — nuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since dev-linsfirst loved livvy.
Click to expand...
 
I could see men of all colours bouncing along in the boxcar. We stood up. We laid down. We piled on each other. We used each other for pillows. I could smell the sour and bitter sweat soaking through my own khaki shirt and britches, and the work clothes, the overhauls and saggy, dirty suits of the other guys. My mouth was full of some kind of gray mineral dust that was about an inch deep all over the floor.

We looked like a gang of lost corpses, heading back to the boneyard. Hot in the September heat, tired, mean and mad, cussing and sweating, raving and preaching. Part of us waved our hands in the cloud of dust and hollered out to the whole crowd. Others was too week, too sick, too hungry or too drunk even to stand up.

The train was a highball and had the right of way. Our car was a rough rider, called by hoboes a "flat wheeler." I was riding in the tail end where I got more dust but less heat. The wheels were clipping it off at sixty miles an hour. About all I could hear above the raving and cussing and the roar of the car was the jingle and clink on the under side every time the wheels went over a rail joint.

I guess ten or fifteen of us guys were singing:

This train don't carry no gamblers,
Liars, thieves and big-shot ramblers;
This train is bound for glory,
This train!
Click to expand...

Woody Guthrie - Bound for Glory
 
"Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo"

James Joyce, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
 
danny la rouge said:
Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers:

"It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."
Click to expand...

I was just coming to post that :mad:

My next favourite one is:

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heart-beats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first-time at home-made movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged—the same house, the same people—and then realized that he did not exist there at all and nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby-carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.
Click to expand...
 
"Warning


You may have acquired this book under false pretences."
'The Selfish Pig's Guide to Caring' - Hugh Marriott
 
SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
 
Maybe not the best but it is the best book I have read.

kSEh0.png
 
Suzumiya Haruhi no yuutsu (The melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi)
When did I stop believing in Santa Claus? In truth, this sort of silly question holds no real significance for me. However, if you were to ask me when I stopped believing that the old man wearing the red costume was Santa, then I can confidently say: I have never believed in Santa, ever. I knew that the Santa who appeared at my preschool Christmas party was a fraud, and now that I think about it, every one of my classmates shared the same look of disbelief watching our teacher pretend to be Santa. Although I had never seen mommy kissing Santa Claus, I was already wise enough to be suspicious about the existence of an old man who worked only on Christmas Eve.

However, it took me quite a bit longer to realize that the aliens, time-travelers, ghosts, monsters and espers in those effects-filled 'good guys versus evil organization' cartoons didn't actually exist either. No, wait, I probably did realize, I just didn't want to admit it. Deep inside my heart I still wanted those aliens, time-travelers, ghosts, monsters, espers and evil organizations to suddenly appear. Compared to this boring, normal life of mine, the world of those flashy shows was much more exciting; I wanted to live in that world too!

I wanted to be the one who saved the girl kidnapped by aliens and imprisoned in a bowl-like fortress. I wanted to be the one who used my courage, intelligence and trusty laser gun to fight against villains from the future trying to change history for their own gain. I wanted to be someone who could banish demons and monsters with a single spell, battle against mutants or psychics from evil organizations, and engage in telepathic fights!

But wait, calm down. If I really were ever attacked by aliens or whatever, how could I ever possibly fight against them? I don't even have any special powers!

Well then, how about this: one day, a mysterious new student transfers to my class. Except he's really an alien or from the future, and he has telepathic abilities. When he gets into a fight with the bad guys, all I need to do is find a way to get involved in his war. He'll handle all the fighting and I can just be his flunky sidekick. Oh my god, this is great, I am so clever!

Or maybe, if that doesn't work, how about this: one day, a mysterious power inside me awakens, something like a telekinetic or psychic ability. I discover that a lot of other people in this world also have similar powers, and then some sort of paranormal society recruits me. I'll become part of this organization and protect the world against evil mutants.

Unfortunately, reality is surprisingly cruel... No one got transferred to my class. I've never seen a UFO. When I went to places that were rumored to be haunted, nothing showed up. Two hours of intense staring didn't make my pencil move a single millimeter, and glaring at my classmate's head didn't reveal his thoughts to me either. I couldn't help but get depressed at how normal the laws of physics were. I began to stop watching for UFOs and paying attention to paranormal TV shows because I finally convinced myself it was impossible. I even reached a point where I only had a sense of nostalgia for those things.

After junior high, I completely grew out of that fantasy world and became utterly grounded in reality. Nothing happened in 1999, even though I kept hoping, just a bit, that something would; mankind hadn't returned to the moon or gone beyond it. I suppose, from the way things are looking, that I'll be long dead before you can book a round trip from Earth to Alpha Centauri.

With those sorts of pedestrian thoughts in my mind, I became a normal, carefree senior high student. That is, until the day I met Suzumiya Haruhi.
Click to expand...
 
It's not quite the opening sentence but I love this paragraph from 'A Passage to India'....

"The sky settles everything — not only climates and seasons but when the earth shall be beautiful. By herself she can do little — only feeble outbursts of fiowers. But when the sky chooses, glory can rain into the Chandrapore bazaars or a benediction pass from horizon to horizon. The sky can do this because it is so strong and so enormous. Strength comes from the sun, infused in it daily; size from the prostrate earth."
 
Another screen-grab, it's easier to do than select text (doesn't allow it!).

Some sublime creation of atmosphere :cool:

Edit to add: Read this twice since I posted it and I think it is probably my favourite, it's the one I first thought of when I saw this thread as well.


IjKK1.png
 
My absolutely favourite book opens with: 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.
I have not read the book yet but this line appeals to me: It was the day my grandmother exploded. From The Crow Road.
 
September 3rd, 1939. The last minutes of peace ticking away. Father and I were watching Mother digging our air-raid shelter. “She’s a great little woman,” said Father. “And getting smaller all the time,” I added. Two minutes later, a man called Chamberlain who did Prime Minister impressions spoke on the wireless; he said, “As from eleven o’clock we are at war with Germany.” (I loved the WE.) “War?” said Mother. “It must have been something we said,” said Father. The people next door panicked, burnt their post-office books and took in the washing.
Click to expand...

:D
 
For the sake of completeness, openings from two novels I've never read, but still know the openings to. That has to count for something surely?!
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
Click to expand...
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, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Click to expand...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

krtek a houby
Best plumber in film?
Replies
27
Views
571
Humberto
Humberto
Spymaster
Best Dog Films
2 3
Replies
78
Views
2K
ATOMIC SUPLEX
ATOMIC SUPLEX
DaveCinzano
  • Poll
Which was the best house band on Knowing Me, Knowing You...With Alan Partridge?
Replies
9
Views
390
Elpenor
Elpenor
Orang Utan
Pitch your one sentence film idea
2 3
Replies
80
Views
1K
A380
A380
Orang Utan
What’s the grimmest, bleakest or most pessimistic film or tv show you’ve ever seen?
2 3 4 5 6
Replies
174
Views
6K
Plumdaff
Plumdaff
Back
Top Bottom