Best Opening Line

Which opening line is the best?

  • #1

    Votes: 3 15.0%

  • #2

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • #3

    Votes: 3 15.0%

  • #4

    Votes: 3 15.0%

  • #5

    Votes: 1 5.0%

  • #6

    Votes: 4 20.0%

  • Another one (post).

    Votes: 6 30.0%
  • Total voters
    20
QueenSusanofNarnia

QueenSusanofNarnia

New member
Okay. So I saw the "lousy opening lines" thing and thought, hmm. I love opening lines. Which is the best?

So I've here a list of some GREAT opening lines (in my opinion). Which do you think is the best?


  1. "Mr and Mrs Dursley, of Number 4, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much." (From Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone)
  2. "Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." (From Mrs Dalloway)
  3. "No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine." (From Northanger Abbey)
  4. "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day." (From Jane Eyre)
  5. "Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice 'without pictures or conversation?'" (From Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)
  6. (Prologue) Two households, both alike in dignity,
    In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
    From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
    Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
    From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
    A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
    Whole misadventured piteous overthrows
    Do with their death bury their parents' strife.
    The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
    And the continuance of their parents' rage,
    Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,
    Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
    The which if you with patient ears attend,
    What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend. (From Romeo and Juliet)


 
Openings from The Archives of Anthropos:

John Wilson was no good at whistling, but he whistled anyway. From The Sword Bearer

Moonlight fell silently on the frozen lake. from Gaal the Conqueror

Maybe they shouldn't have been there at all. Wesley the oldest, was more touchy than the other two about getting into trouble. Not that they often did-at least no more than most kids their age. From The Tower of Geburah

And finally:

In the last days of Narnia. that opening from The Last Battle always touched me.
 
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I concur with the one about Eustace - totally a classic.

My personal favorite opening is from a fantasy novel titled 'Nor Crystal Tears' which begins:

It's hard to be a larva.

:p
 
I like this one:

"When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton." (Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings)

and this one always makes me smile: "In a hole in a ground there lived a hobbit" (The Hobbit)
 
Charles Dickens in "A Tale of Two Cities" captured the promise and savagery of the days of the French Revolution thusly:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it ws 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 directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way."
 
"In the last days of Narnia." From The Last Battle... I decided this line should have its own post.;)

And I love the one from Dawn Treader, Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit.
 
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I will take a selfish moment here (What, ME SELFISH?? :D)

"My name was--and still is--Mountebank Beaverlee, a rather odd name, which is why I did--and still do--go by Mountie."

(Opening sentence of Byron on Wells)
 
Lioness_of_God said:
I like this one:

"When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton." (Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings)

and this one always makes me smile: "In a hole in a ground there lived a hobbit" (The Hobbit)
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I love the opening line of the Hobbit :D

Lemony Snicket had some good ones in the Series of Unfortunate events but I can't remember any of them
 
EveningStar said:
Charles Dickens in "A Tale of Two Cities" captured the promise and savagery of the days of the French Revolution thusly:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it ws 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 directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way."
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I have to agree that this is up there with the best. How many other opening paragraphs are you supposed to memorize in school?

I can't remember any good opening lines myself though >.<
 
Geez these are all realy good,
um well another good opening line I suppose could be from

The Great Gatsby:
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that i've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"when every you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in the world haven't had the advantages you've had."
 
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

-Pride and Prejudice-
 
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy

"The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up." -- The Napoleon of Notting Hill, by G. K. Chesterton

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." The Go-Between, by L. P. Hartley

"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad." Scaramouche, by Raphael Sabbatini

"The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting." The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane

"Becker rested against the pillar staring up at the iron grey clouds that trudged by like weary soldiers returning from the front." The Golden Buddha, by an old friend, name long since forgotten.
 
"I was born while my mother was tied to the railroad tracks two miles out of Perth Amboy, New Jersey, with a milk train only half a mile away and my father doing a lot of screaming and yelling."

From Sweet Agony: A writing manual of sorts by Gene Olson


"Juan Cayetano was a weary, odd looking twenty-five year old ex-soldier who had deserted from a murderous army."

unfinished story
 
Gondorgirl said:
Lemony Snicket had some good ones in the Series of Unfortunate events but I can't remember any of them
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The book you are now holding in your hands--assuming that you are, in fact, holding this book, and that you have only two hands--is one of the two books in the world that will show you the difference between the word "nervous" and the word "anxious."

I can!! That's the opening from the sixth book in the series called The Ersatz Elevator. I'll try to find more in the books I have. :D
 
"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."

- Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy


Does no one think that those Kindles are like Hitchhiker Guides to the Galaxy?
 
NarniaGirl12 said:
The book you are now holding in your hands--assuming that you are, in fact, holding this book, and that you have only two hands--is one of the two books in the world that will show you the difference between the word "nervous" and the word "anxious."

I can!! That's the opening from the sixth book in the series called The Ersatz Elevator. I'll try to find more in the books I have. :D
Click to expand...

I think we have all of the books in our house, I'll have to go find some of them :D
 
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