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Show HN: Opening lines of famous literary works

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Re: Show HN: Opening lines of famous literary works

#101

Post by senderista »

clickety_clack wrote: post #99
gregdaniels421 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a good way to determine after seeing N unique items in M trials how many items there potentially are? Would tracking the time between seeing new unique items help? Is this an already solved problem?

This is the “German tank problem”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem?wprov=sfti...

No, it's not the same as the German tank problem, because that assumes all sampled values are unique (and totally ordered). It's closer to the "species richness" estimation problem, where you estimate the total number of species from a sample (specimens) with many repeated values (species).

Re: Show HN: Opening lines of famous literary works

#102

Post by rhyperior »

dcminter wrote: post #81
amatecha wrote: post #56

Nice. The only opening line I remember offhand is from Neuromancer (which I'm glad to see is included in the site!) "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

It's so interesting that the intuitive meaning of this has changed - first meaning grey, then bright blue, and now... perhaps black, perhaps nothing? What does "a dead channel" mean to kids today? I recently re-read the sprawl trilogy and thought Neuromancer stood up very well, but the others not so much.

To me, not just grey but an ever shifting speckled rainbow colored static with a heavy bias towards grey.

Re: Show HN: Opening lines of famous literary works

#103

Post by noirchen »

Actually I think it is better to show a random poem. Novels are long, and opening lines can easily trick you to think that you "know" the works. But poems, on the other hand, can be short (and long), with more vivid language in just a few lines.

You can have short poems (The fog comes / on little cat feet./ It sits looking / over harbor and city / on silent haunches /and then moves on.) or a passage of long poems (I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,/ dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix).

Re: Show HN: Opening lines of famous literary works

#107

Post by gabriel666smith »

DataDaoDe wrote: post #20

I'd be interested to know what everyone's favorite opening lines of all time are. (bonus - to see how much of it you can quote without looking :) For me, its: Whann that aprill with hir shoures soote, The drought of march hath perced to the roote, And zepherus eek with his sweete breath, inspired hath in every holt and heth, the tendre cropes, and the sonne hath in the ram, hir halve cours ironne, Than preketh hem na…

I was taught to use the term "action sentence" for an opening line that actually does something to a reader, and to aspire to that. I think it's a Gordon Lish-coined term, but it might not be.

Hard to pick an absolute favourite, but one would be:

"There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls."

From Cortazar's short story Axolotl.

I don't know for certain why I find it so evocative, but it certainly draws me in, and makes me want to know more.

Quoting without looking attempt:

"I went to see them in the aquarium in the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now, I am an axolotl."

Re: Show HN: Opening lines of famous literary works

#108

Post by gabriel666smith »

maxbendick wrote: post #86

You've found the right market. There's an awful lot of tech folk who don't read but want to feel like they do. I gotta rep my favorite though, even if it's typical. "Call me Ishmael." It's not the narrator's actual name - he just feels like an outcast. It sets the pace for the mythic and worldly talk throughout the book. A high bar with complete follow-through. I'm a total sucker for it.

I'm with the pedants on this one, in that I'd argue the prologue is inseparable from the novel, and the first line would be either be:

"(Supplied by a late consumptive usher..."

or:

"The pale Usher-threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now."

But straight fire either way. And, when it comes down to it, that "Call me Ishmael" is considered so consistently as the novel's opening line makes it the opening line. A testament to its power :-)

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