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What makes a great opening line?

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Re: What makes a great opening line?

#91

Does anyone know of a book wherein the last line is the same as the first? In the sense of making the book self-referencing? Something along the lines of, “And so it is with you.”

The Dark Tower series, though it isn't a single book

I want to say Ulysses but I don't remember exactly if it does

Re: What makes a great opening line?

#92
I read a lot of novels, but I can't recall any really great opening lines in particular. Rap though...

"I sit alone in my four-cornered room staring at candles"

"I'm waking up in the morning with problems on mind, motherfuck an education, and drug rehabilitation"

"Damned if I do, damned if I don't, holla fuck the world with a chest full of smoke"

Re: What makes a great opening line?

#93
> When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s ‘The Thieving Magpie,’ which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.

Look I haven't seriously studied literature or anything, so maybe I'm being a philistine. But what in the world is the appeal of this? Doesn't balance clarity and curiosity - a lot of mundane details, not reason for me to care about their phone call. I guess it's weird in a meta sense, in how it bucks the trend for good openers?

I don't doubt some people genuinely like that line, but that just says to me that this question is so subjective and so unimportant in the grand scheme of things (do people seriously stop reading after a single sentence?) that it sounds bizarre to go as far as teaching a class on the topic.

Re: What makes a great opening line?

#95

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun."

Also from him:

“The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was”

Re: What makes a great opening line?

#96
I've always loved P.G. Wodehouse:

“Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.”

(Especially as an Englishman who is terrible at French)

Re: What makes a great opening line?

#97
post #91

Does anyone know of a book wherein the last line is the same as the first? In the sense of making the book self-referencing? Something along the lines of, “And so it is with you.”

The Dark Tower series, though it isn't a single book I want to say Ulysses but I don't remember exactly if it does

you're thinking of Finnegan's Wake. And it doesn't.. but
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