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For reference, a famous Irish coffee-table (read: bathroom) book in a similar vein: https://www.abebooks.com/Said-Duchess-First-Lines-Gemma-OCon... And from a cursory few refreshes I didn't see the obvious one come up: "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." Orwell, 1984
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…
Ok so I guess it is literally just openings of famous literary works, and not great first lines
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…
From memory: The sky was the color of a TV tuned to a bad channel
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…
** ETA the full opening:
“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.
> "I was born in the City of Bombay… once upon a time." > Midnight's Children > Salman Rushdie · 1981 Ok so I guess it is literally just openings of famous literary works, and not great first lines
This reminds me how much weight a great opening sentence carries. Some of them are memorable decades later because they establish the tone immediately
"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 talk French." - Wodehouse, The Luck of the Bodkins
"When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow." - Harper Lee. To Kill A Mockingbird
"Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were."- Margaret Mitchell. Gone With the Wind
Frustrating without a way to get to the list of works, because it's not clear when you've seen them all. You start having to guess how many there are, based on how many you have seen and how many have repeated, and the distance between seeing ones you haven't yet seen before. A problem made worse, the more quotes there are, as if you have N quotes, then you expect to see the one you see the most often approximately e…
I cheated and looked at the source: There are 60 quotes. So expect ~280 refreshes to collect 'em all.