College Students! discussion

Have you ever started a book, read the opening line, and thought... Wow! That was an amazing first line or it just drew you in right away! ?? Share those amazing opening lines! Or feel free just to share the first line of the book you are reading.

Yes! Even though i never finished the book- which i need to- The first line in The Wind Up Bird Chronicles by Haruke Murakami is beautiful! Sadly, I cant remember the line off the top of my head, but I'll get back to you ladies when I remember!

I wouldnt say its the first line..but Danielle Steel tends to put lines from poetry she has written or the whole poem actually. i love it. its great

for some reason I always liked this one.

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." 1984 by George Orwell

i think my favorites are these 2:

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth." -- Catcher in the Rye

--i just can't help but love it.


&

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York" --the bell jar

Ladies, I love 1984 and Catcher in the Rye. Two of my favorite books. Just thought I would add that in! :)

1984 is such a good book!

ooh i really like that catcher in the rye one.

"I write this sitting in the kitchen sink."

(I Capture the Castle)

This line hooked me immediately.

I haven't read this book yet but I want to because I've heard a great deal of it and it has a very powerful and fantastic first line:

"It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to be in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured." Shantaram

Although it is not a first liner, I think that Popular Music from Vittula and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit have one of the best prologues/first chapters :)

ooh i like that first line! let me know how the rest of the book is :)

I've been meaning to read Shantaram...and now after reading the first line, I might have to go pick it up!

"When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy" -Ellen Foster


AMAZING book. And a very quick read. Told from the point-of-view of the most fascinating eleven year old girl.

"It was the day my grandmother exploded." Crow Road by Iain Banks.

I haven't read the book yet, but someone suggested the author to me. This line is in the synopsis on Barnes & Noble. Real attention grabber. Has anyone read any of his books? Let me know what you thought.

haha that is a real attention grabber. I've never read any of his books though.

I had to put a few of these on my to read list. Lol. I just read Wind Up Bird Chronicles. I loved it! I don't remember the first line though. I can't think of any favorite first lines at current. I may find one later though.

I had a creative writing teacher who made us make a list of our favorite first lines...sadly that was over 6 years ago and I don't remember any of them

Hmm good topic.

I really like the first line of Slaughterhouse Five-- All this happened, more or less.


Another good first line I remember liking was from Cat's Eye:

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.

I am reading Slaughterhouse Five right now and also really liked the first line.

I just started Choke by Chuck Palahniuk and I just laughed at the first line. It certainly draws you in.

"If you are going to read this, don't bother."

"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler."

"Call me Ishmael."

"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."

"One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary."

"It was a pleasure to burn."

omg. quote number 3 is Joyce, isn't it? I had to read that forever ago and I still remember being sooooo confused by the (uber) stream of consciousness at the beginning.

"Although it was winter, the nearest ocean four hundred miles away, and the Tribal Weatherman asleep because of boredom, a hurricane dropped from the sky in 1976 and fell so hard on the Spokane Indian Reservation that it knocked Victor from bed and his latest nightmare." - Sherman Alexie, "Every Little Hurricane" from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

What are some first lines from books you are reading?

"Everyone thought she had made it up, and she had tolerated more taunting from other children, more lectures and punishments from grown-ups, than any eleven-year-old should have to bear." - The Looking Glass Wars.

Not my favorite first line, but what I am currently reading.

Drew, I LOVE The Looking Glass Wars. I've read up to the second book, the third is on my wish list.

"Part of the problem, Nita thought as she tore desperately down Rose Avenue, is that I can't keep my mouth shut."
So You Want to Be a Wizard

Love this book, I read that line when I was 12 and was hooked instantly. It's still one of my very favorite book series. It's one of those I get more out of every time I read it.

Ok, here's a good one. Perfect for the season.

"Marley was dead, to begin with."
A Christmas Carol

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

"That's good thinking there, Cool Breeze."

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

I love the first line from The Lovely Bones. Only a little bit longer before the movie comes out!

"My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name Susie."

"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." The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"It is the finest outhouse in the Dakotas. It has to be."
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

"Biographers are notorious for falling in love with their subjects."
Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire
I like it.

Anastasia wrote: "Yes! Even though i never finished the book- which i need to- The first line in The Wind Up Bird Chronicles by Haruke Murakami is beautiful! Sadly, I cant remember the line off the top of my head, b..."

Okay, here's the first line of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which I also loved:

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

It's a rather ordinary sentence, but there's something about it that just draws you in. I knew I would love this book the moment I read that first sentence.

I also fell in love with The Crimson Petal and the White with its very first line. Here are the first three lines, just so you can get an accurate picture of just how much this book draws you in from the very beginning:

"Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them. This city I am bringing you to is vast and intricate, and you have not been here before."

To this day, I can still remember reading those lines when I picked up this book at a campus bookstore. I could actually feel myself being pulled into the pages.

"Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas. J'ai reçu un télégramme de l'asile: Mère décédée. Enterrement demain. Sentiments distingués. Cela ne veut rien dire. C'était peut-être hier"

in english:
"Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. I got a telegram from the home: Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours. That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday."

L'Etranger (the Stranger) by Albert Camus.
i don't know why, but i always loved that.

1958
Prelude

"Ladies and Gentlemen, behold: The Enemy:"

He raised the blinds, and there was the street below. Townies going up and down upon the land. Greased, efficient gears in the Village engine. Harmless.

"Relentless. Unstoppable. You cannot hope to defeat them. Nor, as a matter of fact, would you want to. Their defeat also means yours. When a host dies, he takes his virus with him. Viruses are fools--they work toward their own extinction. Not you. You will sustain the enemy as long as possible, and flourish.

"So why are they the enemy? Because they are bent on destroying you. They did it yesterday. They'll do it tomorrow. They are curing themselves of you as I speak--their serum is Indifference. Your job is to infect them, elude the antidote, and to thrive. To make your thoughts into their obsessions, your whims into their rapacious desires. And I will show you how to do it. If this isn't what you had in mind, leave now to join them and become our food and save me considerable trouble. My job is to give you courage, cunning, power. To make you strong. To make you smarter. To make you ruthless. Because when you leave here, you are not just going to work.

"You are going to war."

- Chip Kidd, The Cheese Monkeys A Novel in Two Semesters
I LOVE THIS BOOK!

This first line in The Stupidest Angel A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror, Version 2.0 by Christopher Moore is hilarious.

"Christmas crept into Pine Cove like a creeping Christmas thing: dragging garland, ribbon, and sleigh bells, oozing eggnog, reeking of pine, and threatening festive doom like a cold sore under the mistletoe."

LOVE IT!!

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood:

"Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge."

I think I just found the best first line ever:

"The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit."

I had just started Uglies, read that, and cracked up. Hopefully the rest is that good.

lol, Kelly I did the same thing when I read that book.

Haha I do remember that line. I was like..Wow..I'm not sure what to expect.

first lines are one of my favorite things about reading. two that i like are:

from the story 'Bigfoot Stole My Wife' by ron carlson- "the problem is credibility."

and from 'Invitation to a Beheading' by nabokov- "in accordance with the law the death sentence was announced to cincinnatus c. in a whisper."

"When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy."

Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons

"The Pigeon was not one to sit around and pine, and so the day after he saw the beautiful Anielica Hetmanska up on Old Baldy Hill, he went to talk to her father."

--A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True

"The Healer's name was Fords Deep Waters."

The Host by Stephenie Meyer

"It was a black in the closet as old blood."
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

"Andy Bellefleur was as drunk as a skunk." --Living Dead in Dallas

I laughed so hard at this.

"It was an airport gypsy who told me that I had to kill my husband."

--Backseat Saints

Umm yeah that drew me in from the first sentence!

Jamie wrote: "I just started Choke by Chuck Palahniuk and I just laughed at the first line. It certainly draws you in.

"If you are going to read this, don't bother.""

I just saw this topic and was about to add this one. Glad I skimmed through previous posts first. :)

Denise wrote: "I love the first line from The Lovely Bones. Only a little bit longer before the movie comes out!

"My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name Susie."

"

I just have to add the second sentence to this:

"My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973."

How could you not read on after that beginning? One of the best first lines of a book ever!

I just finished this last weekend too. I was going to come on to see if someone wrote that first line (Or two) and look what I find. Funny how sometimes we all think alike, then others we have such different opinions.

"He began his new life standing up, surrounded by cold darkness and stale, dusty air."

-The Maze Runner by James Dashner