Book with best opening paragraph

[TheBlueMonster]

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tl;dr

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yea I figured it was too long, but I could cut it down. It would lose alot if I did.

[A_C_Slater]

Tralala was 15 the first time she was laid. There was no real passion. Just diversion. She hungout in the Greeks with the other neighborhood kids. Nothin to do. Sit and talk. Listen to the jukebox. Drink coffee. Bum cigarettes. Everything a drag. She said yes. In the park. 3 or 4 couples finding their own tree and grass. Actually she didn't say yes. She said nothing. Tony or Vinnie or whoever it was just continued.

[man]

I'm amazed by how many people can't follow directions.

this probably isn't the best, but it's good. mr. vertigo, by paul auster.

"I was twelve years old the first time I walked on water. The man in the black clothes taught me how to do it, and I'm not going to pretend I learned that trick overnight. Master Yehudi found me when I was nine, an orphan boy begging nickels on the streets of Saint Louis, and he worked with me steadily for three years before he let me show my stuff in public. That was in 1927, the year of Babe Ruth and Charles Lindbergh, the precise year when night began to fall on the world forever. I kept it up until a few days befor ethe October crash, and what I did was greater than anything those two gents could have dreamed of. I did was no American had done before me, what no one has done ever since."

[Blarg]

Gregor Samsa awoke from a night of uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a monstrous vermin.

-- Metamorphosis, by Kafka

I don't remember if there's more to the first paragraph, but who cares. What an opener!

[diebitter]

Yah, good opener. The only other really striking one I know is from a pulp read by Robert Bloch, called 'The Scarf'

It is:

Fetish? You name it. All I know is that I've always had to have it with me..


Darn, I'm hijacking my own threads now!

[Matt Flynn]

"It was a dark and stormy night. The rain fell into my shot glass, dampening my spirits."

Pure poetry.

[AceHigh]

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Wasn't he getting paid by the word or something? Or is that a myth?

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Dickens originally wrote a Tale of Two Cities as a series of articles for a periodical. So in a sense he was paid per chapter.

[Eihli]

I like that one. What's it from?

[edtost]

"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."

[Dominic]

Nabakov - in his first novel using English:(!)

Lolita,light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo=lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.