Book with best opening paragraph

[Blarg]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
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.

[/ QUOTE ]

This book sounds really interesting. What is the name of it?

[/ QUOTE ]

heheh

[TheBlueMonster]

ok. awesome

[eviljeff]

[ QUOTE ]
pick something original.

[/ QUOTE ]

right, Dickens was a complete hack.

I'm guessing the version of A Tale of Two Cities you read was about 50 pages thick and had a black and yellow striped cover.

[Blarg]

LOL.

That seems a very unfair characterization of Dickens, though, to say the least.

[poker-penguin]

[ QUOTE ]
Catch-22 by Heller.

"It was love at first sight.
"The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.
"Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it wasn't quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn't become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused them."

The Doc

[/ QUOTE ]

Thank you, I was about to add this one, mainly because I love the first sentence (and the rest of the book).

[private joker]

"If you're going to read this, don't bother. After a couple of pages, you won't want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you're still in one piece. Save yourself. There has to be something better on television. Or since you have so much time on your hands, maybe you could take a night course. Become a doctor. You could make something out of yourself. Treat yourself to a dinner out. Color your hair. You're not getting any younger. What happens here is first going to piss you off. After that it just gets worse and worse."

[Phoenix1010]

"The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life. I had worked for an hour or two and perused the pages of old books. I had had pains for two hours, as elderly people do. I had taken a powder and been very glad when the pains consented to disappear. I had lain in a hot bath and absorbed its kindly warmth. Three times the mail had come with undesired letters and circulars to look through. I had done my breathing exercises, but found it convenient today to omit the thought exercies. I had been for an hour's walk and seen the loveliest feathery cloud patterns penciiled against the sky. That was delightful. So was the reading of the old books. So was the lying in the warm bath. But, taken all in all, it had not been exactly a day or rapture. No, it had not even been a day brightened with happiness and joy. Rather, it had been just one of those days which for a long while now had fallen to my lot; the moderately pleasant, the wholly bearable and tolerable, lukewarm days of a discontented middle-aged man; days without special pains, without special cares, without particular worry, without despair; days when I calmly wonder, obective and fearless, whether it isn't time to follow the example of Adalbert Stifter and have an accident while shaving."

Hermann Hesse- Steppenwolf

[Phoenix1010]

Whoever took care of Notes From Underground and Catch 22, I love you guys. Those are my other two choices.

[jakethebake]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Catch-22 by Heller.

"It was love at first sight.
"The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.
"Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it wasn't quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn't become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused them."

The Doc

[/ QUOTE ]

Thank you, I was about to add this one, mainly because I love the first sentence (and the rest of the book).

[/ QUOTE ]

Except that the question was best paragraph...not paragraphs. [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

[jason_t]

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point. Every year during the month of March a family of ragged gypsies would set up their tents near the village, and with a great uproar of pipes and kettledrums they would display new inventions. First they brought the magnet. A heavy gypsy with an untamed beard and sparrow hands, who introduced himself as Melquiades, put on a bold public demonstration of what he himself called the eighth wonder of the learned alchemists of Macedonia. He went from house to house dragging two metal ingots and everybody was amazed to see pots, pans, tongs, and braziers tumble down from their places and beams creak from the desperation of nails and screws trying to emerge, and even objects that had been lost for a long time appeared from where they had been searched for most and went dragging along in turbulent confusion behind Melquiades' magical irons. "Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls." Jose' Arcadio Buendia, whose unbridled imagination always went beyond the genius of nature and even beyond miracles and magic, thought that it would be possible to make use of that useless invention to extract gold from the bowels of the earth. Melquiades, who was an honest man, warned him: "It won't work for that." But Jose Arcadio Buendia at that time did not believe in the honesty of gypsies, so he traded his mule and a pair of goats for the two magnetized ingots. Ursula Iguaran, his wife, who relied on those animals to increase their poor domestic holdings, was unable to dissuade him. "Very soon we'll have gold enough and more to pave the floors of the house," her husband replied. For several months he worked hard to demonstrate the truth of his idea. He explored every inch of the region, even the riverbed, dragging the two iron ingots along and reciting Melquiades' incantation aloud. The only thing he succeeded in doing was to unearth a suit of fifteenth-century armor which had all of its pieces soldered together with rust and inside of which there was the hollow resonance of an enormous stone-filled gourd. When Jose Arcadio Buendia and the four men of his expedition managed to take the armor apart, they found inside a calcified skeleton with a copper locket containing a woman's hair around its neck.