alt Hacker NewsI'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 natur in hir courages, and longon folk to gon on pilgrimages.
Somehow that has always stuck with me, I'm sure I'm missing parts, but from the first time I ever heard these lines the just imprinted themselves like a song to me.
Replies
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”
Though for me it’s the second line that nails it: “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”
"The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason." - Seveneves
"All this happened, more or less." - Slaughterhouse-Five
Curiously, it seems difficult to find John Donne's Meditations XVII with the original language. The spelling has been modernized everywhere I can find it online.
(I suppose this technically isn't the opening line, but it's the first line used when most people quote the passage.)
No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine
last night i dreamt i went to Manderley again
There’s also: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
From memory: The sky was the color of a TV tuned to a bad channel
"The war tried to kill us in the spring" from The Yellow Birds always stuck with me, for its complete decoupling of the war from the men who had come thousands of miles to fight it.
** 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.