Several weeks ago I posted some interesting opening lines from various novels. Here, at random, are a few more.
“‘I see …’ said the vampire thoughtfully, and slowly he walked across the room towards the window.” Interview with the Vampire, by Anne Rice
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” 1984, by George Orwell
“About nine-thirty a girl came puffing up Lexington and turned into Twenty-Fifth. I’d never seen her before, but I knew she belonged. She wasn’t wearing a hat and she was built like a battleship in the rear. Somehow all those radicals look alike.” I Can Get It For You Wholesale, by Jerome Weidman
“When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from troubled dreams, he found that he had been transformed – in his bed – into a kind of giant bug.” Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka
“It was a pleasure to burn.” – Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.” The Secret History, by Donna Tartt
“At dusk they pour from the sky. They blow across the ramparts, turn cartwheels over rooftops, flutter into the ravines between the houses. Entire streets swirl with them, flashing white against the cobbles.” – All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr
“I dream about Carmel often. In my dreams she’s always walking backwards.” – The Girl in the Red Coat, by Kate Hamer
“The phone call came late one August afternoon as my older sister Gracie and I sat out on the back porch shucking the sweet corn into the big tin buckets. The buckets were still peppered with little teeth-marks from this past spring, when Verywell, our ranch hound, became depressed and turned to eating metal.” The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet, by Reif Larsen
“Six months before Polly Cain drowned in the canal, my sister, Nona, ran off and married a cowboy.” The God of Animals, by Aryn Kyle
“Monuments matter most to pigeons and soldiers.” Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, by Kathleen Rooney
“Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice’s Lenten fast in the desert.” A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
“Mr. and Mrs. Fang called it art. Their children called it mischief.” The Family Fang, by Kevin Wilson
“While Pearl Tull was dying, a funny thought occurred to her. It twitched her lips and rustled her breath, and she felt her son lean forward from where he kept watch by her bed. “Get …” she told him. “You should have got …” Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, by Anne Tyler
“A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once.” A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
Do you have some opening lines you’d like to share? Email them to me at chevronross@gmail.com and I’ll post them in a future blog.
