I found out yesterday that my uncle died, which was awful and a matter I've decided doesn't need much detailing on this blog. But due to that event, I was up most of the night thinking about life, the universe and everything and I spent a good deal of time leafing through my book collection. One of the books I settled on was Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar" and I think her opening line may be one of my all time favorites:
"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."
I invite you to post some of your most loved opening lines. They can be sad, humorous, outlandish, brief, verbose - anything you like. I'm just curious to see what's out there.
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6 comments:
I've always been a fan of that Plath line. Somehow that got tacked onto the end of an entirely different idea in one of our songs. Now it's the odd outro. For whatever that's worth.
What's always gotten me for some odd reason:
Rimbaud to Théodore de Banville, Remarks to a Poet on the Subject of Flowers :
Plants are industrious today:
Without the thought of profit nothing grows;
except that it turns out that despite my memory, it's actually the begining of the second stanza. And I'm not fond of the following lines. Out of context, I like it. (I found it scrawled in one my notebooks well after the fact.)
The first line in the preamble of Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red is also nice in an odd way, again, out of context helps so much:
He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
Also I like the first lines of quite a few Ultramagnetic MC's songs.
Also, on the Plath tip:
http://catandgirl.com/view.php?loc=500
Which is sort of an aside.
While I've always liked the laconic ease of Melville's "Call me Ishmael," you just can't beat Hunter S. Thompson's classic from Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas-
"We were on the edge of the desert, just outside of Barstow, when the drugs kicked in."
Just as an aside to your aside Josh, that comic is hysterical. I love that kind of humor. Must be why I was so popular in grade school...
From the short story "The House of Asterion," by Jorge Luis Borges (trans. James Irby):
"I know they accuse me of arrogance, and perhaps of misanthropy, and perhaps of madness."
It's a brief story (3 pages in the volume I own), but one of the most powerful, interesting pieces I've ever read.
Sorry for the follow-up, but this one only came to me this morning. Odd that, since it's my favorite opening line of all. It's from V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River:
“The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”
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