Welcome to “Off the Clock,” the fortnightly Saturday edition of Timeless & Timely that’s a fun look at language and words — bonus content for the literate.
“It was a dark and stormy night…” — Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, 1830
You know the old saying “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.”
The same is true with literature. The first line an author presents to a reader can set the stage for what’s to come.
Whether we’re talking about popular fiction or some of the great works of literature, first lines are attention-grabbing. And in many cases, we remember the opening lines better than the rest of the works themselves.
The clichéd opening line of Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford is held up as something of satire and is even used as the basis for a contest that challenges participants to write an atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written.
In the spirit of finding the best, here is a small collection of great opening lines.
Great Opening Lines
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” — Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” — George Orwell, 1984
“Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles...” — Homer, The Iliad
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” — Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
“All this happened, more or less.” — Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
“Call me Ishmael.” — Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
“The great fish moved silently through the night water.” — Peter Benchley, Jaws
“To Sherlock Holmes, she was always the woman.” — Arthur Conan Doyle, "A Scandal in Bohemia"
“It was a pleasure to burn.” — Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.” — Homer, The Odyssey
“Mother died today. Or maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure” — Albert Camus, The Stranger
“Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.” — Ha Jin, Waiting
“Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.” — Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” — Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
It’s strange how some of these stick with me years after having first read them. That’s the power of great opening lines, whether they’re short or long, simple or complex. They become part of you.
I’d love to learn about what your favorites are.
There’s so much to learn,
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
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The Wasteland, TS Eliot
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Or (it is all one sentence)
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Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
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yep, Yeats for our time.
"At the age of eighty my mother had her last bad fall, and after that her mind wandered free through time." Russell Baker, Growing Up.