On writing. Words are particular and a few of them appropriately used can display extraordinary, vivid and complex ideas. Below are some singular first lines from literature that determine extremely picturesquely how the succeeding ideas will be understood. Keiichi Matsuda (two posts below this one) in his Kickstarter pitch used a quote from J. G. Ballard then echoed and amplified it to describe his potential film very succinctly, a further echo being that both texts convey past, present and future concerns of Unit Fifteen. The following first lines are abridged from americanbookreview. For an extensive collection of first lines see Wikiquote.
It was the day my grandmother exploded. —Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. —Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)
A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)
It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. —Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. —William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
Where now? Who now? When now? —Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)
All this happened, more or less. —Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
The moment one learns English, complications set in. —Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990)
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. —C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. —Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)
It was a pleasure to burn. —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. —Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)
In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. —David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988)
Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. —Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. —G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)
If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. —Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. —L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)
Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. —J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)
Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. —William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)
The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. —Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)
Psychics can see the color of time it's blue. —Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away (1986)
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. —Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988)
It began as a mistake - Charles Bukowski, Post Office (1971)
A spectre is haunting Europe; the spectre of Communism. - Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)
Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. - Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins, Watchmen (1986-1987)
