I love browsing in bookstores. I love picking up the latest release and reading the first line. Introductions are important, and if I’m not the least bit impressed by the first impression a book gives me, then chances are it’s not getting purchased that day.
Then there are those first lines you know by heart. You keep them in your heart and love them like a husband, child, uhm………..I don’t know. You just love them.
Here are my four favorites:
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE (1967), Gabriel García Márquez
”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.”
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (1813), Jane Austen
”It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE (1998), J.K. Rowling
”Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”
REBECCA (1938), Daphne du Maurier
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and a chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge-keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge was uninhabited.”
Pretty please comment below with your favorite!
First Impressions – My Four Favorite First Lines In Literature!
I love that line from Pride and Prejudice too! Also the opening line from Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair is one of the most intriguing I’ve read: “My father had a face that could stop a clock. I don’t mean that he was ugly or anything; it was a phrase the ChronoGuard used to describe someone who had the power to reduce time to an ultra-slow trickle.”