What do you think is the best ever first line in a book?

Question

Mine is from Cannery Row by John Steinbeck:

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses.


Can you beat that?

Answer 1

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

"Just before he faced the firing squad Colonel Aureliano Buendía thought about the time his father took him to see the ice."

Answer 2

Have always loved:

A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment.

Return of the Native - Hardy

But the best overall opening chapter is PERFUME by Patrick Suskind - 18th century Paris, described in terms of smell.

Love the Cannery Row extract!

Also love:

The NELLIE, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.
The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

Heart of Darkness - because it is such a gentle opening to a book full of horror.

ALSO suggest you read The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born (Ayi Kwei Armah) - you will love the description of the old railway offices - especially how he describes the ****-encrusted handrail on the staircase (beautyful is spelled that way in the title, and the **** is mine, to save Yahoo the effort)


And the Marquez line below is fabulous!


WITHOUT DOUBT this is the BESTsequence of answers l've seen on this site in a long time - some wonderful suggestions (some books I'd not thought of/forgotten, some l will look out for).

Shame though that some of you have used thumbs-down - not really in the spirit, people.

.

Answer 3

I can't beat that even with a stick! Monterey is my favorite place in the world....and I love John Steinbeck's Cannery Row book :)

Answer 4

If I may suggest, this is a little more than the first line; therefoe......
"The southbound train from Paris was the one we had always taken from time immemorial- the same long slowcoach of a train, stringing out its bluish lights across the twilight landscapes like some super-glow-worm. It reached Provence at dawn, often by a brindled moonlight which striped the countryside like a tiger´s hide.
from "Monsieur or The Prince of Darkness" by Lawrence Durrell.

Answer 5

I second "Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents" from Little Women.

I also like:

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink from Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle

And it's "Who is John Galt?" that begins Atlas Shrugged.
Rand's The Fountainhead begins with Howard Roark laughed. He stood naked at the edge of a cliff...

Answer 6

The first two, and last, sentences (working from memory):

Call me Ishmael. Some time ago, never mind how long exactly, having nothing in particular to interest me on shore and little money in my pocket, I decided to sail around a little and see the watery part of the world.

And I alone survived to tell the tale.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Answer 7

The Dark Man fled across the desert and the Gunslinger followed...

Stephen King's Dark Tower-The Gunslinger

Answer 8

I like "Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening Hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen." from 'Northern Lights', by Philip Pullman.

My fave last line is from Poe's 'The Masque of the Red Death': "And darkness and decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all". How Gothic is that?

Answer 9

"Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her."
Emma- Jane Austen
we're dared to hate her, all through the book, but we love her!
ps-yours great, love Steinbeck.

Answer 10

Take my camel, dear," said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay.
Wonderful. Just wonderful.