Great opening lines

[philsmove]

From a book i have just started

Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside

[littlewiggle]

Sounds interesting - what't the book called adn who is it by?

[Whitebeard]

h

Are you trying to tell me I have a future ???

[Nick M]

Sounds like "A short history of tractors in Ukranian" by Marina Lewycka - a much better book than it's title would suggest!

[straycat]

Sorry - this one's a bit long (opening few lines) - but I think the whole thing's needed. From one of my firm favourites.

Two days ago I decided to kill myself. I would walk and hitch and sail away from this dark city to the bright spaces of the wet west coast, and there throw myself into the tall, glittering seas beyond Iona (with its cargo of mouldering kings) to let the gulls and seals and tides have their way with my remains, and in my dying moments look forward to an encounter with Staffa’s six-sided columns and Fingal’s cave; or I might head south to Corryvrecken, to be spun inside the whirlpool and listen with my waterlogged deaf ears to its mile-wide voice ringing over the wave-race; or be borne north, to where the white sands sing and coral hides, pink-fingered and hard-soft, beneath the ocean swell, and the rampart cliffs climb thousand-foot above the seething acres of milky foam, rainbow-buttressed.

Last night I changed my mind and decided to stay alive. Everything that follows is . . . just to try and explain.

[philsmove]

Originally Posted by straycat264

From one of my firm favourites.

I,m a great Banks fan but I have never read Espedair Street

I have added it to my list

Interestlingly In Raw Spirit he reveles he has never seen the Corryvrecken which is a shame ‘cos it makes the Falls of Lora look like a mill pond

[Beowulf]

The city was hot and sticky, as hot and sticky as my dear old moms treacle pudding, but unlike my moms treacle pudding the city was full of nuts.

The door to my office opened and this broad walked in, which was odd as my my office door was quite narrow. She had legs that reached all the way to the ground and a walk like eels chewing gum in a bowl of jello.

She had a box of chocolates under one arm and a stuffed sea bird her other, I suspected she may have something to do with with disappearance of the Malteser Penguin mentioned in the press.

She had bad news written all over her, she'd obviously leaned against the newspaper printing press on the way in.

[Piglet]

Like your one Beo - where's that from?

Jack Reacher ordered espresso, double, foam cup, and before it arrived at his table he saw a man's life change for ever. Not that the waiter was slow. Just that the move was slick. So slick, Reacher had no idea what he was watching. It was just an urban scene, repeated a billion times a day: a guy unlocked a car and got in and drove away. That was all.

But that was enough.

[Beowulf]

Originally Posted by Piglet

Like your one Beo - where's that from?

oh I don't know.. just off the top of my head My own little Homage to Film Noir Detective fiction

[straycat]

Originally Posted by Beowulf1970

oh I don't know.. just off the top of my head My own little Homage to Film Noir Detective fiction

You're going to have to write the rest of the novel now. I want to read it...

[Stuart M]

Originally Posted by Richard Burton in paraphrasing the book

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space; no one could have dreamed we were being scrutinised, as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets and yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us.

...followed by three chords a la Beethoven's Fifth.

The original opening lines of the book are:
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

[Beowulf]

My copy of WOTW on tape got chewed up in my machine so I cut the damaged bit out and respliced the tape. from that day forth it used to sound like Mr Burton was saying

no one could have dreamed we were being scrutiscoped

Since then I've always fancied a Scrutiscope<SUP>(tm)</SUP>

[Stuart M]

Originally Posted by Beowulf1970

My copy of WOTW on tape got chewed up in my machine

Ah, so were you yet another victim of the Red Weed? Somehow I don't think audio cassette tape was meant to handle that particular section - it claimed my Dad's copy.

[philsmove]

The all time classic

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

[Beowulf]

Originally Posted by philsmove

The all time classic

set 22 years ago and another Richard Burton link perhaps??

Double plus good !

[Stuart M]

Originally Posted by Beowulf1970

set 22 years ago and another Richard Burton link perhaps??

Double plus good !

Anyone who, like me, was hypnotised by Burton's voice in WOTW (or 1984) should invest in the original recording of this work by his national playwright:

To begin at the beginning:
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters''-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.

Though I gather the more recent (1988) version with Anthony Hopkins and an all-star Welsh cast was pretty good too (off to order it now - hadn't realised Hopkins had done it until I was surfing for the above quote!)

[Beowulf]

Dylan Thomas .. (or is it Thomas Dylan ) Under Milk Wood

How about "Call me Ishmael" or "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" everybody should know those ones

[philsmove]

no i have not read this

Helen woke up in the middle of the night wearing someone else's breasts. Not her own insignificant, almost nonexistent bumps, but huge pendulous, full ones

but may be I should

[straycat]

From another all-time favourite:

Nothing ever begins.

[philsmove]

It was the day my grandmother exploded

IMHO one of his best