Favorite first lines

[DragonOfTheAerie]

I hear you DofA! The line above is a great starting line but I've put the book aside at Chapter 2 for now. Like you I couldn't get into it. I do hope to try it again one day but I've just discovered Terry Pratchett so I'll be immersed in discworld for a while! I must say, isn't it funny, the first line of The Colour of Magic didn't grab me but the story did, whereas the first line of The Shifter is clever but the story doesn't grab me. Wonder why?

Janice gives such worthy advice on her website, I owe it to her to try and read The Shifter. I did really like the concept behind her magic...

Oh, yes. The concept of healing magic and shifting pain really interests me. I'm not sure why the book can't hook me though.

 

[Steerpike]

Reading Greg Egan’s “Distress.” Don’t know that it makes my favorites, but the first line is a three-sentence bit of dialogue:

“All right. He’s dead. Go ahead and talk to him.”

 

[Dark Squiggle]

"She had debated, in the frivolity of the beginning, whether to build a hole in the ground or a tower; a hole, because she was fond of hobbits, or a tower - well a tower for many reasons, but chiefly because she liked spiral stairways.
As time went on, and she thought over the pros and cons of each, the idea of a tower became increasingly exciting...."
Bone People, by Keri Hulme. The first half of the book stays just as good as these lines.

 

[Garren Jacobsen]

Marley was dead to begin with.

 

[Steerpike]

Marley was dead to begin with.

Classic

 

[Michael K. Eidson]

It was starting to end, after what seemed most of eternity to me.
-- Roger Zelazny, Nine Princes in Amber

Smoke collected on the belly of the storm. It rose up in slim fingers above the tree line, coiled into a fist when it cleared the ridge. Hung there and spread against the underbelly of the clouds like oil across water.
-- K. Eason, Enemy

Sundered from us by gulfs of time and stranger dimensions dreams the ancient world of Nehwon with its towers and skulls and jewels, its swords and sorceries.
-- Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry