Huffington Post Readers' Picks: Best First Sentences

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

Though "A Tale of Two Cities" and "Pride and Prejudice" are not particularly similar, they do both share unforgettable first sentences. Without that amazing first sentence, you're not reading the rest of the book. There are some so great that we never forget them.

This week, we asked HuffPost readers on Twitter and Facebook to reveal their favorites. Here are the results.

Don't see your favorite first sentence? Let us know what it is in the comments!

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"Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury

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"It was a pleasure to burn."

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"It was a pleasure to burn."

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Onethought said on 26 Thursday 2011 pm31 1:16 pm: hmmm, aren't we forgetting one of the most memorable first lines ever? "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect-like creature."

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Comments

[Lupernikes]

12:44 PM on 06/08/2011

OK 2nd plug, this time for a short story lol;

"Senses wild and disengaged, running blindly through the forest, leaf mould and detritus jumping in slow motion plumes around his feet; flashes of images, strangely coloured and disjointed play before his eyes but nothing enters, nothing stays; he doesn’t feel the twigs and branches and snags as they catch on flesh of arms, legs or face; hair becomes soiled and tangled, snarls tearing away to become part of the forest but he seems not to notice. The breathing is heavy and laboured, sweat running through dirt and tree debris creating tracks on skin; he staggers but to where he does not know; from where he has not a single notion. He staggers in complete disorientation, face twisted in effort or pain or fear or all three together, leaning weight on bough or fallen trunk, scrabbling at bushes and shrubs, feet trying to find their own path over roots and rocks and fallen assortment.."

[Lupernikes]

12:41 PM on 06/08/2011

Seeing as it seems ok to do this, to plug my own WIP;

"It's amazing how often one's mind will play tricks on itself in order to not process the obvious isn't it?"

[Eris23Skidoo]

06:47 AM on 06/06/2011

"It began as a mistake".

Post Office, Charles Bukowski.

[kuhler]

05:42 PM on 06/05/2011

"The temperature hit 90 the day she arrived." Jacqueline Susann's 'Valley of the Dolls.'

[FlavorDav]

10:04 PM on 06/02/2011

"A screaming comes across the sky." --Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new." --Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." --William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

"Arma virumque cano" ["Of arms and a man I sing"] --Vergil, Aeneid (17 BCE)

"When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton." --J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." --George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins." --Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

"Call me Ishmael." --Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

"'What's it going to be then, eh?'" --Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

"A green hunting cap squeezed the fleshy balloon of a head." --John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)

[DoctorGreeves]

06:24 AM on 06/25/2011

Wow. These are some GOOOOOOOD first sentences. The Nabokov/Lolita sentence is a real screamer!

[aw326]

02:50 PM on 06/01/2011

How about this one, from Toni Morrison's Beloved: "124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom."

[colleenos]

02:11 PM on 05/30/2011

This one is probably already cited, but just in case:

'It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.'

Anthony Burgess, 'Earthly Powers'.

[Elleni]

10:22 AM on 05/30/2011

"Scaramouche" by Raphael Sabatini:
"He was born with the gift of laughter, and a sense that the world was mad."

[Mum]

04:48 AM on 05/30/2011

A few of my favorite first lines: "There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable." (Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)---------- "The sheets are dirty." (Sherman Alexie, Indian Killer)---------- "I was looking for a quiet place to die." (Paul Auster, Brooklyn Follies)---------- "They threw me off the hay truck about noon." (James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice)---------- "Although she had fled the blood-spattered scene and fled the collected crowd of identical individuals - one legged, nose-picking, vigilant-eyed - and hurried down the street at a speed uncommon for her, a speed no one would have thought possible on those high red heels that were no longer firm but wobbled drunkenly under the weight of her thick, purple-veined legs, Lotte slowed as she neared her door." (Anita Desai, Baumgartner's Bombay)---------- "There were crows in his eyes when he came right out with it, confessing that he had been the murderer." (Rodney Hall, Captivity Captive)---------- "When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his moth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun." (Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd)---------- "For thirty-five years now I've been in wastepaper, and it's my love story." (Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude)---------- "He should have seen it coming." (Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question)---------- "I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way." (Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden)---------- "So let me dish you this comedy about a family I knew when I was growing up." (Rick Moody, The Ice Storm)---------- "Call Me Jonah." (Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle)---------- "Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice's Lenten fast in the desert." (Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz)---------- "See the child." (Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian)---------- "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." (L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between)----------I apologize for this being in one big lump. I'm waiting for HP to fix it on their end.

[YourNewNeighbor]

05:15 AM on 05/29/2011

'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again...' Just before dawn one winter's morning, New Year's Day or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel, without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky.

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

[eetwi]

01:16 PM on 05/28/2011

Just got my hands on this, so if I don't post for awhile, that's why. Thought it made sort of a nice coda to this topic.

"Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb's-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spine-cabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak's thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers."

Miss you, D.F.W.

[ArnoldHorshack]

08:58 PM on 05/27/2011

This is George. [He was a good little monkey and always very curious. He lived with his friend, the man with the yellow hat.]

[Obb]

01:02 PM on 05/27/2011

"A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before but there is nothing to compare it to now." - Gravity's Rainbow

[tbeth1957]

11:33 AM on 05/27/2011

This is cheating, but, "That was effective. Do it again," from Daphne du Maurier's "The Parasites." Pappy, Celia, Niall, and Freada--an old friend of Pappy's, now his son Niall's lover--have gone to the country to visit Pappy's daughter, Maria, a newlywed. The entire trip is comedic gold (and agony for Niall), but on arrival after a tense drive down, Freada trips exiting the car, landing in the drive in a sort of swan dive, prompting Pappy's dry comment. "The Parasites" is somewhat scandalous, but I've never understood why it isn't better known. Love "Rebecca," of course, and its famous opening line.

[tbeth1957]

11:43 AM on 05/27/2011

Oh, dear, I read "first" as "best." Still, the first sentence of "The Parasites" certainly drew me right in, and I wasn't disappointed. "When people play the game: Name three or four persons whom you would choose to have with you on a desert island--they never choose the Delaneys."

[eetwi]

10:27 AM on 05/27/2011

I may have missed it in an earlier post somewhere, but has this one really not been mentioned yet?
"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed."
And with Bloomsday coming up, too!

[colleenos]

05:01 PM on 05/30/2011

And didn't himself trump that one with:

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and environs.

[eetwi]

12:46 PM on 06/01/2011

Agreed. But the word "trump" gives me an involuntary twitch these days.