When I was little, my grandmother used to tell me that the first line of a book is the best one. That you can tell what the book is going to be like just from that line. I don't know if that's true, but I always remembered it.
"I have been afraid of putting air into a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign."
-First line of "The Bean Trees" by Barbara Kingsolver
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."
-First line of "The Catcher in the Rye." by J.D. Salinger
"A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees."
ReplyDelete-First line of "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" by Kurt Vonnegut.
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Everything within takes place after Jack died and before my mom and I drowned in a burning ferry in the cool tannin-tinted Guaviare River, in East-Central Columbia, with forty-two locals we hadn't yet met.
ReplyDelete-First line of "You Shall Know Our Velocity." by Dave Eggers