In an interview with recently deceased author Paul Auster, he says the following:
When I was 9 or 10, my grandmother gave me a six-volume collection of books by Robert Louis Stevenson, which inspired me to start writing stories that began with scintillating sentences like this one: “In the year of our Lord 1751, I found myself staggering around blindly in a raging snowstorm, trying to make my way back to my ancestral home.”
This encouraged me to browse my bookshelf and search for those scintillating first sentences. As it turns out, many of the books that I loved the most really do pack a punch before the end of their first paragraph. Here’s my personal selection. Unlike Auster’s example, the ones I am sharing do not immediately drop you in the middle of the action, as the number of adventure books on my bookshelf is marginal. However, I do feel they capture a lot about the protagonist and set the tone for the novel.
I would love for you to share yours.
The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster:
I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn, and so the next morning I traveled down there from Westchester to scope out the terrain.
Moon Palace by Paul Auster:
It was the summer that men first walked on the moon. I was very young back then, but I did not believe there would ever be a future.
The Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, 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.
The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin by David Nobbs
When Reginald Iolanthe Perrin set out for work on the Thursday morning, he had no intention of calling his mother-in-law a hippopotamus.
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“I’m pretty much fucked.”
The Martian Andy Weir
“The man in Black fled across the Desert, and the Gunslinger followed.”
Stephen King - The Gunslinger
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
W. Gibson - Neuromancer
it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want for a wife.
Pride & Prejudice - Jane Austen
Not the very first lines, but Terry Pratchetts “The Colour of Magic” intro is a lore about the world and universe, and ends with this absolute gem:
There was, for example, the theory that A’Tuin had come from nowhere and would continue at a uniform crawl, or steady gait, into nowhere, for all time. This theory was popular among academics. An alternative, favoured by those of a religious persuasion, was that A’Tuin was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as were all the stars in the sky which were, obviously, also carried by giant turtles. When they arrived they would briefly and passionately mate, for the first and only time, and from that fiery union new turtles would be born to carry a new pattern of worlds. This was known as the Big Bang hypothesis
“Nothing but stars, scattered across the blackness as though the Creator had smashed the windshield of his car and hadn’t bothered to stop to sweep up the pieces.”
-Pyramids, by Terry Pratchett
It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size. For Sister Thorn of the Sweet Mercy Convent Lano Tacsis brought two hundred men.
Red sister by Mark Lawrence.
“In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit.”
