I’ve never been convinced that – as some claim – the most important sentence in literature/book/newspaper article is the first line. It must grab and hold, they tell us. I expect that, like myself, you’ve never dropped a book/article because of a disappointing first line. Even first paragraph.
That said, I do have my favourite opening lines, mainly for their own sakes. They may have poise, excite immediate attention or simply impress. One, from schooldays, is A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
He would never get away with that now. An editor would slash it, mercilessly. More acceptable would be: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,” from George Orwell’s 1984. Or this: “Happy families are all alike: every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.
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A favourite of mine is: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” from Jane Austen’s wonderful Pride and Prejudice. Another would be: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed,” opening lines to James Joyce’s Ulysses.
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I also like: “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish,” from Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, and not least as I once interviewed a man in Cuba they claimed was the basis for Hemingway’s “Old Man”.
Beginning, from Old English beginnan, “to attempt, undertake”.
