I suspect we'll all begin differently, and I'll let my co-
bloggers introduce themselves and announce their intentions separately, but I'm using the old-faithful novel start of the first line, in part because I am a devotee of Herman Melville and
Frantz Kafka, though I expect I'll never live up to "Call me Ishmael" or "When
Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a
monsterous insect."
That's good stuff. As one of my colleagues would say, those are real "
nutgrabbers."
In my own, decidedly less brilliant case, the first line, culled from my notebook of
randomity, is
The end of the forgetting came before anyone thought to look for it.
We'll see where we go from here.
1 comment:
This is a great list of first lines, by the way. But they left off a two of my favorites, including the fanciful: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit" (Tolkien) and the delightfully snarky: "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" (Salinger).
I will say, however that Bradbury's bitingly short "It was a pleasure to burn" is much more my style. Perhaps mine will be more like that.
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