Crooked Timber » » Favorite first line?:

Marley was dead, to begin with. -A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens The latter is probably my favorite. At some point, I started believing it meant more than that Marley was dead at the beginning of the story. good. most of the lines quoted by others I do not esp like, though. tend twd the descriptive? classically stylized?

Aujourd’hui maman est morte. Ou peut-etre hier, je ne sais pas. --L’Etranger. Or maybe yesterday. very nice.

To the red country and part of the grey country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. (John Steinbeck.) ok, I like that well enough though it is description. I like 'the last rains' and I like 'Oklahoma' and it having grey country as well as red.

First word of Finnegans Wake is also memorable, if only because none of the rest of the book is: “riverrun” yes I like that word I live river and more r all the better run together and yes one remembers the opening the more because not what follows, and bcs the end comes around to it

He was born with the gift of laughter, and a feeling that the world was mad, and that was the sum of his patrimony. -Scaramouche ah dad likes that story


I don’t have any. =

= Bellona Times (2002 archive) ...the favorite first lines game was played, and I quickly realized that I didn't have any. On the other extremity, ..I recall (and re-read) a good many last lines. ...Such an ending is more likely to speed the traveller on with a slamming of the door than with a gentle swinging to, treating readerly expectations so aggressively that they could almost be called rebuttals to their own books. (Ulysses is one such rebuff after another.) Closure is, after and above all, a refusal of further story.

1.	Trouble no quiet, kind heart; leave sunny imaginations hope. Let it be theirs to conceive the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror, the rapture of rescue from peril, the wondrous reprieve from dread, the fruition of return. Let them picture union and a happy succeeding life. Madame Beck prospered all the days of her life; so did Père Silas; Madame Walravens fulfilled her ninetieth year before she died. Farewell.
2.	"That was the happiest time we ever had," said Frédéric. "Yes, perhaps you're right. That was the happiest time we ever had," said Deslauriers.
3.	I remember them all with such happiness.
4.	I should certainly never again, on the spot, quite hang together, even though it wasn't really that I hadn't three times her method. What I too fatally lacked was her tone.
5.	"That may be," Nora said, "but it's all pretty unsatisfactory."
6.	He bent to pick it up, then stopped. Don't touch it, he thought, don't touch it.

[The first remains the most chill-enducing and daringly experimental ending I've ever read, as befits Charlotte Brontë's Villette, the pinnacle, in English literature, of characterization through narrative voice: The plot is resolved in the imperative! ah it is isn't it. I do like that. or, more accurately, via the narrator's very use of the imperative! Aided by the unemphasized selectivity of her seemingly conventional last paragraph wrap-up..

The second concludes Flaubert's most brilliant closing movement: that of the infinitely self-undermining Sentimental Education -- whose influence can be clearly seen in my third entry, from M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart, and perhaps also in Mavis Gallant's "The Moslem Wife" (as cited in Eclogues). How green was my valley, and the valley of them that have gone. Next, and speaking of characterization through narrative voice, the befuddled detective of Henry James's The Sacred Fount finally manages to reach a conclusion. Fifth is Dashiell Hammett's last word on the murder mystery genre (or perhaps on fiction in general) in The Thin Man, and lastly Patricia Highsmith's The Cry of the Owl abruptly becomes non-Highsmithian -- and freezes.]

Some end with a flourished signature:

1.	And by what I have written in this document you will see, won't you, that I have obeyed her?
2.	And the twelfth stroke of midnight sounded; the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-eight.
3.	Having seen this time what I needed to see, I started writing; and in time wrote all that you have read.
4.	"You and Capablanca," I said.

[Janet Frame's Faces in the Water throws mental health into our eyes like vitriol; Virginia Woolf's Orlando shoots its arrows of desire right through the temporal barrier; Jack Womack's Going, Going, Gone goes home; Raymond Chandler's The High Window gives everyone a fucking break.]

Some with a gleeful or furious or heartbreaking -- but perfectly definite -- denial of closure:

1.	That is said nowadays by the most modern of the physicists. If that is true, then that is how it is with Pooch and with Carmen and with all the others.
2.	I'd always felt the future held wonderful things for me. I'd never quite caught up with it, but quite soon I would. I felt sure I hadn't long to wait.
3.	Something further may follow of this Masquerade.
4.	Ever after. I promise. Now close your eyes.

[Carol Emshwiller's Carmen Dog; Barbara Comyns's Mr Fox; Herman Melville's The Confidence Man; and the devastating final sentence of John Crowley's Engine Summer, whose subject (in several senses) might be said to be the tragicomedy of incompletion.] what, what is said by all the physicist? I like that one. true of all the dogs. I hope it's not something bad. I hope it's something good. and the last of the three is very pretty. ("Open your eyes. This is what I look like when I believe in you.")

And some are simply, disturbingly or delightfully, accomplished:

1.	"Nothing, Mamma. I was just thinking." And, drawing a deep breath, he considered the faint whiff of scent that rose from his mother's corseted waist.
2.	He ran this way and that, low down in his throat crying, and she grinning and crying with him; crying in shorter and shorter spaces, moving head to head, until she gave up, lying out, her hands beside her, her face turned and weeping; and the dog too gave up then, and lay down, his eyes bloodshot, his head flat along her knees.
3.	The beautiful weather was compared with the Great Disappointment of '44, when Christ failed once again to appear to the Millerites.

[Robert Musil's Young Törless enters sentimental grad school huh(?); Djuna Barnes's Nightwood pays tribute to Aphrodite oh?; Karen Joy Fowler's Sister Noon lights out for the hills. nice. and that third one is the one I like here.]

nice collection. and very nice layout here.