Submitted by vedant-mate t3_znk3yq in books
I have for a long time experienced that couples who are in love have a similar physical appearance (the face at least) which was not what others around me believed and then I read this quote which made me read the entire book: “He looks like you because you brought him up, and you look like me because we gazed and gazed at each other for so many years. Loving couples come to resemble each other.” The Sea, The Sea- Irish Murdoch
Hilarious 😆! Must be an interesting read.
One of my favourite books ever, I highly recommend it. It's funny and light-hearted but also good at exploring the anxieties of a generation.
I didn’t remember if a have picked a book based on a quote, but the one that you just shared makes me think in my husband because so many people tell us that we look like siblings, so maybe that book will be the first one. Thanks.
“Man is broad, too broad, indeed. I'd have him narrower. "
The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky.
Wait, so it's not just me?
Unfortunately typical but: "The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation”. (The Secret History by Donna Tartt)
"Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don't know." (The Stranger by Albert Camus)
And this isn't strictly a first line but is the first line in the beginning of chapter one (there's one page before it that I skipped lol): "All of this happened more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true." (Slaughterhouse-V by Kurt Vonnegut)
WAIT. SO WHAT WAS IT ALL ABOUT. Damn you theliver!!!!
"It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts." - from "The Name of the Wind"
The first two sentences of the book. I just had to read it. And I did not regret it. It was amazing. It's now my favourite book of all times.
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four
Meaning you liked this quote or you're also a lesbian trapped inside a man's body :D?
Beats me.
Good book tho
“It was the day my grandmother exploded.”
The opening line of The Crow Road by Iain Banks, which remains one of my favourite books ‘til this day.
“It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.”
I'm the type that would apologize when another person bumps into me. It's an ongoing process to break that habit and one day I randomly came across this quote... I have now read almost all pf P.G. Wodehouse's body of works AND I'M NOT SORRY IN THE LEAST! Lol!
one cannot be brave who has no fear
What`s that from?
“I would die for you. But I won’t live for you.” - The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name...! - The Last Unicorn by Peter Beagle
another murdochista here.
i don't think i go for first lines. i know that was what got me with timothy findlay's headhunter, but i can't find the book so i can't transcribe it here.
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definitely can credit my reading moby dick with one sentence that reached out of the the opening paragraph and got me. i really don't have good history with 19th century lit - seem to hate almost all of it. but ishmael had me with the bolded part:
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>''Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodologically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball... I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.''
"I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” ― Henry David Thoreau, Walden
“To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else’s heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter.” - Love in the Time of Cholera
Great book. Significantly less romantic than that quote led me to believe.
"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 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 being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."
A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
“ Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending “you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” Robber bride by Margaret Atwood
“Is there any terrestial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness?” After reading that stylistic gem, I knew I had to read THE GOOD SOLDIER.
“Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.” (Call me by your Name -André Aciman) “There are some people who’s dread of human beings is so morbid that they reach a point where they yearn to see with their own eyes monsters of ever more horrible shapes.” (No longer human -Osamu Dazai) “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you?” (The Body - Stephen King)
Dressing for the Burial
“No one wants to talk about the hilarity after death— the way the week my brother shot himself, his wife and I fell on the bed laughing because she couldn’t decide what to wear for the big day, and asked me, “Do I go for sexy or Amish?” I told her sexy. And we rolled around on the mattress they’d shared for eighteen years, clutching our sides. Meanwhile, he lay in a narrow refrigerated drawer, soft brown curls springing from his scalp, framing his handsome face. This was back when he still had a face, and we were going to get to see it. “Hold up the black skirt again,” I said. She said, “Which one?” And then she said, “You look so Mafia Chic,” and I said, “Thank you,” and it went on until we both got tired and our ribs hurt and now I don’t even remember what we wore. Only that we both looked fabulous weeping over that open hole in the ground. …”
Bonfire Opera. Poems by Danusha Lameris
That’s a damn good line.
“You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.” - The Sun Also Rises
"The man in black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed." The first book in the Dark Tower series
Basically any quote from David Wong/the John dies at the end series.
No need to comment then really
love moby-dick so so much
It was the coffin warehouses 🤣🤣🤣. I honestly fell a little in love on the spot.
I think some of you have misinterpreted the question. The quote need not be the first line of the novel. The quote can be from anywhere in the novel which you might have read on Instagram, Goodreads or any where for that matter. And the quote struck you so profoundly that you were motivated to read the entire novel.
"In all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other." Contact by Carl Sagan
"The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time." Jack London, paraphrased in The Call of the Wild. I actually discovered this quote reading Educated.
Renegades by Marissa Meyer
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." From Dune by Frank Herbret
“My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.”
The opening line of the novel The Lovely Bones
Now testify!
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"Let there be spaces between your togetherness". The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
Not a fiction, but when I saw The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins in a shop, I opened this book and saw this quote:
“As a child, my wife hated her school and wished she could leave. Years later, when she was in her twenties, she disclosed this unhappy fact to her parents, and her mother was aghast: ‘But darling, why didn’t you come to us and tell us?’ Lalla’s reply is my text for today: ‘But I didn’t know I could.
I didn’t know I could.
I suspect – well, I am sure – that there are lots of people out there who have been brought up in some religion or other, are unhappy in it, don’t believe it, or are worried about the evils that are done in its name; people who feel vague yearnings to leave their parents’ religion and wish they could, but just don’t realize that leaving is an option.”
I knew immediately that I wanted to read this book, and I've really liked it.
Well that's better than I remember.
I’m great fan of Wodehouse too. His work is quintessential British humour. I’ve read all of his Jeeves (a character from his book who is a butler) novels. Here are few dialogues from ‘The Code of the Woosters’ that I found humours:
“Good evening, Jeeves.” “Good morning, sir.” This surprised me. “Is it morning?” “Yes, sir.” “Are you sure? It seems very dark outside.” “There is a fog, sir. If you will recollect, we are now in Autumn- season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” “Season of what?” (Opening scene. Conversation between the narrator Mr. Bertram Wooster and his neat butler Jeeves)
“There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, 'Do trousers matter?'" “The mood will pass, sir”
“I mean, imagine how some unfortunate Master Criminal would feel, on coming down to do a murder at the old Grange, if he found that not only was Sherlock Holmes putting in the weekend there, but Hercule Poirot, as well." ~ Bertram "Bertie" Wooster
“as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment” Bertram describing Tom Travers
“She laughed - a bit louder than I could have wished in my frail state of health, but then she is always a woman who tends to bring plaster falling from the ceiling when amused.”
“You can’t fling the hands up in a passionate gesture when you are driving a car at fifty miles an hour. Otherwise, I should have done so.” Bertie Wooster to Jeeves when his provides solution to Bertie’s problem which he always does.
“If I might suggest, sir—it is, of course, merely a palliative—but it has often been found in times of despondency that the assumption of formal evening dress has a stimulating effect on the morale.”
“One frequently finds in girls a disinclination towards discussion of matter of importance”
Bertie: “Women often put a damper on things, don’t they Jeeves?” Jeeves: “They are brought up to believe that it is part of their duty to restrain male optimism, sir.”
"My mother is a fish". I had to find out how that group of words came to pass in that order 😄
Orwell’s 1984 for me too but it shook me. Note could be a spoiler: Winston doesn’t explain having sex as making love or procreating but that just performing the act was “a political statement.”
As a 17 year old the thought never crossed my mind.
The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest, Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash opening lines.
“Call me Ishmael”. The unpretentious opening made me read Moby Dick. The ending where the narrator says the search ship found another orphan is equally interesting.
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I think a lot of redditors specifically are exposed to first-line quotes because there are a lot of "what's the best opening line of a novel" threads in r/books.
I'm honestly struggling to think of a quote that drew me to a book that wasn't an opening line, lol.
"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good."
East of Eden, John Steinbeck
Song of Achilles? Lol
"Language is like a cracked kettle on which we bang to make a bear dance, when we would move the stars to pity." Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert.
It was the poem for me, "i went to the woods, to live deliberately..."
One of the best opening lines.
Love the Book!
"Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness." — Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones[ George .R.R. Martin ]
AND
"'A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies,' said Jojen. 'The man who never reads lives only one.'" — Jojen Reed, A Dance with Dragons[ George .R.R. Martin ]
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This post is the snake's eyebrows!
[deleted] t1_j0he55u wrote
"Dag says he's a lesbian trapped inside a man's body. Figure that out." from Generation X by Douglas Coupland.