> The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.

The Gunslinger - Stephen King

The Secret History by Donna Tartt:

>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.

Who or what is Bunny? A little kid's rabbit? Who is narrating? What kind of person? Several weeks dead? Just now coming to understand the 'gravity' of the situation?

Maybe this makes me want to read it all over again.

Anna Karenina, obviously.

“I’m pretty much fucked.” — The Martian by Andy Weir

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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

First one I thought of!

I LOVE when authors do this, especially when it encapsulates the plot while setting the tone for the rest of the story.

Taylor Jenkins Reid’s One True Loves does this perfectly: “I'm finishing up dinner with my family and my fiancé when my husband calls.”

The night was humid.

There once was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

Doesn't sum up the whole book (Voyage of the Dawn Treader), but definitely sums up Eustace's early personality.

Far Out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

> Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

The sentence summarises the nature of One Hundred Years of Solitude: the magical absurdism of 'discovering' ice; the fluidity of time moving from an unclear now to a future death then jumping to an innocent childhood; someone called Buendia.

"When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home."

Stoner by John Williams.

Here is the second paragraph (sorry, I don’t know how to indent text):

“An occasional student who comes upon the name may wonder idly who William Stoner was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question. Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.”

Catcher in the rye has a great first sentence

​

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.

I was there the day Horus slew the Emperor.

The same here.

>In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Such a great start to the book, and the proceeding lines.

The first paragraph spoils the entire story - but only gives the broad details of a man's unremarkable life. And then immediately flashes back to how William Stoner grew up and lived this life that we're supposed to experience.

Sums it up very well.

"It began as a mistake."

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.

"None of this would have happened if it weren't for the she-shed."

Suburban Hell

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.”

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The Lord of the Flies:

“The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.”

That this story will include a narrative on the loss of innocence and purity is conveyed by the first seven words. A boy with what is initially described as “fair hair” (later in the book described as “yellow” when he fails to stand up to the other boys) lowers himself down (his own actions bringing him from a high place and sinking lower) sets up how these characters will fall from the more pure state of their childhood innocence to a more morally complicit young adult status.

The Great Gatsby:

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.’”

“Younger and more vulnerable years” again conveys that some loss of an earlier innocence has occurred that this narrator has now learned from. We are then set up with advice that when we are tempted to be critical of someone, to understand the context of their socioeconomic advantages or lack thereof as having an important place in how we should analyze that person’s actions. The narrator, Nick, comes to learn that Gatsby fabricated his entire identity to try to attain the social status that would, he thought, make him able to be with Daisy. Gatsby didn’t have the socioeconomic status that Tom had, and the reality was that nothing was going to change that. The creation, Jay Gatsby, could never be with Daisy because the creator, James Gatz wasn’t born with money. Should we judge him for his criminal acts to obtain money to spend on lavish parties just to win over some girl he met years ago? Yeah maybe a little, but his naïveté was believing that there was a path toward real socioeconomic mobility, a myth the United States continues to tell itself in its own self-imagining. The narrator, Nick, was vulnerable because he cared for Gatsby. He witnesses when the this image that is Jay Gatsby gets “shattered” but then Gatsby still takes the blame for when Daisy recklessly kills someone. Nick tells Gatsby that Gatsby is “worth the whole damn bunch [of the born rich] put together,” for naïvely believing in a myth he has been shown to be false but hoping for its virtue anyway. The final pain for Nick is realizing that Daisy and Tom were in truth “careless people…they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money,” and thus, Nick is calloused from the pain of seeing what naïve hope suffers in the face of the power of old money.

I sat down in a cafe to have a glance at this new book I'd bought, Anna Karenina, having not known much about it, and having intended to read it after my upcoming month of exams. Just a glance, why not?

I read the first line, sighed, and thought "fuck, I'm definitely going to read this huge book instead of revising for my exams".

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

1984 ~George Orwell

"I am an invisible man".

Ralp lh Ellison

"Now consider the tortoise and the eagle."

Small Gods, Discworld

The night was moist.

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"It was the day my grandmother exploded" Pretty well indicates that what is to come will be a quirky, sometimes mysterious, and darkly humorous account of family and misfortune.

Marguerite Duras’ The Lover.

“Very early in my life it was too late”.

In the myriadic year of our Lord — the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death! — Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.

This was the first one I thought of.

Foreshadowing of conflict, echoes of the novel’s theme of people always looking back and being trapped by nostalgia, the seemingly uncomplicated early days compared with the messy later days, and the ‘magic’ of ice, which reflects the recurring images of supernatural things being considered everyday and science and technology being consider mystical.

‘In a sense, I am Jacob Horner.’ - The End Of The Road.

This sentence sets you up for a novel in which the main character cannot make a decision or commit to a course of action or opinion, and instead everything seems an equivocation.

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.

From the Eye if the world, the first book of the wheel of time saga

It not only encapsulates the essence of the book but of all the 15 book saga

"Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know." (The Stranger)

God, what an effectively horrifying little paragraph. Imagine not knowing what Lolita is about and encountering that. “Light of my life, fire of my loins,” oh okay so he’s describing his girlfriend or wife, then the “four feet ten in one sock” starts to set off warning bells, and then “at school” hits and those bells are deafeningly loud, and then he reminds you he’s talking about this individual, this Lolita “in my arms…” and it’s ABORT ABORT OH NO.

I didn’t feel the need to read that book more than once but damn, he can write. That “one sock” detail is such tragically childish imagery.

> As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka

> It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

> It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. 1984, George Orwell

> There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

> It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

> It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

> 124 was spiteful. Full of Baby's venom Beloved, Toni's Morrison

> Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste Brought Death into the World, and all our woe. Paradise Lost, John Milton

> I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life. Giovanni's Room, James Baldwin

>>> 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 the 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 methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

Perfect preparation for the rest of the book. “Hi, I’m your narrator, let’s get into it. First up, I’m very wordy, melodramatic, and fundamentally unhinged. But most importantly, I love the ocean and think it can fix all my problems.”

“The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault.”- honestly, this one sums up pretty much every book in the series.

The circus arrives without warning.

Lolita.

I think this verb tense is future progressive. But it's been 15 years since I taught grammar, so hopefully someone smarter than me will come along to identify it.

I particularly liked a first line of a chapter in the middle of a book: "There was a demon in the room's corner, and only she could see it." Immediately i wanted to know more.

David Gemmell also often started his chapters with a cold open. It's fun to read.

Does such a good job of summing up the ending to the series, too!

In the summer of 1963, when I was thirteen, I stabbed my father in the chest with a Davy

Crockett Explorers pocketknife. - Kings of Colorado

It was a pleasure to burn.

Phenomenal way to describe the MC's journey, how he burns through his old life in order to seek genuine pleasure. The surface level meaning of enjoying his work too is also really clever since his work reinforces conformity/cheap thrills (which is something Guy grows past very quickly/the main thing he shuns when he develops as a character).

If you ever want to make it worse, say it aloud. He's not joking. One of the most playful and enjoyable bits of prose ever written, followed so closely by a half-riddle with the disgusting answer of "She's 13 and I am 36."