There was a poll that stated—Rowling’s opening line in the HP series is one of best in the world. Someone posted about how there are a bunch of other opening statements that are better.
Here’s one of my personal favorites, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez (English translated):
“It is inevitable. The scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”
@DocCarms@bookstodon "It was raining real hard the day we buried my daddy. Mama said it was because the angels were crying; but after hours of drenching downpour I doubted the angels were crying tears of joy about seeing Daddy in heaven but instead were downright upset about him there."
– "The Angels of Morgan Hill" by Donna VanLiere
@DocCarms@bookstodon You get what you vote for. My favourite is "Once upon a time, in a land far far away, there lived a...." because so many great stories from my childhood started like that.
“the color of television, tuned to a dead channel” comes from using a analog television with an antenna and receiving broadcast channels. Turned to a “dead channel” produces a gray, undulating, pixelated-like screen, a screen that no longer exists in the digital world of cable and streaming. It’s not about the business model of streaming, it’s about the technology. Gibson was writing in 1984, years before our contemporary digital world.
@DocCarms@bookstodon "I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination." Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin
"When, suddenly, on an ordinary Wednesday, it seemed to Barney that the world tilted and ran downhill in all directions, he knew he was about to be haunted again." The Haunting, Margaret Mahy
"When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing."
@DocCarms@bookstodon “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.” - Donna Tart, The Secret History
@DocCarms@bookstodon The year is 50 B.C. Gaul is entirely occupied by the Romans. Well not entirely! One small village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the invaders.
@DocCarms@bookstodon ""It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York." - Sylvia Plath.
There's a short story by Richard Cowper that compresses an amazing amount of world-building into "He reached up to the buttons in his forehead, and changed his mind with an audible click".
Honourable mention to John Scalzi's "Shadow War of the Night Dragons", the opening sentence of which is a ~250 word masterpiece of deliberate urple. (As is the second; the third caps the joke with an eight word punchline.)
@DocCarms@bookstodon “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.”
The Old Man And The Sea, Ernest Hemingway
“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”
Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
“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
@DocCarms@bookstodon
"Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt"
@mutinyc@DocCarms@bookstodon It was a poll, and that inherently becomes a popularity contest because most people haven't ready that many works.
If you want a measure of best lines rather than most popular lines, you'd need some sort of tournament-style vote where people are made to read a few before choosing from them. Even then I suspect people would be biased towards the ones familiar to them.
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