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
Call me Ishmael (I found Moby Dick at my grandmother's house when I was 11 years old. I started reading it, because I thought it was a story about pirates and as a kid I loved pirate stories. I was impressed by that first line, because I didn't know you could jump into as story like this.)
@DocCarms@bookstodon 'Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.' - Viriginia Woolf. (Seeing as someone's already suggested I Capture the Castle!)
"If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done." -Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker
spoiler: it CAN'T be done so he finished the book off by hand, and gave us one of the best closing lines. "It's never too late to have a happy childhood."
@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.
@DocCarms@bookstodon
"Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt"
@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
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 ""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.
@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 “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
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