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/lit/ - Literature

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1086818 No.1086818 [Reply] [Original]

ITT: We post the first sentence of a book at hand. (Not inc. preface, intro, acknowledgments, etc)

I'll start: "They're out there."

>> No.1086821

Nigger balls.

>> No.1086827

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

>> No.1086832

Who is John Galt?

>> No.1086834

The main smoking room of the Strollers Club had been filling for the last half-hour, and was now nearly full.

>> No.1086846

I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.

>> No.1086848

Terrified, wounded and now out of ammo, lieutenant Rick 'Razor' Haynes staggered down the tight passageway, blood pouring from a gunshot wound to his left thigh, scratch-marks criss-crossing his face.

>> No.1086849

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.

>> No.1086858

In a taxi skidding away from the Gare Du Nord, one dark greasy February morning before the shutters were down, Henrietta sat beside Miss Fisher.

>> No.1086859

"Most discipline is hidden discipline, designed not to liberate but to limit."

>> No.1086873

It was in their very first conversation that he warned her that he did not intend to get involved in a serious relationship.

>> No.1086876

On and on Coeurl prowled.

>> No.1086879

From my Psychology study guide:
"Why spend money on a study guide when you have already purchased a textbook?"

Fucking lol. I just was asking myself the same question

>> No.1086902

Which of the gods was it that made them quarrel?

>> No.1086918

I'm in the kitchen cooking spaghetti when the woman calls.

>> No.1086926

>>1086918
Were you listening to Rossini or the Thieving Magpie?

>> No.1086948

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

>> No.1086951

Muuuuuuuuuraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaakaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

>> No.1086960

'The philosophers have only explained the world; the point is to change it.' This famous dictum of Marx allows us to judge his doctrine by its practical consequences, in other words by examining the kind of society which has resulted from its application.

>> No.1086987

On a cold autumn night, under a black sky leached of starlight and absent the moon, Captain Henry Baltimore clutches his rifle and stares across the dark abyss of the battlefield, and knows in his heart that these are the torture fields of Hell, and damnation awaits mere steps ahead.

>> No.1087007

>>1086948
This.

>> No.1087011

>>1086832

Aww, I was gonna do that

>> No.1087018

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderly again.

>> No.1087033

If you look at satellite photographs of the far east by night, you'll see a large splotch curiously lacking in light.

>> No.1087049

When the lights go out in Beebe Station, you can hear the metal groan.

>> No.1087053

Strangely enough, it would be the oak trees that Justine Burnelli remembered from the day Centurion Station died.

>> No.1087067

"It was 7.00 am, not a good hour when one has just flown the Atlantic economy class."

>> No.1087075

this first book proposes, first in brief, the whole subject, man's disobidience, and the loss thereupon of Paradise...

>> No.1087085

Even the very last drop of fuel can be used to accelerate.

>> No.1087083

"I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stoll pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a tunrstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch and upton A train... Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit holds the door back for me."

>> No.1087096

When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.

>> No.1087103

It is a simple matter.

>> No.1087105

"Hi, I'm Thomas Pynchon, and I apologize to you for writing this garbage."

>> No.1087107

>It is, I believe, a fairly common experience for those who have been engaged for a good many years in the profession of literary criticism, to slip, almost unconsciously, into a condition of mistrust of all their most familiar and general terms.

>> No.1087108

They say it first came from Africa, carried in the stream of the enslaved; that it was the death of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that cracked open in the Antilles.

long first sentence is long.

>> No.1087109

When the storm came, it hit the hills like a hammer.

>> No.1087154

When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.

>> No.1087176

This is where my story begins.

>> No.1087188

Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny feeling that what he has come to meet, what's floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane.

>> No.1087187

We are at rest five miles behind the front.

>> No.1087191

(name of first chapter is 5 words backwards)
This inscription could be seen on the glass door of a small shop, but naturally this was the only way it looked if you were inside the dimly lit shop, looking out at the street through the plate-glass door.

>> No.1087214

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.

>> No.1087219

I never knew her in life.

>> No.1087222

Be warned: this book has no literary merit whatsoever.

>> No.1087241

I did not kill my father, but sometimes I felt I had helped him on his way.

>> No.1087257

The first thing I remember is being under something

>> No.1087281

There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.

>> No.1087293

Why can't we stay closed up inside ourselves?

>> No.1087296

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.

>> No.1087300

IT WAS THE YEAR WHEN THEY FINALLY IMMANENTIZED THE ESCHATON.

>> No.1087316

>>1087281
I love the graveyard book so much.
Which illustration version do you have?

>> No.1087323

It was a marvelous night, the sort of night one only experiences when one is young.

>> No.1087326

"I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies."

>> No.1087330

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

>> No.1087352

The elderly passenger sitting on the north-window side of that inexorably moving railway coach,next to an empty seat and facing two empty ones, was none other than Professor Timofey Pnin.

>> No.1087358

"For years I had believed my uncle to be dead."

From a book I use as a mousepad.

>> No.1087364

>>1087358
Hmm this is familiar.
Source?

>> No.1087370

A screaming comes across the sky.

>> No.1087377

"This is a child of Destiny...." -declared the prophet Nagi on the day we were born - "...One who will grow to lead the people and be the light in the sky of our nation's future."

>> No.1087379

IT WAS A PROFANE FARTING EXCLAMATION FROM UNFATHOMABLE COSMIC DEPTHS.

>> No.1087384

"I was left back when I was twelve because I had a baby for my fahver."

>> No.1087406

>>1087358
Paddy Doyle, "The God Squad". I don't think anyone has read this book, ever.

>> No.1087414

>>1087406
okay no I have never read that book.
must be thinking of something else.

>> No.1087418

>>1087414
It's an extremely generic sentence, I admit.

>> No.1087422

>>1087418
As are most of these first sentences.

>> No.1087423

>>1087358

my mousepad begins with "The protozoa are single-celled animals."

>> No.1087432

>>1086818

Nice. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

>> No.1087543

Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.

>> No.1087552

My name is Ishmael.

>> No.1087559

>>1086818
As I left the Kenya Beanstalk capsule he was right on my heels.

>> No.1087561

>>1087552
You misqouted Moby Dick.

>> No.1087574

He was an old man who fished alone on a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.

Thrilling.

>> No.1087577

East the wind blew across Tremalking, where the fair-skinned Amayar farmed their fields, and made fine glass and porcelain, and followed the peace of the Water Way.

>> No.1087588

I don't know if my story is grand enough to be a tragedy, although a lot of shitty stuff did happen.

>>1087574
I'm reading that now and it is, in a way. The plot is maybe not, but the prose is wonderful

>> No.1087594

Who am I? If this once I were able to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I "haunt."

>> No.1087595

"All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike," says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina,transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880).

>> No.1087598
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1087598

>>1087595
>says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina,transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880).

>> No.1087600
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1087600

"There was no explanation of who she was or the nature of her business with my Agency beyond her name, Mr.s Kate Warne, written in my appointment book for ten o'clock on the morning of august 22, 1856."

>> No.1087607

A screaming is in the sky.

<33 pynchy-kun

>> No.1087609

>>1087574
i love Hemingway, but the old man and the sea wasn't his best work. currently reading for whom the bell tolls and im genuinely impressed.

>> No.1087610

They came like a caravan of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and across the hill in the mourning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and the musicians on chairs in the truckbed teetering and tuning their instruments, the fat man with guitar grinning and gesturing to others in a car behind the bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned the fiddlepeg and listened with a wrinkled face.

>> No.1087652

All art is quite useless.

>> No.1087660

A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ besides his bed awakened Rick Deckard.

>> No.1087686

>>1087598
that's part of the quote you know.

>> No.1087697

My mother drove me to the airport with the windows rolled down.

>> No.1087703

Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening Hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.

>> No.1087715

>>1087697
is this twilight

>> No.1087738

Would I find La Maga?

>> No.1087741

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

>> No.1087745

>>1087607
a screaming comes across the sky...

>> No.1087757

>>1087543
Die Blechtrommel?

>> No.1087752

Convicts' garb is striped pink and white.

>> No.1087772

"Well, sir, I should have been sitting pretty, just about as pretty as a man could sit."

>> No.1087770

"My father's family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Phillip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip."

>> No.1087998

This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, what a Man's resolution can achieve.

>> No.1088020

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were on about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing;--that not only the production of a ration being was concern'd in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;--and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humors and dispositions which were then uppermost:----Had they duly weighed and considered this all this, and proceeded accordingly, ----I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.


Ladies and gentlemen, Tristam Shandy

>> No.1088938

>>1088020
so wat

From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that – a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that sight and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.

"Eat my shit." -- William Faulkner

>> No.1088957

"Airport."

--My Education by William S. Burroughs.

>> No.1088961

"Not a Harley butch, not a working-class he-she with a D-A; a soft-cheeked Kevin Costner Butch, a Paul Mitchell hair products butch."

Crybaby Butch by Judith Frank

>> No.1088972

In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful Alif lam mim.