Opening Lines -- June 12, 2025

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The Book Page 

Three works:

• The Hare With Amber Eyes, Edmund De Waal, c. 2010, the link;
• The White Road: Journey Into An Obsession, Edmund de Waal, c. 2015, the link;
• Portrait of a Lady, Henry James, serial published in 1880 - 1881, and then as a book, 1881.

From recent issue of The New York Review of Books, June 12, 2025, p. 21, "Anecdote of the Teapot," Christopher Benfey. 

Henry James has one of the best opening sentences of any novel:

In England a teapot like this was part of a long-established domestic ritual. “Under certain circumstances,” Henry James wrote in the opening sentence of The Portrait of a Lady, “there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.”

For me, that opening line competes with 

"I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills," from Isak Dinesan's Out of Africa. 

I think I could do a blog on "opening lines."

Here's another one, link here:

I was talking with a friend last night about great opening sentences—you know the ones that grip you right away. I always thought A Prayer for Owen Meany opened up beautifully. In fact Irving has called it his favorite first sentence:

"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God." 

No one I know has ever mentioned A Prayer for Owen Meany to me, but I discovered it on my own, and enjoyed it immensely. 

From that same link, a long paragraph broken up: 

"California, Labor Day weekend ... early, with ocean fog still in the streets, outlaw motorcyclists wearing chains, shades and greasy Levis roll out from damp garages, all-night diners and cast-off one-night pads in Frisco, Hollywood, Berdoo and East Oakland, heading for the Monterey peninsula, north of Big Sur ...

...The Menace is loose again, the Hell's Angels, the hundred-carat headline, running fast and loud on the early morning freeway, low in the saddle, nobody smiles, jamming crazy through traffic and ninety miles an hour down the center stripe, missing by inches ...

... Little Jesus, the Gimp, Chocolate George, Buzzard, Zorro, Hambone, Clean Cut, Tiny, Terry the Tramp, Frenchy, Mouldy Marvin, Mother Miles, Dirty Ed, Chuck the Duck, Fat Freddy, Filthy Phil, Charger Charley the Child Molester, Crazy Cross, Puff, Magoo, Animal and at least a hundred more ...

... tense for the action, long hair in the wind, beards and bandanas flapping, earrings, armpits, chain whips, swastikas and stripped-down Harleys flashing chrome as traffic on 101 moves over, nervous, to let the formation pass like a burst of dirty thunder ...

I mean if you're gonna write a book about guys on motorcycles then why not just blow the reader away with something like that? 

But it wasn't just the opening line for Hunter S Thompson. He had so many great lines. I used one of his lines in my remarks at my retirement ceremony, after 30 years in the USAF. To wit:

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.

One could go on and on.