First Lines of Great Books
"It began as a mistake."
-- Charles Bukowsi: Post Office
"I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead."
-- Henry Miller: Tropic of Cancer
"Here's how it started. I'd never said a word."
-- Louis Ferdinand Celine: Journey to the End of the Night
"Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure."
“I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased."
-- Fyodor Dostoyewsky: Notes from the Underground
"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."
-- J.D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye
"I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train . . . "
-- William S. Burroughs: Naked Lunch
"One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Bunker Hill, down in the very middle of Los Angeles."