Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Craven Moorehead]

Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls.

Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake

[meangradin]

[.38 Special]

[Koveras]

[Deep Thirteen]

"You are waking from a stupor that feels like a chronic headache after a week in Vegas."

Someone has got to recognize that line.

[MollyBloom]

[MollyBloom]

[DWAEJIMORIGUKBAP]

[Jane]

One of the most famous opening lines in Japanese literature:

The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.

Snow Country- Yasunari Kawabata

[MollyBloom]

[DWAEJIMORIGUKBAP]

Darn. Just remembered all my best and most favourite books are in England in my parent's attic.

I have a free morning today so was planning to pick out a few of my best books and slam down some new dazzling opening lines that would entertain, enlighten, add a dash of Lime juice to this thread and of course show myself to be a most learned, mordant, aesthete of unarguable good taste.

Instead I found these few I have with me in Korea which are merely decent. I think we can extend from sentences to opening paragraphs if we like....

From Marquez's 'Memories of my Melancoly Whores.'

"The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of wild love with an adolescent virgin."

From Banana Yoshimoto's 'Kitchen.'

"The place I like best in this world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it's a kitchen, if it's a place they make food, it's fine with me. Ideally it should be well broken in. Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate. White tile catching the light (ting! ting!)"

Not great but I have a soft spot for the novella and it's a good introduction to the character's personality, situation and introspection at the begining of the story.

And from Italo Calvino's head spinning, deliciously original collection 'Cosmicomics'

"Right, that's how long it takes, not a day less, - Qfwfq said, - once as I went past, I drew a sign at a point in space, just so I could find it again two hundred million years later, when we went by the next time around. What sort of sign? It's hard to explain because if I say sign to you, you immediately think of a someting that can be distinguished from a something else, but nothing could be distinguished from anything there; you immiediately think of a sign made with some implement or with your hands, and then when you take the implement or your hands away, the sign remains, but in those days there were no implements or even hands, or teeth, or noses, all things that came along afterwards, a long time afterwards."

[matthewschmidt]

Maybe not the best ever, but I've got the books with me here in Korea so I thought I'd contribute.

Catcher in the Rye:

"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."

Slaughterhouse Five:

"All this happened, more or less."

Old Man and the Sea:

"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."

[Deep Thirteen]

[joyfulgirl]

you've beat me to most of the ones that have stuck in my head.

i also remember these:

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."

-Virgina Woolf


"They shoot the white girl first."

- Toni Morrison

[VanIslander]