Do you have a favorite incipit (see details)

We are humans. Being human is a chronic fatal condition.

in Orwell’s 1984: IT WAS A BRIGHT COLD DAY IN APRIL, AND THE CLOCKS WERE STRIKING THIRTEEN

@Strauss – the book burning was in Fahrenheit 451 – not 1984.

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,” – The Raven – - – Edgar Allan Poe

@elbanditoroso Thanks. That was a copy-paste error!

“Lightning sought our mother out, when she was a young girl in Brown County, Indiana.” The Winner of the National Book Award by Jincy Willet

“A screaming comes across the sky.” Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

I absolutely love incipits. I can spend hours in a book store or library going from book to book only reading these little bits.

“My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.”
The Stranger, Albert Camus

“In the year 3058, the warring factions of the Inner Sphere band together to execute the complete annihilation of Clan Smoke Jaguar.”

“It was a dark and stormy night”
Charles Schultz

I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.
Ficciones Jorge Luis Borges

“Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”

“When he was nearly 13, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the ankle.”

^^ Edit: “elbow” not “ankle”!

Dare I say – most incipits are pretty insipid…

“GET OUTA THE WAY YOU SONOFABITCH!!!”

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like ‘I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…’ and suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car….”
Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

Credit for “It was a dark and stormy night” belongs to Sir Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel Paul Clifford begins with those words. Schultz just borrowed them.

Every year since 1982, San Jose State University has held the Bulwer-Lytton contest for the most awful imaginable opening lines. I tried my worst and didn’t come close. After the contest, you can read the runners-up.

As for my own nominee, I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite, but it’s worth more than a mention, from Vladimir Nabokov’s sensuous masterpiece, Lolita:

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.”

“To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.”

The Grapes of Wrath, 1939

About 25 years ago, I was standing in Elliot Bay Book Company looking for a book about Seattle’s history. The first one I picked up started with statistics like Seattle’s longitude and latitude. The second book, Skid Road, started with “The hills are so steep in downtown Seattle that some of the sidewalks have cleats” and went on to describe how the Seattle Symphony rigged a pulley system to carry their instruments three blocks uphill from the storage space to the practice hall. That paragraph has stayed with me ever since.

I’ve always liked the incipit of S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, ever since I was assigned to read the novel in 8th grade:

When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the dark movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman, and a ride home.

Note that this line also functions as the explicit (the last line of the novel). I can’t at the moment think of any other novels that begin and end with the same line, so it is an interesting case.

Another one I’ve always liked is the incipit of James Joyce’s The Dead:

Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.

I’m sure the great James Joyce knew this was an incorrect usage of the word “literally” (which apparently people were doing all the way back in 1905), but this is something Lily herself would’ve said, so it is apropos.

“Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission, to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before.”

“Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the river bank, and of having nothing to do. Once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”

My favourite ‘incipit’ has to be:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,”

As I \m sure many of you know it is the first words in the Charles Dickens classic ‘A Tale of Two Cities’

May I wish your the happiest and healthiest 2024.