Good Beginnings
What is your favorite beginning to a book? Here are a few of mine--
From Donna Tart's, A Secret History: "The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation."
From Mark Danielewski's, House of Leaves: "I still get nightmares."
From Stephen Crane's, The Red Badge of Courage: "The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting."
From Margaret Atwood's, The Handmaid's Tale: "We slept in what had once been the gymnasium."
From Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn's, Many Things Have Happened Since He Died: "My father has been dead 101 days."
From George Eliot's, Middlemarch: "Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress."
From Fanny Burney's, Camilla: "The historian of human life finds less difficulty and of intricacy to develop, in its accidents and adventures, than the investigator of the human heart in its feelings and its changes."
From Wallace Stegner's, Crossing to Safety: "Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface."
From Iris Murdoch's, The Nice and The Good: "A head of a department, working quietly in his room in Whitehall on a summer afternoon, is not accustomed to being disturbed by the nearby and indubitable sound of a revolver shot."
From Hunter S. Thompson's, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."
From Charlotte Bronte's, Jane Eyre: "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day."
From Peter Hoeg's, Smila's Sense of Snow: "It's freezing--an extraordinary 0 degrees Fahrenheit--and it's snowing, and in the language that is no longer mine, the snow is qanik--big, almost weightless crystals falling in clumps and covering the ground with a layer of pulverized white frost."
From D. H. Lawrence's, Lady Chatterley's Lover: "Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically."
From Kurt Vonnegut's, Slaugherhouse Five: "All this happened, more or less."
From Herman Melville's, Moby Dick: "Call me Ishmael."
More later, I'm sure.
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