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Best Opening Lines Of Everything, Ever

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Junior Wells championed the Bee Gees’ “In the event of something happening to me …” as one of the best opening lines to anything, and he’s right. What others occur to you, readers? Books, movies, songs …

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  1. Just to be absolutely clear – we’re looking for the best opening line, not couplet or verse or paragraph. The most arresting and compelling handful of words. I was thinking of Chuck Berry’s “Deep down in Louisiana close to New Orleans” but it doesn’t quite stand up without the second line.

  5. “In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream…” Urgent, almost breathless, exciting, dramatic, intriguing and the song itself supercharged Bruce’s career.

  6. “English as tuppence, changing yet changeless as canal-water, nestling in green nowhere, armoured and effete, bold flag-bearer, lotus fed Miss Havishambling, opsimath and eremite, feudal-still reactionary Rawlinson End.”

    Erm … does that count as one line?

  17. I always liked the opening line of Crowded House’s Mean to Me (the original opening track of their debut album).

    “She came all the way from America, she had a blind date with destiny”

  21. A movie two-fer:

    “What a dump!” (Bette Davis in “Beyond The Forest”)

    “What a dump… what’s that from?” (Elizabeth Taylor in “Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?”)

  22. IIRC the actual Word magazine devoted a chart to the best opening lines to songs, their winner being ABC’s “The Look Of Love”:

    When you’re world is full of strange arrangements, and gravity won’t pull you through…

  24. Three song opening lyrics from me:

    “Bless my cotton socks, I’m in the News.” (Teardrop Explodes – “Reward”)

    ” I am angry, I am ill and I’m as ugly as sin – It’s my irritability that keeps me alive and kickin.'” (Magazine – “A song From Under The Floorboards”)

    “I Don’t believe in an interventionist God, but I know, darling, that you do.” (Nick Cave – “Into My Arms”)

    • Ooh, yes! Excellent call!

      How about: “It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.” Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers.

      “They fuck you up, your mum and dad” P. Larkin.

      “This is me e.g. nigel molesworth the curse of st custard’s which is the skool i am at.” G. Willans, Down With Skool.

  27. “Anne was trying to do some of her prep in a corner of the common room when her cousin George came bursting in”.
    The first book I ever properly chose for myself in the local library age six. I was entranced and enthralled. I had never ever heard of Enid Blyton before so imagine my astonished disbelieving delight when on returning Kirrin Island the librarian, the stern-faced but kindly Mrs Heatherwick, lead me to the shelves and pointed to the other 423 Famous Five books. I may have wet myself.

  29. “Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French” Wodehouse, The Luck of the Bodkins

  31. The opening line of recently-departed Harlan Ellison’s short story “How’s The Night Life On Cissalda” is: “When they unscrewed the time capsule, preparatory to helping temponaut Enoch Mirren to disembark, they found him doing a disgusting thing with a disgusting thing.”

    • The great thing about that line (as @greatdismal himself [WG] points out) is that is has changed meaning over the generations. It would now probably mean jet black. At other times could potentially have meant blue (as in blue screen of death), or white noise grey.

  34. It’s hard to beat the sheer life-affirming warmth and unadulterated goodness of:

    “Cat’s foot, iron claw, neurosurgeons scream for more, at paranoia’s poison door; twenty first century schizoid man.”

  35. When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez, and it’s Eastertime too.

    Just like Tom Thumb’s Blues

    (Although for years, I thought “in Juarez” was “and worries”, which I still kind of prefer)

    • same song my mondegreen was “Verlaine & Rimbaud” or “the lanes and rambled”. I like to think either works.

      And I’ve always loved “the cops don’t need you, and man they expect the same”

  37. ‘I’m standing winding staircase, seven eagles long
    Misty planet creature how could I kiss you wrong?’ – T Rex, I’m a fool for you girl – Nonsense, but lovely.
    ‘Pick a card, any card, wrong.’ Blue Aeroplanes, Jacket Hangs

  40. “Junior Wells championed the Bee Gees’ “In the event of something happening to me …” as one of the best opening lines to anything, and he’s right.”

    HP Saucepot / Afterword blog 23 Aug 2018

  42. “I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand, walking through the streets of Soho in the rain”.

    Warren Zevon, though that line was written by Waddy

  44. “When you wish upon a star that turns into a plane”
    The Replacements, Nevermind

    “Tell me all the things you would change, I don’t pretend to know what you want”
    Crowded House, Distant Sun

  45. how about ‘you didn’t wake up this morning, because you didn’t go to bed, you were watching the whites of your eyes turn red’

    ‘This Is the Day’ by The The

  47. I’ve always liked the opening of Jean Genet’s best novel:

    Weidmann appeared before you in a five o’clock edition, his head swathed in white bands, a nun and yet a wounded pilot fallen into the rye one September day like the day when the world came to know the name of Our Lady of the Flowers.

  49. Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen.

    Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing

  50. “On the firefly platform on sunny Goodge Street, a violent hash-smoker shook a chocolate machine. Involved in an eating scene.”

    DONOVAN.

    “My name’s John Lee Pettimore. Same as my daddy and his daddy before.”

    Steve Earle – Copperhead Road.

    “Why do my thoughts loom so large on me?”

    Mick Jagger – She Smiled Sweetly (almost certainly stolen, but from whom?).

  53. “No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space.”

    And with a totally different vibe:

    “Son I’m thirty, I only went with your mother cos she’s dirty.”

  56. Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure. – Camus, L’etranger.

    Call me Ishmael. Melville – Moby Dick

    When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect. Kafka – Metamorphosis.

  58. And of course:
    “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

    Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

  59. ‘Marley was dead, to begin with.’ DIckens: A Christmas Carol
    (It’s the placing of the comma that adds to the brilliance.)

    ‘All boys, except one, grow up.’ J. M. Barrie: Peter Pan
    (Though on this site, we know that isn’t true!)

    I’ve never read it, but this takes some beating –
    ‘”Where’s Papa going with that axe.”, said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.’ E. B. White: Charlotte’s Web

  61. The wind howled. Lightning stabbed at the earth erratically, like an inefficient assassin. – Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters.

    Sam Vimes sighed when he heard the scream, but he finished shaving before he did anything about it – Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

    Stick that up your crinolined arse, Jane Austen…

  62. “Rosebud.” – C. Kane, O. Welles. I had to look up the closing line – it’s “throw that junk in”, where the sled is found. This movie is as great as the critics used to say it was, before they got embarrassed at agreeing with each other.

      • It is a faultless movie on every level, technically innovative, and not a wasted frame. There are films anyone can say are “as good” (I can think of one or two myself) but there are none better. Failed to recoup its costs at the box office on release (as did Blade Runner, The Wizard Of Oz ectect).

    • I’ve asked the mods to distribute the contents of my hamper – and all future hampers – to the poor and needy. If you qualify, be in the carpark behind the Lidl Store, 6 Headley Road, Winnersh between 9-12 Sunday morning. Don’t thank me! Doing good is its own reward.

  65. “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.”
    (John Steinbeck – The Grapes of Wrath)

  69. “Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind , my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression.”

    Flann O’Brien – At Swim Two Birds

    • Now you’re talking. The truly great Flann O’Brien also opened The Third Policeman thus:

      Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with a spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar.

  75. “I’ve shat in better places than this”

    Opening line of Sarah Kane’s Blasted. The place in question is an extremely posh hotel room.

    But we know that the real answer is: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Surely, even if you didn’t finish 100 Years Of Solitude and later found yourself confused as fuck as to what Aureliano Buendia you were currently reading about, that opening line got you to read on?

  77. “When they pulled you out of the oxygen tent, you asked for the latest party” – You-Know-Who (no, not Voldemort).
    “Sometimes you’re better off dead, here’s a gun in your hand it’s pointing at your head” -PSB, West End Girls.
    “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life” – Prince, Let’s Go Crazy.

  78. “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.”

    J.Lennon Tomorrow Never Knows via Leary, Metzner and Alpert’s ‘The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (‘Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream.”)

    I think I prefer Lennon’s version, as it seems less whimsical, more direct and instructive. It’s like a mantra for steering bad trips to calmer waters – good advice, if not always that easy to follow – but I find it popping into my head in all kinds of stressful situations.

    In the song, the line comes at you immediate and stark, a calming instructive that hurls you into a distorted sounding universe. It’s a devastating opening to one of their best songs.

  81. “It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.”

    Anthony Burgess – Earthly Powers

  83. Existence is a stage on which we pass, a sleepwalk trick for mind and heart; it’s hopeless, I know, but onward I must go and try to make a start at seeing something more than day to day survival, chased by final death.

    Heavy, maaaaan……

  85. See the people all in line, what’s makin’ them look at me?
    Can’t imagine that their minds are thinkin’ the same as me.

    -I Can Hear The Grass Grow.

  88. “And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder
    One of the four beasts saying,
    ‘Come and see.’ and I saw, and behold a white horse”

    Johnny Cash – When The Man Comes Around

  89. “With the money from her accident she bought herself a mobile home
    So at least she could get some enjoyment out of being alone”

    Levi Stubbs’ Tears – Billy Bragg

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