September 9, 2002

Dear Friends-

We’re looking for your help on a little arts and crafts project we’re trying to kick off in our household. We want to assemble favorite first lines and that’s where your help comes in. We’re looking for suggestions on your favorite opening lines. We’ll circulate the list back out when we’re done in case you’re interested. 

Here’s what we seek: your favorite first or opening lines. It might be the best line you’ve ever heard or read as long as it’s one you love and can’t forget. Can’t decide on a favorite? That’s fine, send us as many lines as you like, the more the merrier. If you send one and change your mind, send another. You can pull them from a novel, a poem, a story, a song, a play, a movie, an essay, anything you would like. Famous or obscure, published or unpublished, funny or sad, short or long, heart rending or brain baffling, anything that you like as long as it is a first or opening line. Feel free to pass this on to friends and total strangers. 

Click here to e-mail your favorite opening line.

Please include the quote itself, the name of the work from which it comes, and the name of the author. If your line comes in a language other than English, please include a translation. I’ll include some samples down below.

Here are the some sample first lines: 

According to the tapes, my father, then about as run-of-the mill as Joe Blow himself, didn’t want to see the thing.

The Talk Talked between Worms by Lee K. Abbott 

All I know is a door into the dark.

The Forge by Seamus Heaney

All the sorrows of Evan Shepard’s loutish adolescence were redeemed at seventeen, in 1935, when he fell in love with automobiles.

Cold Spring Harbor by Richard Yates

It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.

City of Glass by Paul Auster

"There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief,
"There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.”

All Along the Watchtower by Bob Dylan

Fame requires every kind of excess.

Great Jones Street by Don Delillo

I’d been staying at the Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I’d ever known, for three days under a phony name, shooting heroin.

Work by Denis Johnson

Maybe there is nothing in the world to explain

The world, and Maybe I shouldn’t have opened the door

When I saw him, Bible and pamphlets in hand, looking

Out towards the buckled barn and its fossilized hay,

Towards the second growth woods ripening for development

And the already prosaic defeats of the cornfields

Gone to cul-de-sac houses.

Starlings by Robert Cording