You Got Me at Hello...

Some of my most beloved books, and my favorite first lines...got the idea from Jabberock
to check out this cool-ass website (Click Here). This list is not comprehensive and I am fighting the urge to keep adding to it. Woe is me, I can't find the best first line of them all (I gave away the book a few years ago)...The first line of "Isaac and His Devils" by Fernanda Eberstadt. I will post it as soon as I raid some used bookstores this weekend. Here are some of my favorites. What are yours?

-“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.” –Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov

-‘To be born again,’ sang Gilbert Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die.”--Satanic Verses by Salman Rushide

-“124 was spiteful. Full of baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children” --Beloved by Toni Morrison

-“The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious” –Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins

“Prolixity is not alien to us in India. We are able to talk at some length" -The Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen

“I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire.” –Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee

“Not wanting to arouse Vishnu in case he hadn’t died yet, Mrs. Asrani tiptoed down to the third step above the landing on which he lived, teakettle in hand.” –The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”-One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez