First Line's the Charm

So here's another fun little bandwagon to jump upon. Kristen has been posting favourite first lines from books again. And Zalm has been playing along. Naturally that means I have to as well: Looking back, I didn’t see all that many dead bodies when I was a kid growing up down south, but the ones I saw stuck in my mind. —Stuck Rubber Baby - Howard Cruse The summer my father bought the bear, none of us was born—we weren’t even conceived: not Frank, the oldest; not Franny, the loudest; not me, the next; and not the youngest of us, Lilly and Egg. —The Hotel New Hampshire - John Irving "I have come to die for your sins," Jesus told a stooped figure passing him on the road. —Jesus Christs - A.J. Langguth A-hind of hill, ways off to sun-set-down, is sky come like as fire, and walk I up in way of this, all hard of breath, where is grass colding on I’s feet and wetting they. —Voice of the Fire - Alan Moore Sam Holladay was sixty-three years old when he jabbed a snub-nosed .38 revolver into Simon Bell’s chest and pulled the trigger, knocking him flat, like he’d been shoved, and dead, the bullet passing through his heart and exiting at his left shoulder, trailing blood and tissue like the tail of a comet. —Divining Rod - Michael Knight I am riding the bicycle and I am on Route 31 in Monument, Massachusetts, on my way to Rutterburg, Vermont, and I’m pedaling furiously because this is an old-fashioned bike, no speeds, no fenders, only the warped tires and the brakes that don’t always work and the handlebars with cracked rubber grips to steer with. —I Am the Cheese - Robert Cormier High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. —Changing Places - David Lodge There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. —The Voyage of the Dawn Treader - C.S. Lewis I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing; -- that not only the production of a rational Being was concern'd in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind ; -- and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost : ---- Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly, ---- I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. —The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne