There was a quibbling somewhere I read, and in another place some magazine had tabulated
the best 100, in its humble opinion; yet these seemed to me no better than any first lines I might take randomly from my bookshelf (being, perhaps, not an average one) - so here goes:
1. "People come here, then, to live?"
2. "I have been unhappy many times in my life, as a child, as a youth, as a grown man; many times, if I think back, I have touched what are called the depths of despair."
3. "September 10. - Colonel Stewart, MM. Power and Herbin, left during the night for Dongola, via Berber."
4. "Yes, it could begin this way, right here, just like that, in a rather slow and ponderous way, in this neutral place that belongs to all and to none, where people pass by almost without seeing each other, where the life of the building regularly and distantly sounds."
5. "I had always suspected that the geographers were talking nonsense when they located the site of the Battle of Munda in the territory of the Bastuli-Poeni, near present-day Monda, about two leagues north of Marbella."
6. "In July my father went to take the waters and left me, with my mother and elder brother, a prey to the blinding white heat of summer days."
7. "A drunken Englishman, whom we met I don't know where and who became our travelling companion for a few days and possibly entire weeks on that wild railway escapade, once said - after many nights without much sleep and during the course of no-one knows what interminable, nocturnal, moribund conversation - that we were no more than some poor deterrents trying in vain to survive."
8. "Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov was of venerable stock: he had Adam as his ancestor."
9. "Yesterday the sea was as smooth as a mirror; it is smooth as a mirror today."
10. " 'Boom, bloom, alum-bright, Lucifer of alunite!' "
11. "Ooow-ow-ooow-owow! Oh, look at me, I'm dying!"
12. "On the 12th of August 18-, exactly three days after my tenth birthday, for which I had received such wonderful presents, Karl Ivanych woke me at seven in the morning by hitting at a fly just over my head with a flap made of sugar-bag paper fastened to a stick."
13. "Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us, just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed."
14. "All our scientists claim, and many foreign scientists accept, that the inhabitants of Ibansk are a whole head taller than everybody else, with the exception of those who have followed their example."
15. "A man leaves a dockside tavern in the early morning, the smell of the sea in his nostrils, and a whisky bottle in his pocket, gliding over the cobbles lightly as a ship leaving the harbour."
16. "Before describing the extraordinary events which took place so recently in our town, hitherto not remarkable for anything in particular, I find it necessary, since I am not a skilled writer, to go back a little and begin with certain biographical details concerning our talented and greatly esteemed Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky."
17. "As an officer in the French Army, I found myself at the siege of Saragossa."
18. "On the warm windless night of 5 July 1861, the members of the British Legation at Yeddo were seated in the garden of the temple allotted to them by the Japanese Government, watching a strange planet that blazed above the city."
19. "I absorbed the changing locations of my earlier life without resistance."
20. "When I spoke to the Doctor about my weakness for smoking he told me to begin my analysis by tracing the growth of that habit from the beginning."
21. "Jaffa is the darling of the waters: the waves of the Great Sea kiss her shores, a blue sky is her daily cover, she brims with every kind of people, Jews and Ishmaelites and Christians, busy at trade and labour, at shipping and forwarding."
22. "Early in 1878, when the political world was concerned with the treaty of San Stefano, the election of a new Pope, and the changes of a European war, Warsaw businessmen and the intelligentsia who frequented a certain spot in the Krakowskie Przedmiescie were no less keenly interested in the future of the haberdashery firm of J. Mincel and S. Wokulski."
23. "Some years before my beard announced approaching manhood, or, in other words, when I was neither man nor boy, but between both, I expressed in repeated conversations a strong desire of seeing the world, from which I was discouraged by my parents, though my father had been no inconsiderable traveller himself, as will appear before I have reached the end of my singular, and, I may add, interesting adventures."
24. "Beginning this book (not as they say 'book' in our trade - they mean magazine), beginning this book, I should like if I may, I should like, if I may (that is the way Sir Phoebus writes), I should like then to say: Good-bye to all my friends, my beautiful and lovely friends."
25. "A new voice hailed me of an old friend when, first returned from the Peninsula, I paced again in that long street of Damascus which is called Straight; and suddenly taking me wondering by the hand, "Tell me (he said), since thou art here again in the peace and assurance of Ullah, and whilst we walk, as in the former years, toward the new blossoming orchards, full of the sweet spring as the garden of God, what moved thee, or how couldst thou take such journeys into the fanatic Arabia?"
(If the provenance of any of these troubles you - or (heaven forbid!) you should wish to read on, which perhaps is the point - author and work will be revealed on application to the blogger).
