Microblog Memes

“Ba-room, ba-room, ba-room, baripity, baripity, baripity, baripity - good.”

Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia

(The context turns out to be the protagonist listening to his dad start the truck and drive away.)

The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.

One I've recently re-read. Not quite as catchy as some of the others here, but manages to capture the world and mood of the setting remarkably well in just one sentence.

This is the story of a bloodstained boy. There he stands, swaying as utterly as any windblown sapling. He is quite, quite red. - Railsea, China Mieville.

"When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there."

From The Dinosaur by Augusto Monterroso.

It's the opening like, the closing line and everything in between.

"My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973." the lovely bones

In Germany, "Ilsebill salzte nach." ("Ilsebill added more salt.") from the novel The Flounder, written by author Günter Grass, has been voted the best opening line of all time.

"Somebody warned them that we were coming. The sympathisers left nothing behind but an empty apartment and a few volumes of illegal verse."

• Blackwing, by Ed McDonald

The following lines are even better in terms of raw world building but it's an excellent open.

"Beneath the floor of a very old forest, nestled in among some nice, rich topsoil, lived a family of worms. Earthworms, to be exact." Gary Larson ~ 'There's A Hair In My Dirt!'

“I, Daniel Quinn, neither the first nor the last of a line of such Quinns, set eyes on Maud the wondrous on a late December day in 1849 on the banks of the river of aristocrats and paupers, just as the great courtesan, Magdalena Colon, also known as La Ultima, a woman whose presence turned men into spittling, masturbating pigs, boarded a skiff to carry her across the river’s icy water from Albany to Greenbush, her first stop en route to the city of Troy, a community of iron, where later that evening she was scheduled to enact, yet again, her role as the lascivious Lais, that fabled prostitute who spurned Demosthenes’ gold and yielded without fee to Diogenes the virtuous, impecunious tub-dweller.”

Quinn's Book by William Kennedy

See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.

• Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy.

Haha someone named him Eustace!

I managed to finish that series with my son but daaaang is it weirdly religious.