Catchy Lines

JD Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" is supposed to have spoilt a generation of writers by making writing look too easy. I love the book's style, words tripping together to build Holden Caulfield's character and life. There is something very real and honest about the novel as captured by its first line:

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."

That got me thinking about other memorable first lines or "hooks" from other books. Here's another favorite from Gabriel Garcia Marquez' "One Hundred Years of Solitude":

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

Another brilliant book is "Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides, with one of the most creative storylines I've come across. The novel's first line by its protagonist Calliope Stephanides sums up the story succintly:

"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974."

Here are a couple of quotes from one of my favorite novels "The Incredible Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera. Although they did not open the novel, they are particularly striking:

"We can never know what we want because, living only one life, we can neither compare it to our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come."

We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.

Any more first lines, or memorable quotes from books anyone?

Vonnegut has left the building

What better way to birth my blog than with a tribute to Kurt Vonnegut (d. Apr 11, 07) one of the most interesting, eccentric, thought-provoking writers? I found Vonnegut four years ago, attracted by the title of his essays, "A Man Without a Country." As much as I felt like a woman without a country at the time, I had to put it down after a few pages. It was not what I had expected. Written in a free-flowing manner, it was as if the thoughts had flown from the author's mind to his pen skipping social filters. It was a little bit bitter, a little bit funny, absurd and profound at the same time. Most of all, it was liberating.

Here's an autobiographical excerpt from one of his most famous novels Slaughterhouse Five:

"I think about my education sometimes. I went to the University of Chicago for a while after the Second World War. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.
Another thing they taught was that nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me, "You know -- you never wrote a story with a villain in it."
''I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war. "