OPENING LINES

(Or early lines in stories!)

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.  (J.D. Salinger,  Catcher in the Rye)

In Africa, you want more, I think.  People get avid.  This takes different forms in different people, but it shows up in some form in everybody who stays there any length of time.  It can be sudden.   I include myself.  (Norman Rush, Mating)

Royal Beating. That was Flo’s promise.  You are going to get one Royal Beating. (Alice Munro, "Royal Beating" in Who Do You Think You Are?)

The night was almost warm.  He and Rawlins lay in the road where they could feel the heat coming off the blacktop against their backs and they watched the stars falling down the long black slope of the firmament.  In the distance they heard a door slam.  A voice called.   A coyote that had been hammering somewhere in the hills stopped.   (Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses)

Patrick Blatchford was in love with Rose.  This had become a fixed, even furious, idea with him.  For her, a continual surprise.  He wanted to marry her. (Alice Munro, "The Beggar Maid", in Who Do You Think You Are?)

He met his father in the lobby of the St. Angelus and they walked up Chadbourne Street to the Eagle Café and sat in a booth at the back.  Some at the tables stopped talking when they came in.  A few men nodded to his father and one said his name. (Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses)

After Christmas she was gone all the time.  He and Luisa and Arturo sat in the kitchen.  Luisa couldn’t talk about it without crying so they didn’t talk about it.( McCarthy APH)

It was a fear greater than death, according to the magazines.   Death was number four.  After mutilation, three, and divorce, two.  Number one, the real fear, the one death could not even approach was _________.  (Lorrie Moore, Birds of America)

When the cat died on Remembrance Day, his ashes then packed into a cheesy pink-posied tin and placed high upon the mantel, the house seemed so lonely and Aileen began to drink. (Lorrie Moore, BOA)

I called my mother every Sunday from the silence of my basement apartment, reluctant to tell her how I yearned to get away from this freezing cold city where even the traffic sounds were muffled by the snow. (Anita Badami Rau, Tamarind Mem)

There was something baleful now about the evening.  Black clouds plunged up to the south.  The volcanoes seemed terrifying in the wild sunset.  Four years, almost five, M. Laruelle still felt like a wanderer on another planet.(Malcolm Lowry, Under a Volcano)