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Some of the great openings of some great novels

"The small boys came early to the hanging"

Ken Follett, Pillars of the Earth.
 
“My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.

I grew up slowly beside the tides and marshes of Colleton; my arms were tawny and strong from working long days on the shrimp boat in the blazing South Carolina heat. Because I was a Wingo, I worked as soon as I could walk; I could pick a blue crab clean when I was five. I had killed my first deer by the age of seven, and at nine was regularly putting meat on my family’s table. I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low-country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders. As a boy I was happy above the channels, navigating a small boat between the sandbars with their quiet nation of oysters exposed on the brown flats at the low watermark. I knew every shrimper by name, and they knew me and sounded their horns when they passed me fishing in the river.”

Pat Conroy, “The Prince of Tides.”

My favorite book ever. I’ve read it probably 40 times.
 
“My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.

I grew up slowly beside the tides and marshes of Colleton; my arms were tawny and strong from working long days on the shrimp boat in the blazing South Carolina heat. Because I was a Wingo, I worked as soon as I could walk; I could pick a blue crab clean when I was five. I had killed my first deer by the age of seven, and at nine was regularly putting meat on my family’s table. I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low-country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders. As a boy I was happy above the channels, navigating a small boat between the sandbars with their quiet nation of oysters exposed on the brown flats at the low watermark. I knew every shrimper by name, and they knew me and sounded their horns when they passed me fishing in the river.”

Pat Conroy, “The Prince of Tides.”

My favorite book ever. I’ve read it probably 40 times.
I'm hooked! I'm going to read this next.
 
I'm hooked! I'm going to read this next.

I love this book so much, that I used to buy every copy I ever found in yard sales, thrift stores, etc, to just pass out to people. I loved his style of writing so much, and knew that anyone who read it would immediately fall in love with it, and become hooked for life.

Everyone who I ever gave a book to, came back to tell me about all the other Conroy books they read as a result. 😊
 
Talk about reading a novel 40 times, that's me and all of Chandler's novels.

“It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.”

― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
 
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded, yellow sun.
Orbiting this, at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles, is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms
are so amazingly primitive, that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
 
A man with binoculars. That is how it began: with a man standing by the side of the road, on a crest overlooking a small Arizona town, on a winter night.

- Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton
 
Thomas Mann: "The Magic Mountain"


Ein einfacher junger Mensch reiste im Hochsommer von Hamburg, seiner Vaterstadt, nach Davos-Platz im Graubündischen. Er fuhr auf Besuch für drei Wochen.

I try to translate - in short:

"A simple young man traveled from Hamburg to Davos-Platz in Switzerland"
 
"Somebody must have made a false accusation against Joseph K., for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong."
 
"Somebody must have made a false accusation against Joseph K., for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong."
That I remember well.
 
One of my favorite opening lines of a children's book is ...

On the morning of the best day of her life, Maud Flynn was locked in the outhouse, singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."
 
alice in wonderland …. but i do not know the beginning exactlY
 
alice in wonderland …. but i do not know the beginning exactlY
It is a little interesting given what transpires:

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice “without pictures or conversations?”
 

The sweat wis lashin oafay Sick Boy; he wis tremblin. Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh.​

 
should this imitate edinburgh language?
Yes. The novel's set in Leith a port town to the north, absorbed by Edinburgh.
Mostly known as Lallans, (lowlands) this is Scots, a cousin to English, with West Germanic roots. It shares many words with English, but has many others unique to itself. The constructions differ too. Most kids in my day grew up speaking it at home and play, but then schools tried to eradicate it from our speech, much like Gaelic, as a crass and low dialect! We grew up bilingual!


 
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Mostly known as Lallans, (lowlands) this is Scots, a cousin to English, with West Germanic roots. It shares many words with English, but has many others unique to itself. The constructions differ too. Most kids in my day grew up speaking it at home and play, but then schools tried to eradicate it from our speech, much like Gaelic, as a crass and low dialect! We grew up bilingual!


very interesting!!

is it the language of robert burns?
 
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