/lit/ - Literature

The intro to Lolita got me hooked in it right away

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”

Call me the best of times; call me the worst of times.

Rivendell, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodore vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Eragons.

>>7110044
Call me screaming across the sky.

>>7110050
>>7110061
I sniggered.

Here’s how it started.

A, screaming, cums across this guy.

For a long time I used to go to bed screaming across the sky.

The one where the protagonist wakes up

>>7110061
Saw a really good mashup of Huck Finn and Finnegans Wake once, I'll see if I can find it

Nine replies and no one has posted the first sentence of Mason&Dixon yet. Tis pity

Si le viol, le poison, le poignard, l'incendie,
N'ont pas encore brodé de leurs plaisants dessins
Le canevas banal de nos piteux destins,
C'est que notre âme, hélas! n'est pas assez hardie.

A tale of two cities

>>7110044
"I was a fucking April , and the clocks were striking thirteen"

*gunshots*
*sirens*
*running and panting sounds*
pause. now i bet you're wondering how this all happened.

TURNED INTO A BUG LMAO

>>7110044
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

"Once upon a time..."

On an internet messaging board not too far away, there are neckbeards.

It was a dark and stormy night when the protagonist woke up.

"I was just a normal high school kid, I never expected..."

>>7110110
I loved Portrait of the Artist too. Can't go wrong with Joyce

>>7110085
Huckleberry Finnegans Wake
02-25-2009 01:08 PM
By brendle
riverrun on a riverraft past Jackson's Island and Cairo and farther south down round curve of ess and bend of pee into the Mississippi floodplain and environs. Meeting up then again finally a dukesaying Bilgewater waterhaired a wearworn and heir to pap's noble berth and the regal Dauphin Louis Louis, little Louis lost yet many Louis lost by griftdrifting wanderers southasleep in a Kentucky dream the mishestench of distillillery from fetid headholes venting northward agrand wafting like pap's old stink. A sho wan help thee men Huck they sho use aw help. Thick flubberylubberyrubbery lips expel a brokarken dialectical dialect a language inbornown betraying some inspark of humanity through the charcoal golem lurching forward, slooped, slumped, tarred and wanntana rayust and the exhaustion and indignation flaring in dead cow eyes. Old Testament hullaballoo haven and every man firing and brimstoning every other man a new testament heeizz judgmant cometh and that right soon with the gavelsmash selling men blockwise blackwise I reckon a bada sold he lookin like he baga sold he do mighty fine work badadada slamrap wood on wood flesh stripped ripe for picking and Jim sayin he done seen some thangs what made him powerful furious beasttempered den and hey yall what you lookin at nigger what you starin at boy niggerboy dey deedsignin away muh kin in dere Sunday best and me blackdack eyes up at heaven say where the host runoft to?

But old HuCkE done see all the neighsayers caint be troothsayers even though ol Jefferson heself plant a garden with others black hands and he can see the hands soilcovered sweat and sunslight, a rocking chair on the porch squeakcreak slurp of tea and grayhaired indignant penman. But four fathers and countrybuilders and laborforces ain't got no right And since this hallowed way of life so long but not right not Jim niggerboy but pa done say and all them people say thisuh one be Missuhs Watsons properteh thisuh one with the strong build and meek puppy eyes harangutaned and marked in mind in body property belonging but never belonging and unable to discern white from wrong. Four men held in her swarms, the gushing Miss Isipee, winding her way cross court and country freely flowing down from sea to sea, carrying on her two men, a king in permanent interregnum, the bilgewater Duke of Griftin, the animalman a hootin hollerin the troublesome boy once dead back from heck risen to freedeem on a little raft a way a lone a last a loved a long the

Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas
Texto-fonte:
Obra Completa
, Machado de Assis,
Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Aguilar, 1994.
Publicado originalmente em folhetins, a partir de março de 1880, na
Revista Brasileira
.
Ao verme
que
primeiro roeu as frias carnes
do meu cadáver
dedico
como saudosa lembrança
estas
Memórias Póstumas

>>7110044
im just your average teenage boy living an average life, until i met this crazy indie chick girl who was totally into me for no reason

>>7110128
Well hey that's just how love works sometimes LOL

Stately, I am seated on stairs when Maman's screaming comes across my loins.

5.5/10 tbqhwfy but had me hoojed right away.

A cockroach scurry's across the floor

Whan Aprill, with shoures soote,
Hath pierced the drogthe of Marche to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich liquor
Of which virtu engendered is the flour
Etc.

A huge turd scurries out my rectum

>>7110044
This is the story of a girl who cried a river and drowned the whole world, and while she looks so sad in photographs, I absolutely love her when she smiles.

"Who is John Galt?"

>>7110145
Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote,
the droghte of March hath perced to the roote

I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.

Call me Dick. Moby Dick.

All things are nothing to me

>>7110155
I was trying to remember it off by heart, my bad

Since the seige and assault at Troy...

>>7110044
It is a truth universally acknowledged that it was the best of times.

>>7110177
You got the next two lines right, so that's good

>>7110128
I'm just an average man
with an average life
I work from 9 to 5
hey, yeah, I pay the price
all I want is to be left alone
in my average home
so why do I always feel
like I'm in the Twilight Zone?

>>7110164
[Mission: Impossible theme starts playing]

A screaming comes across the sky above the port which was the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel.

Saw cream gums lacrosse disguise

"What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch?"

"Dr. Pavel, I'm CIA."

>>7110189
>tfw I'm not the only one on this board who knows that song

>>7110106
Metamorphosis?

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan was screaming, coming across an office of heads and bodies in a sky office across the stairhead.

>>7110360
you were supposed to post the chorus, ya dip!

Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.

Just a small town girl, living in a lonely world.

>The boy's name was Santiago. Dusk was falling as the boy arrived with his herd at an
abandoned church. The roof had fallen in long ago, and an enormous sycamore had
grown on the spot where the sacristy had once stood.

Santiago? Church? Dusk? I felt such elation...

>>7110378
I didn't feel like
'Somebody's Watching Me'
And I have some pride, you see
Wo oh oh

If you really want to hear about, the first thing you'll probably want to know is that I raped my sister, Phoebe.

>>7110410

I knew as soon as I pulled my dick out of her ass covered in grey shit that I needed to reevaluate some of my decisions from the past few months

Nous voici encore seuls. Tout cela est si lent, si lourd, si triste… Bientôt je serai vieux. Et ce sera enfin fini. Il est venu tant de monde dans ma chambre. Ils ont dit des choses. Ils ne m'ont pas dit grand-chose. Ils sont partis. Ils sont devenus vieux, misérables et lents chacun dans un coin du monde.

>>7110344
Bane?

>>7110372
>>7110138
Holy

>>7110414
My sides

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

>>7110044
nah

Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women.

That's the first and last time I fuck a Chinaman, she said to herself as she crawled in shame away from the bed.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth.

>>7110044
“So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens - four dowager and three regnant - and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.

“Man,” said Terl, “is an endangered species.”

>>7110090
C'est quoi ?

"Aujourd'hui, maman est morte."

>>7110769
Not this anon but this is a verse from Baudelaire

>>7110138
Ulysses, Infinite Jest, Crime and Punishment? The Stranger, Gravity's Rainbow, Lolita

>>7110044
It was the best of time and it was the worst of times, to be or not to be, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger!

HOLY SHIT, I'm a B.U.G man.

>>7110061
>>7110124

joyce would approve

C’était à Mégara, faubourg de Carthage, dans les jardins d’Hamilcar.

>>7110124
Where can I read more?

>>7110670
God damn you I laughed hysterically for some reason.

>>7110124
Holy shit

Sing out, Heavenly Muse of the beginning of our mortal life, my sin, my soul, how it started I
was seated awoken from uneasy dreams by a screaming across the sky, found myself brought to discover ice which brings us by perhaps a little too much kirsch in the fondue so I used to go to bed early for I am a sick man

Through the fence, between the curling flower places, I could see them hitting a barometric low hung over the Atlantic.

>>7111096
More literary mashups or more things by the same author? Not sure about mashups, but the author has a couple [self-published] books you can buy:

https://www.createspace.com/3842703
https://www.createspace.com/4823606

>>7111113

I like this post.

>>7110806
Didn't even think of resemblance to C&P, others all intended, correct.

>>7110044
it was a dark n stormy night

>>7111422
what book is the stairs part from?

Gustav Aschenbach, or von Aschenbach, as his official surname had been since his
fiftieth birthday, had taken another solitary walk from his apartment in Munich's
Prinzregentenstrafie on a spring afternoon of the year 19.., which had shown
the continent such a menacing grimace for a few months.

>>7110360
You're a moron

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

>>7110044
In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram. Terra autem erat inanis et vacua, et tenebrae erant super faciem abyssi: et spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas. Dixitque Deus: Fiat lux. Et facta est lux. Et vidit Deus lucem quod esset bona: et divisit lucem a tenebris. Appellavitque lucem Diem, et tenebras Noctem: factumque est vespere et mane, dies unus.

>>7110044
"It all began when I raped my sister, Phoebe."

>>7110172
Just resurrect him already

Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr'd the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware,-- the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stocking'd-foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen, in a purposeful Dither since Morning, punctuated by the ringing Lids of Boilers and Stewing-Pots, fragrant with Pie-Spices, peel'd Fruits, Suet, heated Sugar,-- the Children, having all upon the Fly, among rhythmic slaps of Batter and Spoon, coax'd and stolen what they might, proceed, as upon each afternoon all this snowy December, to a comfortable Room at the rear of the House, years since given over to their carefree Assaults.

>>7110124
yes

>>7111711
Would a moron come up with this?
>>7110410

>>7110124

oi I am laffin

Etymology
(Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School.)

>Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Four shots ripped into my groin and I was off on the greatest adventure of my life! But first let me tell you about myself.

>>7110044
call me ishmael

>>7110044
What I learned in boating school is

THE FACT THAT

The fact that so many books still name the Beatles as "the greatest or most significant or most influential" rock band ever only tells you how far rock music still is from becoming a serious art.

Mornings he sings on the toilet.

>>7110172

>>7110103
Is that the opening to straight outta Compton?

Rage - Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters' souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,
Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.

"See the child."

>>7113161
straight to the point, he doesn't seem to be the type he would have some long descriptive first sentence

Im sitting here in a room; heads and bodies everywhere!

>>7110044
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

>>7113154
Yeah, this one. It just has such fucking momentum. It's more of a song (actually it is a song). You just know shit will happen, how Achilles will move earth and heaven and put fear in the eyes of the gods.

He fastened his anus and let loose a great outpouring of shit

>>7110048
>tfw immediately picked up on the Annabel Lee reference when I first read Lolita and felt well read

"I see..." said the vampire thoughtfully, and slowly he walked across the room towards the window.

>>7112553
This would actually be a great way to start a novel about a music snob

This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham: Abraham was the father of Isaac,
Isaac the father of Jacob,
Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers,
Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar, Perez the father of Hezron, Hezron the father of Ram, Ram the father of Amminadab, Amminadab the father of Nahshon, Nahshon the father of Salmon, Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab, Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth, Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of King David.

>>7110103
>*gunshots*
>*sirens*
>*running and panting sounds*
>pause. now i bet you're wondering how this all happened in cheeky cockney accent
>cue obscure music
>black guy in colorful suit runs into frame
>cue graphic with name
>'Governa' is running with a magnum and a with suitcase full of money
>Unpause
>20 feet behind him a white guy midget with a scrawny face and ginger hair
>clumsy
>he is falling with his face in the pavement
>just before his face hits the pavement freeze frame
>cue graphic with name
>'Boipussy Lad Lady'
>Narrator voice: Thats boipussy, and he's about to shit his pants. A really awkward situation for the poor boy.
>Audience laughs
>Unpause
>Boipussy shits his pants
>A huge cream of shit hits the grimey london streets
>Mixes with rain
>Suddenly London calling starts playing
>Out of the shit letters becomes discernible
>Directed by Guy Ritchie

10/10 goat movie

Fucking GOAT thread. For a serious vote though, mines would go to this. >>7110647

>>7113405

>tfw i knew this feel
>tfw i realized that was nabokov pretending all the references would be easy

Lying down, he watched wispy clouds pass through the pure, azure sky, like sheep drowning in a canal.

>>7111506
I messed up 'stairs' and 'stairhead'


>tfw 4ever a pleb now

Abandon all hope ye who enter here is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn’t seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, “Be My Baby” on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.

As Bo and Velma walked along the shore, the clouds hung ponderously on the horizon like steel-gray, loosely formed gorilla turds.

>>7110044
>tfw no jewish girlfriend

>>7110061
Eragons

>>7113405
first time Ive seen someone mention it. It makes a lot more sense now

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings

It was the best of memes, it was the worst of memes.

One fine morning in May, a slim young horsewoman might have been seen riding a glossy sorrel mare along the avenues of the Bois, among the flowers

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover the screaming coming across the sky.

For a long time I would go to bed early. Sometimes, the candle barely out, my eyes close so quickly that I did not have time to tell myself “I’m falling asleep.”

>>7113588
What's this supposed to be? Trainspotting?

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

>>7115154
If only it was a real book

>>7110154
YAS

>>7110044
In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit.

>>7110044
>Howard Roark laughed.

The rest of the opening paragraph makes it even bolder.

>He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. The lake lay far below him. A frozen explosion of granite burst in flight to the sky over motionless water. The water seemed immovable, the stone-flowing. The stone had the stillness of one brief moment in battle when thrust meets thrust and the currents are held in a pause more dynamic than motion. The stone glowed, wet with sunrays.

>The lake below was only a thin steel ring that cuts the rocks in half. The rocks went on into the depth, unchanged. They began and ended in the sky. So that the world seemed suspended in space, an island floating on nothing, anchored to the feet of the man on the cliff.

Dislike the author or not, you can't deny that this is a pretty striking opening.

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday night. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life . . . But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin' else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?

>>7116686
That's not how the book starts you fucking pleb.

>>7116569
If you think being punched repeatedly in the face with shitty mixed metaphors is striking, then yes. I don't dislike the author, I dislike her dreadful writing.

>>7110044
For sale, baby shoes, never worn.

>>7115154
Was this the final version?

>>7116686
The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling. Ah wis jist sitting thair, focusing oan the telly, tryin no tae notice the cunt. He wis bringing me doon. Ah tried tae keep ma attention oan the Jean–Claude Van Damme video.

fuck off /tv/

>>7116686
That's how the beginning of the movie starts you fucking overflowing bedpan

>>7116714
>>7116732
>>7116736
Since the book opens with rugby-watching gibberish, I posted the opening lines from the screenplay.
It grabs one's attention more than some drunk aspie watching Van Damme.

Justice? – You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.

—Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own

>>7116736
>>7116745
>The greatest introductory sentence in literature is:
>in literature
>>>/tv/

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.

>>7115044
This rings my cherries, although I like 'The Circular Ruins even better, in particular the first clause:
>No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe sink into the sacred mud, but in a few days there was no one who did not know that the taciturn man came from the South and that his home had been one of those numberless villages upstream in the deeply cleft side of the mountain, where the Zend language has not been contaminated by Greek and where leprosy is infrequent.

>>7116719
That's first sentence that really captures the essence of the story as a whole, much like the best of John Irving, yet somehow even moreso.

Simon & Schuster Audio Presents: Star Trek®: The Return, by William Shatner.

>>7116745
It's very sad that your monolingual ADHD Ameritard brain can't handle Irvine Welsh's prose, but this is a /lit/ thread.

>>7116799
>implying i'm an ameritard
>implying i haven't read it cover to cover
>implying i didn't post a more gripping opening

>ctrl+f "Ishmael"
>see this >>7112210

This

>It was the day my grandmother exploded.

>>7110172
Well either mine or yours translantion is fucked up
Mine begins with "Minha causa é a causa de nada" which roughly translates to "My cause is the cause of nothing"
Sincerely speaking, mine seems way better, as it sounds less edgy and seems more related to the introduction

>>7110423
Is this a real book?
Interesting.

not quite OP, keep trying.

>>7116816
>>7116799
Look, two British idiots getting into it calling each other "Americans" mockingly, while the Americans have the superior author, superior sentence, superior culture.

No offense, chaps. You bested in trashiness only by Aussies.

>>7116870
keep trying what?

>>7115649
More like 'opening line with the largest ensuing letdown'

happy family's are same, sad families are different different.
good job tolstie

>>7110172
*tips fedora

>>7110702
Is dat sum Barbara Tuchman?

The dull red glow of the planet in front of him provided a soft illumination for the interior of the shuttle. Three days he had watched the planet steadily creep towards him, studying every detail that painted her surface. To him, the planet was more than just a lonely rock drifting through space: It was an inevitability.

>>7110414

>>7117972
This sounds like a fanfic

>>7118019
Old Mans War, one of the more popular sci-fi books

>>7118019
Sounds like pretty average sci-fi writing to be honest, what makes you think that?

crtl f, no Camus
Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know.

>>7118065
that sentence is a meme

also

>>7110769

>>7110102
lel

>>7116719
ma boy Hemmingway, nice

>>7110073
You never did the Kenosha, kid.