Greatest Sentence of All Time?

[Templetroll]

The apocryphal 'beginning sentence to really grab the reader...':

"Hell!", cried the Duchess, as she waved her wooden leg!

 

[The Forsaken One]

I think I'll go for:

Your gp or your hp!

I'm gonna be rich and famous after I invent a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet.

 

[domino]

"Death came quietly to the Row."

A cookie if you can tell me what book it came from.

It's not a "WOW" type of sentence but it's my favorite lead into a novel.

It's one of the Matador books. I don't know which one, but I know that nearly ALL of them start with death coming somehow to somewhere.

 

[AelyaShade]

"O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market-place."

 

[Macbeth]

My favorite opener: "Maman died today." - The Stranger by Albert Camus (Trans. Matthew Ward).

"People are always asking, did I know about Tyler Durdern" - Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. Seems like just any other sentence at first but it keeps on meaning more throughout the book.

"I am the way into woe.
I am the way to a forsaken people.
I am the way to eternal sorrow.

Sacred Justice Moved my Architect.
I was raised here by divine omnipotence,
primordial love and ultimate intellect.

Only those elements time cannot wear
were made before me, and beyond time I stand.
Abandon all hope ye who enter here." - The Inferno by Dante. Gotta love Dante

"I always knew it would be this way." - The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis. Quickly becoming one of my favorite writers, right up there with Palahniuk, Pratchett, and Adams. Given even more weight by the movie version's excellent adaption.

 

[Frostmarrow]

"He came one evening in April — came like a whirlwind, an earthenware jug hanging from a belly-strap flung round his neck."

That's the beginning of The People of Hemsö. I kind of like how it introduces the anti-hero Carlsson. Even though it's translated it still is kind of funky.

 

[Umbran]

"Pass me another elf, sergeant. Mine's split."

 

[Felikeries]

ok well i 'll just tap this baby through

The gowns of lavish laces,yet tuffened sufferage to present a fine and great girl,layde crossed with velvets and strict leathur boots,hands fealing the worlds answers as if a ‘divination’by their presence alone,so sweet to look upon,as though the feeding roots to the tree of life or Layzon magics

Alliyah Stormrider of Doom

 

[Mallus]

I'm not sure I can top the above for anti-lucidity, but it did indirectly remind me of one of my favorite writers, Denis Johnson...

From Car Crash While Hitchiking

Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn't know yet that her husband was dead. We knew. That's what gave her such power over us. The doctor took her into a room with a desk at the end of the hall, and from under the closed door a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated in there. What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I've gone looking for that feeling everywhere.

and from Dundun

"McGinness isn't feeling too good. I just shot him.

Would you believe there was kindness in his heart? The left hand didn't know what the right was doing. It was only that certain important connections had been burned through. If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into someone like that.

 

[Mark Chance]

Here are two bona fide award-winners:

"She resolved to end the love affair with Ramon tonight . . . summarily, like Martha Stewart ripping the sand vein out of a shrimp's tail . . . though the term "love affair" now struck her as a ridiculous euphemism . . . not unlike "sand vein," which is after all an intestine, not a vein . . . and that tarry substance inside certainly isn't sand . . . and that brought her back to Ramon."

"On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained."