Some great historical opening paragraphs:
“You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary.”
“The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.”
“The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He’s got esprit up to here. Right now, he is in Southern California, and that is where he is going to stay, unless something really weird happens. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest.”
“Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.”
“The year 1866 was signalised by a remarkable incident, a mysterious and puzzling phenomenon, which doubtless no one has yet forgotten. Not to mention rumours which agitated the maritime and commercial world, the fact is that a thing, a something, a moving object, was sighted by many ships—an object which moved with such speed and in such a way that it defied all hitherto known laws of mechanics.”
“I scarcely know where to begin, though I sometimes facetiously place the cause of it all to Charley Furuseth’s credit. He kept a summer cottage in Mill Valley, under the shadow of Mount Tamalpais, and never occupied it except when he loafed through the winter months and read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer to rest his brain. When summer came on, he elected to sweat out a hot and dusty existence in the city and to toil incessantly. Had it not been my custom to run up to see him every Saturday afternoon and to stop over till Monday morning, this particular January Monday morning would not have found me afloat on San Francisco Bay.”
“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”
These openings excel because they establish tone, introduce compelling characters or mysteries, and hint at the thrilling journeys ahead.
Keep going! I was never any good at short stories in HS and college. It was always an intense labor with little to show for it.
Call me Ishmael ...
My favorite opening line (from memory) would be C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: “Once there was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
Thank you for the erudite and thoughtful comment.
“A barometric low hung over the Atlantic. It moved eastward toward a
high-pressure area over Russia without as yet showing any inclina-
tion to bypass this high in a northerly direction. The isotherms and
isotheres were functioning as they should. The air temperature was
appropriate relative to the annual mean temperature and to the ape-
riodic monthly fluctuations of the temperature. The rising and set-
ting of the sun, the moon, the phases of the moon, of Venus, of the
rings of Saturn, and many other significant phenomena were all in
accordance with the forecasts in the astronomical yearbooks. The
water vapor in the air was at its maximal state of tension, while the
humidity was minimal. In a word that characterizes‘the facts fairly
accurately, even if it is a bit old-fashioned: It was a fine day in August
1913.”
- Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities.