Classic Lines - SWOON!
Since we’re so in love with our new Classic Lines series we’re giving a set away.
Like//Reblog this post for a chance to win all four!
Trills between books, spring arrives / Trinos entre libros, llega la primavera (ilustración de Camille Engel)
On the nearby table sat my Kindle e-reader, the fancy present my children gave me last Christmas. I couldn’t understand why I’d want such a thing until Donelle tol me I could get lots a classic books for free. Wouldn’t need to run to the Bay Springs library so much. Right now in my Kindle I was re-readin Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. I kept a little black notebook and a pen next to the Kindle so I could write down quotes I wanted to remember.
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| — | Cherrie Mae, Gone to Ground by Brandilyn Collins |
The classics are not irrelevant. They offer insight into our shared past- they show us how far we’ve come and, at the same time, how humanity has hung on to certain aspects of itself throughout civilization’s recorded history. The classics have shaped the course of literature, outlasted literary fads, and added value to the whole of human thought. Assuming that the modern reader doesn’t want to experience that (or worse, that they can’t because it involves too much effort) is unfair. Readers don’t need profanity and iPods to understand themes concerning racism, poverty, compassion, love, and family. Do we really think the modern reader is so lazy that s/he can’t read the classics because they’re too hard?
Ten Wonderful, Memorable First Lines
Some first lines become as famous as the literary works that they introduce. They set the mood and the tone. Those first words need to capture the reader and flow into the rest of the story. One may wonder if these were the necessary words to unleash a creative flow. On the other hand, it may be a carefully crafted welcome for the reader. In any case, the following are some first-rate, first lines…
* “Call me Ishmael”.
-Herman Melville, Moby Dick
* “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.”
—Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
* “It was love at first sight.”
—Joseph Heller, Catch-22
* “The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.”
—Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
* “He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.”
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
* “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
* “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.”
—Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier
* “All this happened, more or less.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
* “It was a pleasure to burn.”
—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
* “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
—George Orwell, 1984
* “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
—Charles Dickens, Tale of Two Cities
As the host of a weekly meme called Book Beginnings (where bloggers share the first lines of their current read every week), is it any wonder that I love this post? My favorite of these: Fahrenheit 451
Sterling Publishing is releasing some of our favorite classics with some seriously pretty new covers in March 2012. Click here for more information.
