Chamblee54

PG was looking at the search engine terms for his blog when he saw this… going down with janis opening line. It seems as though the phrase was used in a post about a political consultant. The opening line to that piece was Lisa Baron is a big, cavernous piece of work.
One good thing about this post is finding the exact quote about Janis Joplin. A lady named Peggy Caserta wrote about her life as the gf of Miss Joplin. According to How To Snort an Airplane, the opening line was “I was stark naked, stoned out of my mind on heroin, and between my legs giving me head was Janis Joplin.”
There isn’t anywhere to go from there but up. As it turns out, the intercom is full of people who supply good opening lines from literature. It saves you the trouble of reading the rest of the book.
Here are Top 10 Most Outrageous Opening Lines in Literature, in reverse order. Three quotes are included from the comments. Ten are from opening sentences, which advertises Filipino Cupid. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. .
THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY Douglas Adams 1979 “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.”
NEUROMANCER William Gibson 1984 “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
1984 George Orwell 1949 “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
INVISIBLE MAN Ralph Ellison 1952 “I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”
NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND Fyodor Dostoyevsky 1864 “I am a sick man . . . I am a wicked man. An unattractive man, I think my liver hurts.”
ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST Ken Kesey 1962 “They’re out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them.”
TRAINSPOTTING Irvine Welsh 1993 “The sweat was lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling.”
FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS Hunter S. Thompson 1971 “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like ‘I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive . . .’ And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming, ‘Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'”
THE METAMORPHOSIS Franz Kafka 1915 “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
Orlando Virginia Woolf 1928 “He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor.”
Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen, 1813 It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
Lolita Vladimir Nabokov, 1955 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.
The Catcher in the Rye JD Salinger, 1951 If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens, 1859 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.
Moby Dick Herman Melville, 1850 Call me Ishmael.
Peter Pan JM Barrie, 1911 All children, except one, grow up.
The Hobbit JRR Tolkien, 1937 In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat; it was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort.
One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1967 Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy, 1873-7 Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Women Charles Bukowski “I was 50 years old and hadn’t been to bed with a woman for four years. I had no women friends. I looked at them as I passed them on the streets or wherever I saw them, but I looked at them without yearning and with a sense of futility. I masturbated regularly, but the idea of having a relationship with a woman—even on non-sexual terms—was beyond my imagination.”
The Bible author unknown Genesis 1: In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth
Naked Lunch William S. Burroughs “I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train… Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit holds the door back.”