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comment by briandmyers
briandmyers  ·  3614 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What are some great short stories?




thenewgreen  ·  3613 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    "They're made out of meat."
flagamuffin, I'd say that's one hell of an opening line. Would you agree? It's not often that the first sentence is the title.

A great story Brian, extremely funny.

user-inactivated  ·  3613 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It's neat. I like that story.

Dialogue as your opening line is sort of a way to evade the entire question, right? It can be done really well, too.

briandmyers  ·  3613 days ago  ·  link  ·  

This is out of place, but - my wife's favourite first line (not from a short story though), is from "Earthly Powers" by Anthony Burgess :

    It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.
user-inactivated  ·  3613 days ago  ·  link  ·  

You may not have seen the thread tng was referencing.

I have seen that line before, but not read that book. I think that's a problem with iconic first lines: they get spread around and everyone knows his name's Ishmael but they don't know a damn thing about the rest of the book, or they jump to conclusions about it.

mike  ·  3613 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Oh, that's good!