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comment by thenewgreen
thenewgreen  ·  3573 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What are some great short stories?

    "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  ·  3573 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  ·  3573 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  ·  3573 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.