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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 · 3814 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.