Hands down, my fave, at the very least for opening sentence:
“In five years, the penis will be obsolete,” said the salesman.
---- John Varley, Steel Beach
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She strutted into my office wearing a dress that clung to her like Saran Wrap to a sloppily butchered pork knuckle, bone and sinew jutting and lurching asymmetrically beneath its folds, the tightness exaggerating the granularity of the suet and causing what little palatable meat there was to sweat, its transparency the thief of imagination.
–Chris Wieloch, winner of last year’s Bulwer-Lytton fiction prize.
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“Those were drinking days, and most men drank hard.”
Another from Dickens, tale of two cities. The whole paragraph is even better.
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Dude, all we are is dust in the wind
but seriously, I liked the Fitzgerald one from Gatsby. I’m glad I re-read it as an adult because his prose is so incredibly masterful, I mistook its sublimity for boredom as a teen.
The only Joyce I’ve read was Dubliners (i.e. the easy one) but the prose was–in the proper sense of the word–awesome.
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More Adams.
The problem is, or rather one of the problems, for there are many, a sizeable proportion of which are continually clogging up the civil, commercial, and criminal courts in all areas of the Galaxy, and especially, where possible, the more corrupt ones, this.
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My non-linear meat continues it’s journey down some sort of random path… The “dream” part triggered my memory of this passage that always surfaced in my noggin when I was deciding about whether to pursue some lass… (the relevant sentence in bold)
If you do not attain happiness, always remember that you are on the right road, and try not to leave it. Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute. Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself. What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in yourself. Avoid fear, too, though fear is only the consequence of every sort of falsehood. Never be frightened at your own faint-heartedness in attaining love. Don’t be frightened overmuch even at your evil actions. I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labour and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science.― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov Not beautiful language like the lines in TFA, but it always brought some sort of comfort/focus to me...
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Three come to mind. And they are opening sentences. I haven’t read the article yet.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.
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It is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound a fury, signifying nothing.
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Bright blue?
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Well, it’s Dickens and the book starts with a one sentence paragraph beginning in Chapter One entitled ‘The Period’ where one should be forgiven for wondering just where the period is because it is at the end of the paragraph which is what, in the minds of many, is one of the most entertaining sentences written.
Gird your loins (or whatever), pick up a copy of Notes for Joyce (Gifford/Seidman), give yourself, say, 3 months and you will be rewarded immensly when you tackle Ulysses.
“DESHIL HOLLES EAMUS. DESHIL HOLLES EAMUS. DESHIL HOLES Eamus.” [Oxen of the Sun seems to be my fav chapter/episode/whatever]
Oh, if you want to tackle Finnegan’s Wake, best bet is to get a few friends together with a single malt Irish whisky, say Erin Go Braugh. Of course, this is extremely hard to find most places in the US (I just lucked out at the right time) and Jameson’s will do nicely. Then, attempt to read Finnegan’s Wake out loud to each other. It is actually pretty funny out loud. And of course, much merriment ensues when a poor devil gets stuck with one of those effing thunderclaps 
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Anything from Herman Melville, but especially this from Billy Budd: “He had seen much service, been in various engagements, always acquitting himself as an officer mindful of the welfare of his men, but never tolerating an infraction of discipline; thoroughly versed in the science of his profession, and intrepid to the verge of temerity, though never injudiciously, so.”
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The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.
And now I’m wondering how Pride & Prejudice would have gone if Jane Austen was a gonzo writer…
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How about his letters instead?
It has been, and still is, a matter of opinion whether, if you wish to kill your undesirable,is it better to let him die quietly in a concentration camp, flay him until he dies, hurl him over a precipice, burn, drown, or suffocate him; or entomb him alive and leave him to perish slowly in the silence of his grave; or asphyxiate him agonizingly in a lethal chamber, or press him to death or cut off his head; or produce a sort of coma by means of an electric current that grills him in parts and then, in the name of autopsy, permit the doctors to finish him off- as they do in certain of the United States of North America; or break his neck in strangulation by hanging as the English do.
Charles Duff - A Handbook on Hanging
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
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Whenever someone who should know better sniffs at my coarse language or ribald stories, I know I can always point them to Joyce’s letters or to some other revered, civilized artists’ personal lives… Heh.
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Surely the greatest line in the English language comes from H.H. Munro’s entry to a short story competition; in fact it is the entire sad and terrible story.
To be printed in the form of a classified advert: For sale, baby carriage, unused.
Or on a lighter note, Owen Lift’s,
“The guy in the hat killed the other guy in the hat.”
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The best sentence in American literature is in Spanish! It is the first line from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. ’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.'
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Apparently the article is now titled “The ten ‘Best Sentences’ in literature“
Funny, I’d expect that list to have at least one German, French, Spanish, Russian or Chinese sentence it it.
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