Shortest First Lines

Preparing my First Line Quiz reminded me how many excellent beginning lines have fewer than ten words.*   A few of those appeared in the quiz:

My father lost me to The Beast at cards.     [9]
--Angela Carter, The Tiger Bride

Sooner or later, it was bound to happen.     [8]
--Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous With Rama

What's it going to be then, eh?     [7]
--Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

In a sense, I am Jacob Horner.     [7]
--John Barth, The End of the Road

All this happened, more or less.     [6]
--Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughter-House Five

It was love at first sight.     [6]
--Joseph Heller, Catch-22

--Totally naked, for God's sake?     [5]
--Anthony Burgess, M/F

I even included three examples of opening lines of only three words:

Call me Ishmael.
--Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Mother died today.
--Albert Camus, The Stranger

They're out there.
--Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

The first two are arguably among the most well known opening lines ever written. The third, Kesey's, could easily have been four words, but the abbreviation and resulting homonym pairing give it both a poetic balance and a paranoid foreshadowing of the novel's plot.

I have several other short favorites, some well known, others obscure, that I still enjoy for one reason or another:

It was there when I woke up, I swear.     [9]
--Jonathan Letham, Gun, With Occasional Music

Once there was a man named John.     [7]
--Robert Coover, John’s Wife

I write of what has just occurred.     [7]
--Gene Wolfe, Soldier of the Mist

I have always been a quitter.     [6]
--T. C. Boyle, Budding Prospects

It was a pleasure to burn.     [6]
--Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Her gynecologist recommended him to me.     [6]
--John Irving, The Water-Method Man

A screaming comes across the sky.     [6]
--Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

Context is everything.     [3]
--Jonathan Letham, Motherless Brooklyn

It began oddly.     [3]
--Philip Roth, The Breast

And, yes, I did find an opening line on my bookshelf of a single word, from John Hawkes:

Dad?
--John Hawkes, Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade

-----

      * I discussed the longest first lines last month.