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Comment by Endy | Hacker News Reader

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Endy·

To me, Anna Karenina is really mostly notable for having the second-greatest opening line in all literature.

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"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way", to save others a google.

The greatest one being, of course:

"It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times."

It is a truth universally acknowledged... Jane Austen, naturally.

What's the first?

And the greatest?

"Common Lisp is a new dialect of Lisp, a successor to MacLisp, influenced strongly by Zetalisp and to some extent by Scheme and Interlisp."

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

Kafka. "One day, Gregor Samsa awoke to find himself transformed into a giant cockroach."

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

Definitely the greatest line I've ever read. Such extensive imagery and metaphor (well beyond just the sky), tucked into 15 words.

And teens today (or soon) would not visually know what "television tuned to a dead channel" meant...

It's almost more profound in some ways - on a lot of modern TVs, a dead channel is displayed as being a solid field of bright blue. So, it changes the way Sprawl's sky appears to each reader, but it makes the change take place in Case's head. If it's bright blue, and a person recognizes that first as related to a TV, what does that say about the way they perceive the world? Especially with how bad Case wants digital access.

"Call me Ishmael"?

A screaming comes across the sky.

Now, Everybody---

It's hard to pinpoint a "best," but I agree that this one (from Gravity's Rainbow) it quite, quite good, one I recall often.

¿En un lugar de la Mancha...?

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