Writer's Block: The start of something wonderful

[pedanther]

[Error: unknown template qotd]

'It is said - and it is true - that just before we are born, a cavern angel holds his finger to our mouths and whispers, "Hush! Don't tell what you know."'

-- Roderick MacLeish, Prince Ombra


[Edited to add: I have been reminded that I didn't talk about why this is my favourite opening line. Partly it's the idea; it's not new to the novel - "it is said", and has been said by various people for a long time - but when I read the novel, it was new to me. But it's also, perhaps even more, the way MacLeish tells it. Had the wording been even slightly different, I don't think it would have stuck with me the way it has.]


I also have a soft spot for the opening sentence of Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg, just because it implies a completely different book when shorn of its context:

'Me, a wizard?'

Comments

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... The "Prince Ombra" line comes from the Bogart/Bacall movie "Key Largo".

[pedanther]

There is a description of the same idea in Key Largo. And the idea itself is very old.

But it's as much the way MacLeish tells it that gets me as it is the idea itself.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

The moment I posted the above, I began wondering who really had come up with it first.