itwasthebestoflines. itwasthefirstoflines.

 The Bell Jar-Sylvia Plath

Though brilliantly sunny, Saturday morning was overcoat weather again, not just topcoat weather, as it had been all week and as everyone hoped it would stay for the big weekend — the weekend of the Yale game. Of the twenty-some young men who were waiting at the station for their dates to arrive on the ten-fifty-two, no more than six or seven were out on the cold, open platform. The rest were standing around in hatless, smoky little groups of twos and threes and fours inside the heated waiting room, talking in voices that, almost without exception, sounded collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident, conversational turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue, one that the outside, non-matriculating world had been bungling, provocatively or not, for centuries.

A coma might feel better than this // City and Colour.

“Of Mice and Men”, John Steinbeck (1937).

I heard there was a secret chord // Leonard Cohen.

“Holocene" by Bon Iver, from Bon Iver, Bon Iver (2011).

— The Adventures of Augie March (1953), S. Bellow

I collect opening lines in novels