#guy dammann

Oh man, I just discovered this wonderful, albeit concise, piece on favorite first lines.  Guy Dammann wrote it for The Guardian in 2007, and Ryan Bloom referenced it in his New Yorker piece on the often mistranslated first line of Camus's The Stranger. The sentence he cited caught my eye:

Some openers are so prescient that they seem to burn a hole through the rest of the book, the semantic resonance recurring with the persistence of the first theme in Beethoven's fifth symphony.