Opening Lines And Second Sets

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
--J.D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye

Grateful Dead: 4/8/72


Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night,
but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes.
--George Orwell
Animal Farm

It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
--Paul Auster
City of Glass

Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing,
I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression.
--Flann O'Brien
At Swim-Two-Birds

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.
--Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.
--Douglas Adams
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were being scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
--H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds

Grateful Dead: 5/8/80


A voice comes to one in the dark.
--Samuell Beckett
Company

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert
when the drugs began to take hold.
--Hunter S. Thompson
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

That's good thinking there, Cool Breeze.
--Tom Wolfe
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.
--Edgar Allan Poe
The Fall of the House of Usher

Like the brief doomed flare of exploding suns that registers dimly on blind men's eyes, the beginning of the horror passed almost unnoticed; in the shriek of what followed, in fact, was forgotten and perhaps not connected to the horror at all.
--William Peter Blatty
The Exorcist

Grateful Dead: 5/19/77

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
--Charles Dickens
David Copperfield

SPENCER TERRACE
FROM BELOW GARNET CANYON
SHINUMO AMPHITHEATER
GRAPEVINE CANYON
ISIS TEMPLE / SHIVA TEMPLE DISTANT
INNER GORGE REFLECTION
EAST FROM HAVASUPAI PT.