What's the First Line in the Closest Book?

[Spiffyness]

"Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians."

(Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke)

 

[NuncDimittis]

The force at the core leading our cause forward is the Chinese Communist Party.

Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung
Foreign Language Press, Peking

 

[Wren]

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun."

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

 

[The_Evelyonian]

"It was an odd-looking vine."

Wizards First Rule by Terry Goodkind

 

[mohawk]

They call me Mac.

Battle Cry...Leon Uris

 

[HannahBanana]

"Welcome to sociology!"

Essentials of Sociology, by James M. Henslin

 

[HiredGoon]

"O Lord, through my manifold sins and provocations I have brought myself into great distress." -John Owen, The Forgiveness of Sin: A Practical Exposition of Psalm 130

 

[kiwimac]

" I know it is a risky thing to begin a book on Jesus' parables of grace with a parable of my own on the perils of theologizing; nevertheless. . . "

Capon, Robert Farrar. The Parables of Grace. Eerdmans 1988.

 

[kiwimac]

From the part Mr. Burke took in the American Revolution, it was natural that I should consider him a friend to mankind; and as our acquaintance commenced on that ground, it would have been more agreeable to me to have had cause to continue in that opinion than to change it.

Paine, Thomas. On the Rights of Man.

 

[spinningwheelgirl]

"Two events, twelve years and thousands of miles apart, serve as brackets for the story we tell in this book."

Cold War Canada by Reg Whitaker and Gary Marcuse

 

[CelticRose]

Mullaghash was the mountain out our back.

from Over the Mountain by Maryanne Kerr.

 

[HiredGoon]

"In the spring and on the eve of the seventeenth century, a son was born to Robert and Elizabeth Cromwell of Huntingdon." -Cromwell by Antonia Fraser.

 

[kiwimac]

To uphold the "right of private judgment," and our "Christian liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free;" to add fuel to the fire of investigation, and in the crucible of deep inquiry, melt from the gold of pure religion, the dross of man's invention; to appeal from the erring tribunals of a fallible Priesthood, and restore to its original state the mutilated Testament of the Saviour; also to induce all earnest thinkers to search not a part, but the whole of the Scriptures, if therein they think they will find eternal life; I, as an advocate of free thought and untrammelled opinion, dispute the authority of those uncharitable, bickering, and ignorant Ecclesiastics who first suppressed these gospels and epistles; and I join issue with their Catholic and Protestant successors who have since excluded them from the New Testament, of which they formed a part; and were venerated by the Primitive Churches, during the first four hundred years of the Christian Era.

Archbishop Wake, The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete.

 

[hogiqas]

I was struggling toward the climax of my none-too-polished sermon that Sunday night back in 1972 when disaster struck.
Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire, Jim Cymbala

 

[DreamboatAnnie]

You first heard about the bell witch when you were seven. (The Bell Witch)

 

[NuncDimittis]

In the first months following the conquest of political power by the proletariat in Russia, it might have seemed that the tremendous difference between backward Russia and the advanced countries of Western Europe would cause the proletarian revolution in these latter countries to have very little resemblence to ours.

"Left-Wing" Communism, An Infantile Disorder by V.I. Lenin

 

[HiredGoon]

"If argument in the social sciences is to be useful rather than merely entertaining, it must treat competing positions in their own terms and as fairly as possible." -God is Dead: Secularization in the West by Steve Bruce.

 

[GrinningDwarf]

"I'm telling you, Mike, we can do this!"

Ring of Fire anthology, edited by Eric Flint

 

[starelda]

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy lies a small un-regarded yellow sun.

~ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

 

[Nienor]

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy lies a small un-regarded yellow sun.

~ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

Best. Intro. Ever.

"Thucydides the Athenian wrote the history of the war fought between Athens and Sparta, beginning the account at the very outbreak of the was, in the belief that it was going to be a great war and more worth writing about than any of those which had taken place in the past."
-The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides