A abrir

Começar um livro pode ser uma das tarefas mais complicadas do processo de escrever um livro. Até pode ser fácil e sem esforço a imaginação flui. Mas será sempre o momento crucial, a arrancada para o ataque à besta que nos encara de frente com o seu rosto branco que intimida. Sobretudo se nos preocuparmos em abrir as hostilidades com uma frase ou um parágrafo marcante, definidor, essencial e original. Por vezes é um gesto fluido, mas muitas outras é doloroso e moroso: começar. Eis como começaram alguns gigantes das letras algumas duas suas obras. Aberturas excelentíssimas: .

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” — Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy


“The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.” — The Napoleon of Notting Hill – G. K. Chesterton


“I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot,” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Stammerer,” or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled.” — I, Claudius – Robert Graves


“He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.” — Orlando – Virginia Woolf


“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” — 1984 – George Orwell


“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” — A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens


“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic vermin.” — Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka


“Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the riverbank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book’, thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversation?’” — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll


“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” — Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austin


“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” — Voyage of the Dawn Treader – C. S. Lewis


“Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.” — Inferno – Dante


“It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.” — Earthly Powers – Anthony Burgess

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