A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
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The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.
One I've recently re-read. Not quite as catchy as some of the others here, but manages to capture the world and mood of the setting remarkably well in just one sentence.
"West of House. You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door."
"My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973." the lovely bones
"Beneath the floor of a very old forest, nestled in among some nice, rich topsoil, lived a family of worms. Earthworms, to be exact." Gary Larson ~ 'There's A Hair In My Dirt!'
In Germany, "Ilsebill salzte nach." ("Ilsebill added more salt.") from the novel The Flounder, written by author Günter Grass, has been voted the best opening line of all time.
"Somebody warned them that we were coming. The sympathisers left nothing behind but an empty apartment and a few volumes of illegal verse."
The following lines are even better in terms of raw world building but it's an excellent open.
"When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there."
From The Dinosaur by Augusto Monterroso.
It's the opening like, the closing line and everything in between.
See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.