7 thoughts on “Last Night”

      • The “Manderley” quote is deeply haunting, and I literally could not remember it. Once heard, it unlocked whole series.

        I’ve added the opening line to my list of opening lines to use. Any word that is variable is in brackets {} and I change as needed.

        – Once upon a time,

        – It was a dark and stormy night.

        – Call me {Ishmael}.

        – Last night I dreamt I went to {Manderley} again.

        I found a list that has interesting first lines, many of them are not as successful for my needs. I feel that they were reaching to fill the list. HA!

        100 Best First Lines from Novels
        http://americanbookreview.org/100bestlines.asp

  1. Written 81 years ago and will not be in the public domain for another 40 years. Feels overlong to me.

    Still, it is one of the great first lines.

      • I read it many years ago and it didn’t disappoint. The Hitchcock film was pretty good as well despite the plot changes that were made to comply with the production code.

        As for the public domain, you are lucky that it is only 14 years; for most of the world it’s 40 years (death + 70 years) save for hold outs like Canada who stick to the +50 years of international treaty.

        I can see some interesting times ahead for Project Gutenberg as few people in the UK will worry about instructions not to download if you are outside the USA any more than they worry about fadedpage.com’s works only being public domain in Canada.

Comments are closed.