The 100 Best Opening Lines to a novel

The 100 best opening lines to a novel...


1. Call me Ishmael. -- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

2.It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possessionof a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. — Jane Austen, Pride andPrejudice (1813)

3. A screaming comes across the sky. — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

4.Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel AurelianoBuendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took himto discover ice. — Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years ofSolitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)

5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. — Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

6.Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in itsown way. — Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

7.riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay,brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castleand Environs. — James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)

8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. — George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

9.It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age ofwisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, itwas the epoch of incredulity, 1. Call me Ishmael. -- Herman Melville,Moby-Dick (1851)it was the season of Light, it was the season ofDarkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

10. I am an invisible man. — Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you)sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. — NathanaelWest, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

12. You don't know about mewithout you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of TomSawyer; but that ain't no matter. —Mark Twain, Adventures ofHuckleberry Finn (1885)

13. Someone must have slandered JosefK., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he wasarrested. —Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell)

14.You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on awinter's night a traveler. —Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night atraveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)

15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)

16.If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probablywant 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 allthat David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going intoit, if you want to know the truth. — J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in theRye (1951)

17. Once upon a time and a very good time it wasthere was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that wascoming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard. — Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)

19.I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as theywere in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were aboutwhen they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended uponwhat they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rationalBeing was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation andtemperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of hismind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes ofhis whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositionswhich were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered allthis, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should havemade a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which thereader is likely to see me. — Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy(1759n1767)

20. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of myown life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, thesepages must show. — Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)

21.Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl oflather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. — James Joyce,Ulysses (1922)

22. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fellin torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by aviolent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in Londonthat our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercelyagitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against thedarkness. — Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

23.One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware partywhose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to findthat she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix,of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogulwho had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still hadassets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it allout more than honorary. — Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

24.It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing threetimes in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking forsomeone he was not. — Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)

25.Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see themhitting. — William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)

26. 124 was spiteful. — Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

27.Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care toremember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lanceand ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhoundfor racing. — Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605; trans. EdithGrossman)

28. Mother died today. — Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert)

29. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. — Ha Jin, Waiting (1999)

30. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. — William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

31. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz)

32. Where now? Who now? When now? — Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)

33.Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his ownorchard. "Stop!" cried the groaning old man at last, "Stop! I did notdrag my father beyond this tree." — Gertrude Stein, The Making ofAmericans (1925)

34. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. — John Barth, The End of the Road (1958)

35. It was like so, but wasn't. — Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)

36. —Money . . . in a voice that rustled. — William Gaddis, J R (1975)

37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. — Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

38. All this happened, more or less. — Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

39. They shoot the white girl first. — Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)

40. For a long time, I went to bed early. — Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (1913; trans. Lydia Davis)

41. The moment one learns English, complications set in. — Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990)

42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. — Anita Brookner, The Debut (1981)

43. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; — Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

44. Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. — Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

45.I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generallyhappens in such cases, each time it was a different story. — EdithWharton, Ethan Frome (1911)

46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alvaarrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, againstAlex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another Africanamusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African armyassembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill,assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alexastonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal antannexation. — Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (1974)

47. Therewas a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. —C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)

48. He was anold man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had goneeighty-four days now without taking a fish. — Ernest Hemingway, The OldMan and the Sea (1952)

49. It was the day my grandmother exploded. — Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)

50.I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smoglessDetroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in anemergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. — JeffreyEugenides, Middlesex (2002)

51. Elmer Gantry was drunk. — Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (1927)

52. We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. — Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)

53. It was a pleasure to burn. — Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

54.A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment ofexperience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. —Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)

55. Having placed inmy mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew mypowers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind,my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. — FlannO'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)

56. I was born in the Year1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho' not of that Country,my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; Hegot a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, livedafterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whoseRelations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, andfrom whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruptionof Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, andwrite our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call'd me. — DanielDefoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)

57. In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. — David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988)

58. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. — George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)

59. It was love at first sight. — Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)

60.What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competitionwith her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch herremarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirtslips up to the tops of her stockings? — Gilbert Sorrentino,Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971)

61. I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. — W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge (1944)

62.Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned intothe wrong person. — Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001)

63.The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playingat children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it tillthe end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. — G. K.Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

64. In myyounger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice thatI've been turning over in my mind ever since. — F. Scott Fitzgerald,The Great Gatsby (1925)

65. You better not never tell nobody but God. — Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)

66."To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens,"first you have to die." — Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)

67.It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted theRosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. — SylviaPlath, The Bell Jar (1963)

68. Most really pretty girls havepretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of asudden. — David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (1987)

69. If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. — Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)

70.Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day whenthe boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro namedBuford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it anddrag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting andbury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour atthe head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs fromdigging it up. — Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear it Away (1960)

71.Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me,he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, andmy keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through ablue-eyed type like me. — G?nter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959; trans.Ralph Manheim)

72. When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson. — Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show (1971)

73.Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faithfrom Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. ClaraCollins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to WestCondon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, thereto await the End of the World. — Robert Coover, The Origin of theBrunists (1966)

74. She waited, Kate Croy, for her father tocome in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments atwhich she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a facepositively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the pointof going away without sight of him. — Henry James, The Wings of theDove (1902)

75. In the late summer of that year we lived in ahouse in a village that looked across the river and the plain to themountains. — Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)

76."Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from thisanimal on her return from High Mass. — Rose Macaulay, The Towers ofTrebizond (1956)

77. He was an inch, perhaps two, under sixfeet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slightstoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under starewhich made you think of a charging bull. — Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim(1900)

78. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. — L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)

79.On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boarhe parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadntben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.— Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980)

80. Justice? — You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. — William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)

81. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. — J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)

82. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. — Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)

83."When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she madethe nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hensthemselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized withlonging." — Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1983)

84. In the lastyears of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fopsand fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch calledEbenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talentedthan prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposedto be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of MotherEnglish more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and sorather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learnedthe knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after thefashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarringrhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point. —John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)

85. When I finally caughtup with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholicbulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside ofSonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine springafternoon. — James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (1978)

86. It wasjust noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail withLucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for thatmatter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a whiteman. — William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948)

87. I,Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for Ishall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not solong 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 nowabout to write this strange history of my life; starting from myearliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach thefateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age offifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the"golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled.— Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)

88. Of all the things thatdrive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, iswomen. — Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)

89. I am anAmerican, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city —and go at things asI have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my ownway: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock,sometimes a not so innocent. — Saul Bellow, The Adventures of AugieMarch (1953)

90. The towers of Zenith aspired above the morningmist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy ascliffs and delicate as silver rods. — Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)

91.I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird thatdarts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped;lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers ofhumorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover ofparasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl's underdrawers;still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived thedistressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse;and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim andconfidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of myharmless and sanguine self. — John Hawkes, Second Skin (1964)

92. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. — Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921)

93. Psychics can see the color of time it's blue. — Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away (1986)

94. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. — Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)

95.Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn anddetermined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly asit happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another manfor indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal,a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quiteirresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnishedroom with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and atleast one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise,to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 yearsold—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America theland of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—ajournalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to Americafrom Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly establishedsometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures,and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin bymarriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious toknow if he the father and his family had survived the Germanoccupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter fromthe young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by theyoung man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by agood friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parentsboth his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the otheryounger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a Germanconcentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubthaving been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that,therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person,who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working veryhard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to begiven the opportunity to come to America that great country he hadheard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life,possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen.— Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing (1971)

96. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. — Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988)

97.He — for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of thetime did something to disguise it — was in the act of slicing at thehead of a Moor which swung from the rafters. — Virginia Woolf, Orlando(1928)

98. High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at acombined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. — David Lodge, ChangingPlaces (1975)

99. They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. — Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

100.The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogsrevealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. — Stephen Crane,The Red Badge of Courage (1895)