Books With Our Favorite First Lines

amanda4242: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

amanda4242: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

paradoxosalpha: 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, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

rosalita: "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again"

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

al.vick: "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

AntonioGallo: Phrases such as "Big Brother is watching you" and "doublethink" have entered the lexicon and are often used to describe similar situations in modern times.

ManWithAnAgenda: There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it

perennialreader: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

merrystar: "Marley was dead, to begin with."

rosalita: "IT WAS A PLEASURE TO BURN."

ManWithAnAgenda: I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

susanbooks: The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

ManWithAnAgenda: No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

Cecrow: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

Aquila: "It was a dark and stormy night."

SandraArdnas: Many years later as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. (...) The world was so recent that many things lacked names

AbigailAdams26: “All children, except one, grow up."

susanbooks: A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.

SandraArdnas: All this happened, more or less.

saskia17: The circus arrives without warning.

paradoxosalpha: When I had journeyed half of our life's way, I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the path that does not stray.

AntonioGallo: I prefer "Inferno" since it is known for its exploration of moral and ethical issues. Dante uses the sins and punishments of the various characters to comment on the nature of sin, justice, and divine retribution. This gives the book a timeless quality that continues to resonate with readers today. Life, sometimes, is just like Inferno

Cecrow: "Call me Ishmael."

al.vick: "This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it."

ManWithAnAgenda: It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.

souloftherose: "I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module..."

sturlington: The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

al.vick: Prologue: "People disappear all the time."

sturlington: The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.

anglemark: μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος / οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε

anglemark: "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, 'If on a winter's night a traveler'."

al.vick: "I'm pretty much fucked."

otori: “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”

perennialreader: I had a Farm in Africa.

Cecilturtle: Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.

EerierIdyllMeme: On the copyright page: "This is a very dull page. What is on the next page?"

ManWithAnAgenda: Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

amanda4242: "No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine."

yoyogod: The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

Aquila: "In the myriadic year of our lord—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!—Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth."

susanbooks: Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin.

hipdeep: No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were being scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

asiralh: “Once upon a time on a small, watery, excitable planet called Earth, in a small, watery, excitable country called Italy, a soft-spoken, rather nice-looking young gentleman by the name of Enrico Fermi was born into a family so overprotective that he felt compelled to invent the atomic bomb.”

Aquila: "I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination."

barefootsong: "Lyra and her dæmon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen."

hipdeep: En arkhêi ên ho lógos, kaì ho lógos ên pròs tòn theón, kaì theòs ên ho lógos. | In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Tess_W: In the beginning was the Word.

anglemark: "It was the day my grandmother exploded."

susanbooks: For a long time I used to go to bed early.

kristilabrie: "Have you ever tasted a Whitstable oyster?"

saskia17: Everything starts somewhere, though many physicists disagree.

EerierIdyllMeme: It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression "as pretty as an airport".

Nonconformisto: As Gregor Samsor awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

vwinsloe: "If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done."

sturlington: There was once a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself—not just sometimes, but always.

merrystar: If you want to find Cherry Tree Lane, all you have to do is ask the policeman at the crossroad.

amanda4242: "to wound the autumnal city."

saskia17: Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.

PeanutNoir: "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show."

RBeffa: I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.

abbottthomas: It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills.

paradoxosalpha: There were angels in the glass, two four six many of them, each one shuffling into his place in line like an alderman at the Lord Mayor's show.

Tess_W: “I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.”

hipdeep: This is the saddest story I have ever heard.

yoyogod: After the thing was all over, when peril had ceased to loom and happy endings had been distributed in heaping handfuls and we were driving home with our hats on the side of our heads, having shaken the dust of Steeple Bumpleigh from our tyres, I confessed to Jeeves that there had been moments during the recent proceedings when Bertram Wooster, though no weakling, had come very near to despair.

vwinsloe: "He began to die when he was twenty-one, but tuberculosis is slow and sly and subtle."

anglemark: "My friend Hergal had killed himself again."

sturlington: It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.

msjudy: And then, after walking all day through a golden haze of humid warmth that gathered about him like fine wet fleece, Valentine came to a great ridge of outcropping white stone overlooking the city of Pidruid.

perennialreader: Take my camel, dear, said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.

rosalita: "A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which, to look ahead."

Cecrow: "Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...."

perennialreader: When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.

paradoxosalpha: Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.

al.vick: "This isn't at all what I expected. In 1985, by some sort of journalistic accident I was sent to Madagascar with Mark Carwardine to look for an almost extinct form of lemur called the aye-aye. None of the three of us had ever met before. I had never met Mark, Mark had never met me, and no one, apparently, had seen an aye-aye in years."

EerierIdyllMeme: There once lived, at a series of temporary addresses across the United States of America, a traveling man of Indian origin, advancing years, and retreating mental powers, who, on account of his love for mindless television, had spent far too much of his life in the yellow light of tawdry motel rooms watching an excess of it, and had suffered a peculiar form of brain damage as a result.

msjudy: At dusk they fall from the sky.

al.vick: "My name is Uhtred. I am the son of Uhtred, who was the son of Uhtred and his father was also called Uhtred."

saskia17: The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.

kristilabrie: "In eighteenth century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages."

otori: “Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. ”

Micheller7: “It was Wang Lung’s wedding day.” I have remembered this line for about 65 years.

paradoxosalpha: A screaming comes across the sky.

Archakr: "Kell wore a very peculiar coat."

Pepgiraffe: Our Dragon doesn't eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley.

perennialreader: So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration.

Moloch: "Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them." It's the book that speaks directly to the reader; I was instantly hooked.

Yuki-Onna: I often dream about the Dolphin Hotel.

Brubow: "Late one evening toward the end of March, a teenager picked up a double-bareled shotgun, walked into the forest, put the gun to someone else's forehead and pulled the trigger. This is the story of how we got there."

Porua: In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses, above a certain rent, are women.

LibraryCin: Three days before her death, my mother told me -- these weren't her last words, but they were pretty lose -- that my brother was still alive.

PeanutNoir: "They threw me off the hay truck about noon."

sinki: "Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months."

exhocforte: "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."

abbottthomas: Mr Salteena was an elderly man of 42 and was fond of asking peaple to stay with him.

barefootsong: "When I was nine years old, I hid under a table and heard my sister kill a king." This first line has stuck with me since I first read this in sixth grade.

Aquila: "When, suddenly, on an ordinary Wednesday, it seemed to Barney that the world tilted and ran downhill in all directions, he knew he was about to be haunted again."

AbigailAdams26: Mr. C'Mere's first line: "Humans were diggers and buriers, the cat thought, like dogs." Zoë's first line: "I'd hoped for better, Henry's being a heart doctor. A job like that, you'd think he might actually have a heart."

prosfilaes: It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.