100 best first lines

I thought people might find this interesting:

100 Best First Lines from Novels.

Here are the first ten:

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

2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (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 Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (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 its own 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 Castle and 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 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. —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

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

For the rest:

http://www.litline.org/ABR/100bestfirstlines.html

Anone want to contribute any others?

Personally, I like this one:

Sundown painted purple across the great Pyramid while the Emperor enjoyed a steaming whiz against a dumpster in the alley below. (several other possibilities by the same author )

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice--not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.

-- A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
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"If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

Kurt Vonnegut

It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future. Gene Wolfe, Book of the New Sun.

The Breeze blew into San Junipero in the shotgun seat of Billy Winston's Pinto wagon.

Christopher Moore - Practical Demonkeeping
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"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy" - Benjamin Franklin

What, no love for "It was a dark and stormy night."?

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. - Stephen King, The Dark Tower, part 1: The Gunslinger


Tyler gets me ajob 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. - Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club
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From a fortune cookie: Only those who attempts the absurd can achieve the impossible.

Adventures!

It's not exactly a first line, more like a first paragraph, but I've just started reading Arthur & George by Julian Barnes, and I was captivated by this opening:

Quote:

A child wants to see. It always begins like this, and it began like this then. A child wanted to see. He was able to walk, and could reach up to a door handle. He did this with nothing that could be called a purpose, merely the instinctive tourism of infancy.

It was the phrase the tourism of infancy that got me.
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"If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

Kurt Vonnegut

MADE TO FEEL UNWELCOME

Last edited by Rizak the Really Horrible on Mon May 15, 2006 8:07 am; edited 1 time in total

Thom wrote:

What, no love for "It was a dark and stormy night."?

It's #22 on the list...
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 house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. —Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

Best line I have never seen in print:

She was draped across the bed, naked and dead.

Tell me that wouldnt make you want to read more...
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Socially irresponsible, morally irredeemable and pretty god-damned glorious to behold @mremann

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.

-- Shirley Jackson, "The Haunting of Hill House"

"In five years, the penis will be obsolete."

...then 2 paragraphs later...

"With the right promotional campaign, it might take as little astwo years."

STEEL BEACH- John Varley (I highly recommend his work)

"Once again his wife had not been killed in a car accident."

The Beginning of Sorrows by David L. Martin


(not the first line, but pfft)

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold." -Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas I can't believe that wasn't on the list.

I wish I owned the book so I could post it, but the 1st line of Richard Dawkins' latest, "The God Delusion" is jaw dropping. The guy has some HUGE balls.