Every famous novel began with a memorable
first line. The following are the top ten most famous "first lines"
in history.
10 Best First Lines
from Novels
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)
Now, I'd like you to pick up your favorite novel or short story and in the comment section to this blog posting, write the first line to that piece of fiction. Feel free to comment on each other's first lines. Which ones "hooked" you? What makes them memorable?
Enjoy!
The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light.
ReplyDelete-Isaac Asimov, The Last Question (1956)
"My younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since." -F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
ReplyDelete"It's like he came out of nowhere."
ReplyDelete- Maria Padian, Out of Nowhere
"If I were not perfectly sure of my power to write and of my marvelous ability to express ideas with the utmost grace and vividness... So, more or less, I had thought of beginning my tale." - Despair, Vladimir Nabokov
ReplyDelete"When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home."
ReplyDelete-The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton
"I was seventeen years old when I saw my first dead body." Where Things Come Back, John Corey Whaley
ReplyDeleteYou don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter." Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
ReplyDelete"Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were." Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
ReplyDelete. “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’”
ReplyDelete-The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since." -The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
ReplyDelete"This is not for you." - House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
ReplyDelete"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want 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 all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth." —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
ReplyDelete“At night I would lie bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin.” -The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd
ReplyDelete"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." - The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien (1932)
ReplyDeletein my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that i've been turning over in my mind ever since. -the Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
ReplyDeleteLord of the Flies: “The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way towards the lagoon.”
ReplyDelete"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" - Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk)
ReplyDelete"You can't go back to how things were. How you thought they were. All you really have is...now." 13 reasons why
ReplyDelete"It was the day my grandmother exploded." - The Crow Road, Iain M. Banks
ReplyDelete"When he woke in the woods in the dark and cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him"- The Road, Cormac McCarthy (2006)
ReplyDelete"I am writing to you because she said you listen and understand and didn't try to sleep with that person at that party even though you could have." -The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky
ReplyDelete"Here is a small fact: You are going to die." -The Book Thief, Markus Zusak(2005)
ReplyDelete“When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.”
ReplyDelete-To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
"The first thing they always did was run you."-Moneyball, Michael Lewis
ReplyDelete"We are at rest five miles behind the front."- All quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque(1928)
ReplyDelete"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea." -Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
ReplyDelete"I am Sam. Sam I am." -Green Eggs and Ham, Dr. Seuss (1960)
ReplyDelete"So here's the file that almost killed me, Director."
ReplyDeleteAmie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, Illuminae
"She arrived on the remains of a big American deuce-and-a-half left over from the Vietnam War, its black and olive camouflage peeling."
ReplyDeleteThe reckoning, Jeff Long
“There is one mirror in my house."
ReplyDeleteDivergent, Veronica Roth
These are great!
ReplyDeleteMs. Z.