First words can leave a mark. Below are some of my favorite opening lines of well known novels.
Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own
way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking
thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
You 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 (1885)
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 (1951)
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 coming down along the road met a
nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
This is the saddest story I have ever heard. —Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)
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. —Charles Dickens,David Copperfield (1850)
It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times
in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was
not. —Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)
Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember,
a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield
on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. —Miguel de
Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605; trans. Edith Grossman)
Mother died today. —Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert)
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead
channel. —William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864;
trans. Michael R. Katz)
It was like so, but wasn't. —Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)
All this happened, more or less. —Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five(1969)
They shoot the white girl first. —Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he
had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. —Ernest Hemingway,
The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
It was the day my grandmother exploded. —Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road(1992)
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit
day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room
near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. —Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex(2002)
It was a pleasure to burn. —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
It was love at first sight. —Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)
You better not never tell nobody but God. —Alice Walker, The Color Purple(1982)
He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he
advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward,
and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. —Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle(1948)
The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs
revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. —Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
then maybe someday.....
Why am I such an idiot? --Lora Douglas, Ages from Eternity (20??)
