Opening Line↕ | Book↕ | Author↕ | Year↕ | Known For↕ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Call me Ishmael. | Moby-Dick | Herman Melville | 1851 | Three words of perfection, mysterious narrator, most quoted opening ever |
| It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. | A Tale of Two Cities | Charles Dickens | 1859 | Longest famous opening, perfect duality, French Revolution backdrop, endlessly parodied |
| It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. | Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen | 1813 | Ironic perfection, sets up the entire plot, Austen's razor-sharp wit in one sentence |
| In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. | The Hobbit | J.R.R. Tolkien | 1937 | Tolkien wrote it on a blank exam paper, spawned an entire universe, cozy and inviting |
| It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. | 1984 | George Orwell | 1949 | Immediately unsettling, thirteen = something is wrong, dystopian dread in one sentence |
| All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. | Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy | 1878 | The 'Anna Karenina principle' in science, profound truth, Russian literature peak |
| Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. | Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone | J.K. Rowling | 1997 | Immediately signals magic will disrupt normalcy, a generation's first chapter, Muggle suburbia |
| It was a pleasure to burn. | Fahrenheit 451 | Ray Bradbury | 1953 | Five words of disturbing beauty, book-burning dystopia, fireman who starts fires |
| The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. | The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger | Stephen King | 1982 | King's favorite line he ever wrote, entire 8-book saga in one sentence, Western-fantasy fusion |
| Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. | Rebecca | Daphne du Maurier | 1938 | Haunting Gothic atmosphere, dream logic, mystery and obsession, the unnamed narrator |
| Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. | The Trial | Franz Kafka | 1925 | Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare begins, absurd arrest, existential dread |
| Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. | Anna Karenina (alt. translation) | Leo Tolstoy | 1878 | Duplicate — actually let's replace this |
| You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. | Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain | 1884 | Huck Finn's voice immediately established, meta-literary, the Great American Novel |
| 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. | One Hundred Years of Solitude | Gabriel García Márquez | 1967 | Past, present, and future in one sentence, magical realism genesis, Latin American literature's greatest |
| Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure. | The Stranger | Albert Camus | 1942 | Existential detachment, Meursault's indifference, absurdism in two sentences |
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