Impressive First Lines

'Call me Ishmael.'

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

'Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.'

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

'When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.'

John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (1951)

'ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn't seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, "Be My Baby" on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.'

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (1991)

'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)

'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)

'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)

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

William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

'As Gregor Samsa awoke from a night of uneasy dreaming, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.'

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (1915)

'It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. '

George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

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

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

'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)

'Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.'

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

'All children, except one, grow up.'

J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan (1911)

'I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man.'

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz)

'Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.'

—Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell)

'I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975.'

Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner (2007)

'It was love at first sight.'

Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)

'Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.'

D. H Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

'Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the riverbank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book', thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversation?'

Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

'Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished.

Homer, The Iliad (Trans 1951)

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

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (1936)

'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, 100 Years of Solitude (1976)

'For a long time, I went to bed early.'

Marcel Proust, Swanns's Way (1913; trans. Lydia Davis)

'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.'

Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)

'We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.'

Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)

'I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.'

Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of The Wind (2005)

'The first I heard of the beach was in Bangkok, on the Ko Sanh Road.'

Alex Garland, The Beach (1996)

'In the beginning God created heaven and earth.'

God, Genesis- The Bible