Best Opening Lines in Books
March 27th 2007 08:45
Nothing can reel you in to a book quite like a great opening line. Once they grab you they nary let you go, and if they do - they're mugs! It's all over! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAARRRRR! Yeah, that's right - over!
Ahem. Anyway, here are some great opening lines from novels from various genres...
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Ulysses by James Joyce
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
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.
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
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.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their affairs they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
Hogfather by Terry Pratchett
Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.
The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkein
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
I think the one from 'War of the Worlds' is my favourite. Anyone have any others?
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Comment by Michaelie
Flick Wit
'Call me Ishmael.' - Moby Dick by Herman Melville
'No-one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be a heroine.' - Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
'You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forbodings.' - Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Tale of Two Cities and Pride and Prejudice would have to be my favourites.
Michaelie