100 Famous Novels With Catchy First Lines
Info Lists Novels with great first lines, bound to make the best impression on the readers. The opening lines of a novel can prove crucial, and many authors spend an inordinate amount of time considering how their books will begin. From Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" to Melville's "Moby Dick," often the opening sentence or two of a book will become the most frequently quoted and iconic passage from the entire novel.
These books of fiction are well known for their opening lines. The authors know that it's not just the story that needs to be good in a book, but there needs to be something that brings the reader into it. The opening line is that hook.
This is a list of the greatest novels with the best introductory text, including world literature (with an emphasis on English literature) from throughout history with the most memorable and significant beginnings.
Soure: American Book Review
These books of fiction are well known for their opening lines. The authors know that it's not just the story that needs to be good in a book, but there needs to be something that brings the reader into it. The opening line is that hook.
This is a list of the greatest novels with the best introductory text, including world literature (with an emphasis on English literature) from throughout history with the most memorable and significant beginnings.
Soure: American Book Review
- 1Up 133Down 18
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. „ - 2Up 117Down 19
Kit Reed“ It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. „ - 3Up 106Down 19
Ray Bradbury“ It was a pleasure to burn. „ - 4Up 92Down 16
Leo Tolstoy“ Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. „ - 5Up 94Down 17
Kurt Vonnegut“ All this happened, more or less. „ - 6Up 95Down 21
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. „ - 7Up 91Down 26 Herman Melville“ Call me Ishmael. „
- 8Up 73Down 20 Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov“ Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. „
- 9Up 53Down 13 Miguel de Cervantes“ 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. „
- 10Up 50Down 16
C. S. Lewis“ There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. „ - 11Up 59Down 24 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. „
- 12Up 46Down 17 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. „
- 13Up 42Down 15 Iain Banks“ It was the day my grandmother exploded. „
- 14Up 46Down 20 Mark Twain“ 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. „
- 15Up 38Down 14 Joseph Heller“ It was love at first sight. „
- 16Up 32Down 11 Charles Dickens“ 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. „
- 17Up 33Down 12 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fedor Mikhaïlovitch Dostoïevski“ I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. „
- 18Up 34Down 14 Ralph Ellison“ I am an invisible man. „
- 19Up 29Down 11 Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez“ Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano BuendÃa was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
„ - 20Up 25Down 8 Charles R. Johnson“ Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women. „
- 21Up 27Down 11 Anne Tyler“ Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. „
- 22Up 32Down 16 William Gibson“ The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. „
- 23Up 22Down 8 Jeffrey Eugenides“ 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. „
- 24Up 17Down 4
City of Glass
Douglas Coupland“ 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. „ - 25Up 27Down 13 Albert Camus“ Mother died today. „
- 26Up 20Down 7 Dodie Smith“ I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. „
- 27Up 21Down 8 Graham Greene“ 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. „
- 28Up 22Down 9 Sylvia Plath“ It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. „
- 29Up 22Down 9 Thomas Pynchon“ A screaming comes across the sky. „
- 30Up 26Down 13 Zora Neale Hurston“ Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. „
- 31Up 18Down 6 Samuel Beckett“ The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. „
- 32Up 20Down 8 Rafael Sabatini“ He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. „
- 33Up 20Down 8 Toni Morrison“ They shoot the white girl first. „
- 34Up 21Down 9 L. P. Hartley“ The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. „
- 35Up 17Down 6 Felipe Alfau“ The moment one learns English, complications set in. „
- 36Up 18Down 7 Stephen Crane“ The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. „
- 37Up 17Down 7 Robyn Davidson“ We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. „
- 38Up 17Down 7 Saul Bellow“ If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. „
- 39Up 20Down 10 James Joyce“ 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. „
- 40Up 16Down 7 Edith Wharton“ I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. „
- 41Up 18Down 9 Alice Walker“ You better not never tell nobody but God. „
- 42Up 15Down 7
A Frolic of His Own
William Gaddis“ Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. „ - 43Up 15Down 7 G. K. Chesterton“ The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. „
- 44Up 15Down 7 Margaret Atwood“ Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. „
- 45Up 11Down 4 Robert Graves“ I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot," or "That Claudius," or "Claudius the Stammerer," or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius," am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled. „
- 46Up 13Down 6 Günter Grass“ Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. „
- 47Up 14Down 7 James Joyce“ Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. „
- 48Up 11Down 5 Ford Madox Ford“ This is the saddest story I have ever heard. „
- 49Up 11Down 6 Ernest Hemingway“ In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. „
- 50Up 11Down 6
Changing Places
David Lodge“ High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. „ -
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Moby-Dick at 11/04/2010 9:33 AM
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Moby-Dick at 3/01/2010 6:18 AM
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