Famous Novels With The Catchiest First Lines
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's 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. This list has the best novels with great first lines, bound to make the best impression on readers.
These books of fiction are well known for their opening lines. The authors know that books don't just need a great story, there also needs to be something that draws in the reader. The opening line is that hook and the books on this list all have intriguing, interesting, and unique opening sentences.
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. Vote up the most memorable first lines from fiction below.
Source: American Book Review
- 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.
- It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
- It was a pleasure to burn.
- Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
- Call me Ishmael.
- It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
- In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
- All this happened, more or less.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
- You better not never tell nobody but God.
- 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.
- There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
- The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
- I am an invisible man.
- It was the day my grandmother exploded.
- 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.
- It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
- 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.
- In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were very normal, thank you very much.
- Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
- When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.
- He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
- 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.
- 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.
