100 Best Opening Lines

The American Book Review has listed its top 100 best opening lines from novels.  When writing a novel, an  autobiography, an essay, an article, the first line is the most difficult to create; you want to grab readers' attention, you want to sound interesting, and you want the opening to be memorable.  There are some great openers below, and Mississippi's own William Faulkner made the list twice.  There are a few that were lower down on the list that I think deserve greater credit (e.g., number 38, number 53); you can find the remaining 84 best opening lines here (I took this list to 16 because, well, look at number 16).

100 Best First Lines from Novels

1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

 

2. 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)

 

3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

 

4. 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, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)

 

5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

 

6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

 

7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)

 

8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

 

9. 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)

 

10. I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

 

11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. —Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

 

12. 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. —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

 

13. 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)

 

14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. —Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)

 

15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)

 

16. 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)