It was a pleasure to burn.
Fahrenheit 451
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.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
-George Orwell,1984
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.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
The Bell Jar
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
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
-William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Neuromancer
All this happened, more or less.
Slaughterhouse-Five
Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.
Their Eyes Were Watching God
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
-C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?
Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things
You better not never tell nobody but God.
-Alice Walker, The Color Purple
On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.
-Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
I Capture the Castle
These are some of my picks.Ttime for you to weigh in: what is your favorite opening line from a novel? What makes a great opening line?
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