Opening lines
From BillionQuotes
A good opening line for a book is usually considered desirable. Some are so well-known that they are remembered long after the book, while others are so famous that they end up parodied.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
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A
- All children, except one, grow up.
- All this happened, more or less.
- As Gregor Samsa awoke from a night of uneasy dreaming, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
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B
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C
- Call me Ishmael.
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D
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E
- Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.
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F
- Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.
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G
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H
- All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
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I
- 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 is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
- It's hot as hell in Martirio, but the papers on the porch are icy with the news.
- It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
- 1984 by George Orwell.
- It was a dark and stormy night.
- Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
- Probably the most parodied opening line in literature. See Edward Bulwer-Lytton page for more.
- It was a pleasure to burn.
- It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
- It was love at first sight.
- 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...
- In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
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J
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K
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L
- Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
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M
- 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.
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N
- No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
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O
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P
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Q
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R
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S
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T
- The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended.
- The first time I read the ad, I choked and cursed and spat and threw the paper to the floor.
- Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.
- The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
- The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
- They threw off the hay truck about noon.
- This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.
- To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new.
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U
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V
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W
- We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
- When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.
- When I was seventeen, my life changed forever.
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X
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Y
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Z
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