I got the idea to write a blog about famous first lines over dinner when one of my friends who also liked books mentioned a first line that intrigued me. It was from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. With that one line, Mr. Marquez launched the tone of the entire book. But my most beloved first line of all remains to be that of Mr. Wilkie Collins in his book The Woman in White. Pregnant and beguiling, it beckons the reader to plunge themselves into one of my favorite mystery novels in history.
So here they are. How many of these do you know? Take this list to your book club and have fun! The answers can be found in white colored font below each first line. To read them just highlight the space after the dash with your cursor. And don't miss the Children's and Young Adult books below!
This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.
- Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, 1860
It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, 1988
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
Call me Ishmael.
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Scandal in Bohemia,
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1891
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
- Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca, 1938
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.
- Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, 1952
As Gregor Samsa awoke from a night of uneasy dreaming, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
- Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis, 1915
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
Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.
- Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 1843
My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.
- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, 1861
Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
- Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 1925
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatbsy, 1925
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.
- Ernest Hemingay, Farewell to Arms, 1929
Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth.
- Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon, 1930
Once when I was six years old I saw a beautiful picture in a book about the primeval forest called True Stories. It showed a boa constrictor swallowing an animal. Here is a copy of the drawing.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, A Little Prince, 1943
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 1979
Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.
- Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, 1936
When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventyifirst birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 1954
Amerigo Bonasera sat in New York Criminal Court Number 3 and waited for justice; vengeance on the men who had so cruelly hurt his daughter, who had tried to dishonor her.
- Mario Puzo, The Godfather, 1969
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,....
- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859
When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.
- Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird, 1960
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents - except at occasional intervals.
- Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford, 1830
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949
LOLITA, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.
- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, 1955
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
- William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 1591
Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes.
- Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, 1869
It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.
- Joseph Heller, Catch-22, 1961
I have just returned from a visit to my landlord--the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society.
- Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 1847
A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1932
It is this day three hundred and forty-eight years six months and nineteen days that the good people of Paris were awakened by a grand pealing from all the bells in the three districts of the Cite, the Universite, and the Ville.
- Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, 1831
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
- J.R.R. Tolkien , The Hobbit, 1937
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
124 was spiteful.
- Toni Morrison, Beloved, 1987
Mother died today.
- Albert Camus, The Stranger, 1942
It was the day my grandmother exploded.
- Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road, 1992
She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him.
- Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, 1902
The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way towards the lagoon.
- William Golding, The Lord of the Flies, 1954
Who is John Galt?
- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1368
It was Wang Lung’s marriage day.
- Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth, 1931
Once upon a midnight dreary, as I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
- Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven, 1845
Children’s and Young Adults
These two very old people are the father and mother of Mr. Bucket.
- Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 1964
"Can I have a pig too, Pop?" asked Avery.
- E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web, 1952
Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening Hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.
- Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass, 1995
Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
- J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, 1997
Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin.
- A.A. Milne, Winnie-The-Pooh, 1926
Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids.
- C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 1950
I'd never given much thought to how I would die — though I'd had reason enough in the last few months — but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this
- Stephenie Meyer, Twilight, 2005
Once on a dark winter's day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares."
- Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess, 1904
When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable child ever seen. It was true, too.
- Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden, 1911
“Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.
- Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, 1868
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the riverbank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book', thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversation?'
- Lewis Caroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865
In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.
- Ludwig Bemelmans, Madeline, 1939
All children, except one, grow up.
- J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan, 1906
