Finest first lines from novels: for NTA NET and SET aspirants.

•  It was love at first sight. —Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961) 

•  You better not never tell nobody but God. —Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982) 

•  Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. —Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988) 

• This is the saddest story I have ever heard. —Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)  

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

•  High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. —David Lodge, Changing Places (1975) 

•  He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. —Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928) 

•  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) 

•  Mother died today. —Albert Camus, The Stranger

• Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. —William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)

 

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

 

•  Where now? Who now? When now? —Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

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

•  Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) 

•   In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. —John Barth, The End of the Road(1958)

• The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. —William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)  

• It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. —Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)

 

•  "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die." —Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)

• Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. —Franz Kafka, The Trial

 

• I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. —Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)  

•   Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. —Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum

•  In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

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

• 124 was spiteful. —Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987) 

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

•  Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

• 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)

 

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

 

• Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

 

• 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

 

•  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)

•  They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. —Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) 

• I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. —W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge (1944)  

 

•  A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. —Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951) 

•  When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson. —Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show (1971)

•   He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. —Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900) 

• Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. —Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups(2001)