| Opening Line | Novel Title | Author |
|---|
| Call me Ishmael. | |
| It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. | |
| A screaming comes across the sky. | |
| 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. | |
| Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. | |
| Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. | |
| 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. | |
| It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. | |
| It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness... | |
| I am an invisible man. | |
| 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... | |
| 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. | |
| Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. | |
| You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. | |
| The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. | |
| 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... | |
| 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... | |
| This is the saddest story I have ever heard. | |
| I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me... | |
| Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. | |
| Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. | |
| It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets... | |
| One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue... | |
| 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. | |
| Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. | |
| | Opening Line | Novel Title | Author |
|---|
| 124 was spiteful. | |
| Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf... | |
| Mother died today. | |
| Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. | |
| The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. | |
| I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. | |
| Where now? Who now? When now? | |
| Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. 'Stop!' cried the groaning old man at last, 'Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.' | |
| In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. | |
| It was like so, but wasn't. | |
| —Money . . . in a voice that rustled. | |
| Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. | |
| All this happened, more or less. | |
| They shoot the white girl first. | |
| For a long time, I went to bed early. | |
| The moment one learns English, complications set in. | |
| Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. | |
| I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; | |
| Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. | |
| I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. | |
| Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement... | |
| There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. | |
| 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. | |
| It was the day my grandmother exploded. | |
| 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... | |
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