| Opening Line | Novel Title | Author |
|---|
| Elmer Gantry was drunk. | |
| We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. | |
| It was a pleasure to burn. | |
| 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. | |
| Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind... | |
| I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho' not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull... | |
| In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. | |
| Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. | |
| It was love at first sight. | |
| 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... | |
| I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. | |
| Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. | |
| The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance... | |
| In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. | |
| You better not never tell nobody but God. | |
| 'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die.' | |
| It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. | |
| Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. | |
| If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. | |
| Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get... | |
| 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... | |
| When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson. | |
| Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins... | |
| 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... | |
| 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. | |
| | Opening Line | Novel Title | Author |
|---|
| 'Take my camel, dear,' said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. | |
| 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... | |
| The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. | |
| 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... | |
| Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. | |
| Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. | |
| I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. | |
| 'When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,' Papa would say, 'she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing... | |
| In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke... | |
| When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California... | |
| It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known... | |
| I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known... | |
| Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women. | |
| I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock... | |
| The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. | |
| I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright... | |
| He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. | |
| Psychics can see the color of time it's blue. | |
| In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. | |
| Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step... | |
| Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. | |
| 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... | |
| 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. | |
| They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. | |
| The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. | |
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