| Opening Line | Novella | Author |
|---|
| I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. | |
| Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes. | |
| Mother died today. | |
| During the winter of 1927-28 officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth. | |
| Marley was dead: to begin with. | |
| A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hill-side bank and runs deep and green. | |
| 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. | |
| The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. | |
| What determined the speech that startled him in the course of their encounter scarcely matters, being probably but some words spoken by himself quite without intention... | |
| One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous vermin. | |
| As usual, at five o'clock that morning reveille was sounded by the blows of a hammer on a length of rail hanging up near the staff quarters. | |
| A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of Rum Alley. | |
| A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard. | |
| It is a sin to write this. | |
| A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over: 'Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi! That’s all right!' | |
| I am a rather elderly man. | |
| Gustav Aschenbach, or von Aschenbach, as his official surname had been since his fiftieth birthday, had taken another solitary walk from his apartment... | |
| I am always drawn to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. | |
| Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it... | |
| No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's... | |
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