List of first lines of famous literary works
“Utility ought to be the principal intention of every publication.” So reads the first line in the preface of the first edition (1768) of the Encyclopædia Britannica. The opening line of a work may be the most important sentence an author writes. Hook your readers at the outset or risk losing their interest, no matter how good the rest of the story is. Assuming we still have your attention, read on to discover the first lines of some of the world’s most famous works of literature.
• “Tell me about a complicated man.” —the Odyssey (c. 725–675 bce) attributed to Homer
• “Sun Tzu said: The art of war is of vital importance to the State.” —The Art of War (c. 5th century bce) attributed to Sun Tzu
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• “So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by / and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.” —Beowulf (c. 8th century ce) by an unknown author
• “In a certain reign there was a lady not of the first rank whom the emperor loved more than any of the others.” —The Tale of Genji (c. 1010) by Murasaki Shikibu
• “Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” —The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–21) by Dante
• “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 and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.” —Don Quixote (1605, 1615) by Miguel de Cervantes
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• “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” —The Social Contract (1762) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” —Pride and Prejudice (1813) by Jane Austen
• “Three hundred and forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago to-day, the Parisians awoke to the sound of all the bells in the triple circuit of the city, the university, and the town ringing a full peal.” —The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) by Victor Hugo
• “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism.” —The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
• “Call me Ishmael.” —Moby Dick (1851) by Herman Melville
• “When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only.” —Walden (1854) by Henry David Thoreau
• “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, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.” —A Tale of Two Cities (1859) by Charles Dickens
• “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” —Anna Karenina (1875–77) by Leo Tolstoy
• “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.” —Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) by Mark Twain
• “The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.” —The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) by Oscar Wilde
• “For a long time I used to go to bed early.” —In Search of Lost Time (1913–27) by Marcel Proust
• “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” —The Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz Kafka
• “Installed on the upper floors of certain respectable taverns in Lisbon can be found a small number of restaurants or eating places, which have the stolid, homely look of those restaurants you see in towns that lack even a train station.” —The Book of Disquiet (written c. 1915–35, published 1982) by Fernando Pessoa
• “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.…” —A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) by James Joyce
• “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” —Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf
• “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” —Out of Africa (1937) by Isak Dinesen
“You do see, don’t you, that she’s got to be killed?”
• “To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.” —The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck
• “Mother died today.” —The Stranger (1942) by Albert Camus
• “Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York.” —A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) by Betty Smith
• “On Friday, June 12th, I woke up at six o’clock and no wonder; it was my birthday.” —The Diary of a Young Girl (1947) by Anne Frank
• “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” —Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) by George Orwell
• “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.” —The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger
• “I am an invisible man.” —Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison
• “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 Old Man and the Sea (1952) by Ernest Hemingway
• “Where’s Papa going with that ax?” —Charlotte’s Web (1952) by E.B. White
• “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, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.” —The Adventures of Augie March (1953) by Saul Bellow
• “It was a pleasure to burn.” —Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury
• “Not long ago, there lived in London a young married couple of Dalmatian dogs named Pongo and Missis Pongo.” —The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956) by Dodie Smith
• “The sun did not shine.” —The Cat in the Hat (1957) by Dr. Seuss
• “Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond.” —Things Fall Apart (1958) by Chinua Achebe
• “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.” —To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee
• “They’re out there.” —One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) by Ken Kesey
• “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” —The Bell Jar (1963) by Sylvia Plath
• “When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan riders galloped up to our home in Omaha, Nebraska, one night.” —The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) by Alex Haley
• “The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’” —In Cold Blood (1966) by Truman Capote
“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.”
• “People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day.” —True Grit (1968) by Charles Portis
• “All this happened, more or less.” —Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut
• “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” —Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) by Hunter S. Thompson
• “It was so quiet, one of the killers would later say, you could almost hear the sound of ice rattling in cocktail shakers in the homes way down the canyon.” —Helter Skelter (1974) by Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry
• “All the world began with a yes.” —The Hour of the Star (1977) by Clarice Lispector
• “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” —The White Album (1979) by Joan Didion
• “You better not never tell nobody but God.” —The Color Purple (1982) by Alice Walker
• “When Augustus came out on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake—not a very big one.” —Lonesome Dove (1985) by Larry McMurtry
• “The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years—if it ever did end—began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.” —It (1986) by Stephen King
• “I never knew her in life.” —The Black Dahlia (1987) by James Ellroy
• “124 was spiteful.” —Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison
“To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.”
• “We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.” —Tracks (1988) by Louise Erdrich
• “The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.” —The Secret History (1992) by Donna Tartt
• “My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born.” —Angela’s Ashes (1996) by Frank McCourt
• “May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month.” —The God of Small Things (1997) by Arundhati Roy
• “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.” —Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997) by J.K. Rowling
• “Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.” —Waiting (1999) by Ha Jin
• “My first indication that food was something other than a substance one stuffed in one’s face when hungry—like filling up at a gas station—came after fourth-grade elementary school.” —Kitchen Confidential (2000) by Anthony Bourdain
• “Master was a little crazy; he had spent too many years reading books overseas, talked to himself in his office, did not always return greetings, and had too much hair.” —Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• “They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles.” —The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) by Junot Díaz
• “Listen. Dead people never stop talking.” —A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) by Marlon James