Thread by @CoffeewClassics

Nothing like a good hook to reel in the reader!

A Thread of the 50 Best Opening Lines in Classic Literature. 🧵 👇

1. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."

~Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

2. "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

3. "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

~George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

4. "Of arms and the man, I sing..."

~Virgil, The Aeneid

5. "I am an invisible man."

~Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man

6. "Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board."

~Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

7. "Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles..."

—Homer, The Iliad (Fagles, trans.)

8. "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."

~Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

9. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

~Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

10. "This is the saddest story I have ever heard."

~Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

11. "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..."

~J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

12. "I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased."

~Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From Underground

13. "All this happened, more or less."
—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

14. "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."

~Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

15. "Elmer Gantry was drunk."

~Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry

16. "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, 100 Years of Solitude

17. "It was a pleasure to burn."

~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

18. "Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy."

~Homer, The Odyssey (Fagles trans.)

19. "A screaming comes across the sky."

~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

20. "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."

~Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

21. "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."
~Samuel Beckett, Murphy

22. "He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."

~Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche

23. "Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested."

~Franz Kafka, The Trial

24. "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler."

~Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

25. "It was a dark and stormy night..."

~Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford

26. "One never knows when the blow may fall."

~Graham Greene, The Third Man

27. "Mother died today. Or maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure."

~Albert Camus, The Stranger

28. "Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave..."

~Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

29. "For a long time, I went to bed early."

~Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

30. "I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. If I call it a novel it is only because I don’t know what else to call it."

~W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

31. "Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu."

~Ha Jin, Waiting

32. "I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story."

~Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome

33. "Where now? Who now? When now?"
—Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

34. "Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that."

~ Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

35. "Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital..."

~Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

36. "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

37. "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

~L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between

38. "The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting."

~Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage

39. "I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of gods."

~C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

40. "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day."

~Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

41. "Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress."

~George Eliot, Middlemarch

42. "I returned from the City about three o’clock on that May afternoon pretty well disgusted with life."

~John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps

43. "In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together."

~Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

44. "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

45. "Call me Ishmael."

~Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

46. “All children, except one, grow up.”

~J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

47. “You better not never tell nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy.”

~Alice Walker, The Color Purple

48. "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 for the few people who grow up."

~G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill

49. "There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."

~ C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

50. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”

~J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

What's your favorite opening line in literature?

Did I miss it? Let me know.

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