Thread by @lainitaylor

I've started a collection of great opening lines, and I thought I'd start a thread and add to it over time. Feel free to add your favorites too! (I haven't read all the books and stories; some I found on lists of great first lines.) >>>

"This is how Mortimer Tate ended up killing the first three human beings he'd laid eyes on in nearly a decade:"

--Victor Gischler
Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse

"My father lost me to the Beast at cards."

--Angela Carter
"The Tiger's Bride"

"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."

--David Lodge
Changing Places

"If Zoey Ashe had known she was being stalked by a man who intended to kill her and then slowly eat her bones, she would have worried more about that and less about getting her cat off the roof."

--David Wong
Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits

"We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck."

--MT Anderson
Feed

"You stop fearing the devil when you're holding his hand."

--April Tucholke
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

"They shoot the white girl first."

--Toni Morrison
Paradise

"Since it's Sunday and it's stopped raining, I think I'll take a bouquet of roses to my grave."

--Gabriel Garcia Marquez
"Someone Has Been Disarranging These Roses"

"Dear Anyone Who Finds This, Do not blame the drugs."

--Lynda Barry
Cruddy

"Where's Papa going with the axe?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the breakfast table.

--EB White
Charlotte's Web

"Beatrice did not wake up in heaven."

--CSE Cooney
"The Big Ba-Ha"

"The Scopuli had been taken eight days ago, and Julie Mao was finally ready to be shot."

--James SA Corey
Leviathan Wakes

"It was the day my grandmother exploded."

--Iain Banks
The Crow Road

"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."

--GK Chesterton
The Napoleon of Notting Hill

"Tap-dancing child abuser. That's what the Sunday New York Times from March 8, 1993 had called Vivi."

--Rebecca Wells
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

"Someone was looking at me, a disturbing sensation if you're dead."

--Laura Whitcomb
A Certain Slant of Light

"You know how sometimes when you're drifting off to sleep you feel that jolt, like you were falling and caught yourself at the last second? It's nothing to be concerned about, it's usually just the parasite adjusting its grip."

--David Wong
This Book is Full of Spiders

"When the core-drilling was halted at a depth of exactly 804.5 meters, one half mile down, Amy Guiterman and I conspired to grab immortality by the throat and shake it ill it noticed us."

--Harlan Ellison
"Chatting with Anubis"

"Putting the prairie dog in the library was a mistake.'

--Claire Vaye Watkins
Gold Fame Citrus

“It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size.”

-- Mark Lawrence
Red Sister

"Her name was Philippa Levens, fifth marchioness of Ipswich; and as she smiled at him, her eyes were as clear and bright and brown as they'd been on the day she died, wearing her fire like a bridal veil, on the seventeenth of June 1602."

--Tom Holt
Falling Sideways

"Down a path worn into the woods, past a stream and a hollowed-out log full of pill bugs and termites, was a glass coffin. It rested right on the ground and in it slept a boy with horns on his head and ears as pointed as knives."

--Holly Black
The Darkest Part of the Forest

"When Lilia was four years old, her mother filled a shallow dish with Lilia's blood and fed it to the boars that patrolled the thorn fence."

--Kameron Hurley
The Mirror Empire

"It's sunset, and the sky is aflame, not with clouds or dust, but with the iridescent feathers of a million genehacked passenger pigeons."

--Emily Suvada
This Mortal Coil

"On the morning of the best day of her life, Maud Flynn was locked in the outhouse singing 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic.'"

--Laura Amy Schlitz
A Drowned Maiden's Hair

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

--C.S. Lewis
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."

--Stephen King
The Dark Tower

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

--Ha Jin
Waiting

"This time there would be no witnesses."

--Douglas Adams
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

"It was now lunchtime and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had happened."

--Ernest Hemingway
"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"

"The man sitting across from me at the café was thinking about murdering his wife."

--Lori Brighton
The Mind Readers

"I've confessed to everything and I'd like to be hanged. Now, if you please."

--Franny Billingsley
Chime

"Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things."

--NK Jemison
The Fifth Season

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

--Zora Neale Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching God

"The two would-be jade thieves sweated in the kitchen of the Twice Lucky restaurant."

--Fonda Lee
Jade City

"There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife."

--Neil Gaiman
The Graveyard Book

"The magician's underwear has just been found in a cardboard suitcase floating in a stagnant pond on the outskirts of Miami."

--Tom Robbins
Another Roadside Attraction

"Ironically, since the attacks, the sunsets have been glorious."

--Susan Ee
Angelfall

"Later, when people talked about the fourteen, they called them survivors. It wasn't strictly true. All but one arrived after the deadly moment. They came alone or in pairs, some with their heads up and their eyes on the smoke."

--Elizabeth Knox
Wake

"I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles."

--Christopher Priest
The Inverted World

I'm going to add a few more awesome first lines! Ready?

"It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not."

--Paul Auster
City of Glass

"I write this sitting in the kitchen sink."

--Dodie Smith
I Capture the Castle

"Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass."

--Rose Macaulay
The Towers of Trebizond

"The great grey beast of February has eaten Harvey Swick alive."

--Clive Barker
The Thief of Always

"Do you want my recipe for disaster?"

--AM Holmes
May We Be Forgiven

"Nate Tucker found out about the apartment as people often learn about the things which change their lives forever--by sheer luck."

--Peter Clines
14

"Inside the pink-striped booth of the Asiatic professor only the marvelous existed and there was no such thing as daylight."

--Angela Carter
"The Loves of Lady Purple"

"It was my aunt who decided to give me to the dragon."

--Jessica Day George
Dragon Slippers

"The stranger came out of the sea like a water ghost, barefoot and wearing the scars of his journey."

--Samantha Shannon
The Priory of the Orange Tree

"Today is the two-hundredth anniversary of the final extinction of my One True Love, as close as I can date it."

--Charles Stross
Saturn's Children

"When the blind man arrived in the city, he claimed that he had traveled across a desert of living sand."

--Kevin Brockmeier
A Brief History of the Dead

"The manhunt extended across more than one hundred light years and eight centuries."

--Vernor Vinge
A Deepness in the Sky

"At the end, the bottom, the very worst of it, with the world afire and hell's flamewinged angels calling him by name, Lee Crane blamed himself."

--Theodore Sturgeon
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

"The cage was finished."

--Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Balthazar's Marvelous Afternoon

"'You are full of nightmares,' Harriet tells me."

--James Baldwin
This Morning, This Evening, So Soon

A few more great first lines to start the day! First, a favorite I maybe should have led with...

"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 & Prejudice ♥️

"No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine."

--Jane Austen
Northanger Abbey

"Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her."

--Jane Austen
Emma

"Nobody died that year."

--Renata Adler
Speedboat

"This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast."

--Kurt Vonnegut
Breakfast of Champions

"My brother Wallow has been kicking around Gannon's Boat Graveyard for more than an hour, too embarrassed to admit he doesn't see any ghosts."

--Karen Russell
"Haunting Olivia"

"This is a story about a wise man named Milo. It begins on the day he was eaten by a shark."

--Michael Poore
Reincarnation Blues

"There are places I'll remember all my life: Red Square with a hot wind howling across it, my mother's bedroom on the wrong side of 8-Mile, the endless gardens of a fancy foster home, a man waiting to kill me in a group of ruins known as the Theater of Death."

--Terry Hayes
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I Am Pilgrim

"Just when the idea occurred to her that she was being murdered she could not tell."

--Ray Bradbury
The Small Assassin

"When the sex tape happened and things went south with Fawn, the demon lover did what he always did."

--Kelly Link
I Can See Right Through You

"It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea."

--Philip Reeve
Mortal Engines

"When I was nine years old, I hid under a table and heard my sister kill a king."

--Frances Mary Hendry
Quest for a Maid

"...and last I heard, the sultan hadn't received his airplane and Cosgrove was still married to the ape."

--Mike Mignola
How Doctor Snap Murdered Professor Cyclops and What Came of It, or--The Prisoner of Mars