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May 11, 2024 27 tweets 10 min read Read on X
Nothing like a good hook to reel in the reader!

A Thread of the 50 Best Opening Lines in Classic Literature. 🧵 👇 Dickens' Dream by Robert William Buss, 1875
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 By Thomas Gainsborough, Public Domain
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 Claude Lorrain: Landscape with Aeneas at Delos
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.) By Winslow Homer - https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=153005
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 Henry Fuseli: The Nightmare, 1781
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 Portrait of writer Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin by Ilya Repin, 1884
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 Image
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 The Bitter Drunk by Adriaen Brouwer, c.1630 - c.1638
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 Gogol burning the manuscript of the second part of "Dead Souls" (1909) by Ilya Repin
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 "Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus" by J.M.W. Turner
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 Jolly Flatboatmen in Port by George Caleb Bingham, 1857
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 The Duel After the Masquerade by Jean-Léon Gérôme
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 Ipatiev monastery in the winter night by Aleksey Savrasov, c.1870
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 Francisco Goya: Fire at Night
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 By Jean-François Millet
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 The Writer by Pericles Pantazis
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 Claude Monet - The Magpie
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 The Insane by Théodore Géricault, 1822 - 1823
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 John Everett Millais (1829-1896) - The Boyhood of Raleigh
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 Psyche's Wedding (Pre-Raphaelite, 1895) by Edward Burne-Jones
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 Lady Agnew of Lochnaw by John Singer Sargent
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 The Mulberry Tree by Vincent Van Gogh
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 Whaler and Fishing Vessels near the Coast of Labrador by William Bradford, 1880
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 Alyonushka (1881) by Viktor Vasnetsov
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 Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hal
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 The adventurer by Arnold Böcklin, 1882
What's your favorite opening line in literature?

Did I miss it? Let me know.

And if you enjoyed this thread, please consider sharing it and giving @coffeewclassics a follow.

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More from @CoffeewClassics

Jun 15
For Father’s Day, something different:

A thread of *rare family photos* of famous authors.

1. Charles Dickens with two of his daughters, Mary and Kate. Image
2. Tolstoy with one of his 14 kids, Lev, and a grandson, Pala. Image
3. Henry James with his father, at age 11. Image
Read 12 tweets
Jun 11
Nothing like a good hook to reel in the reader!

A Thread of the 50 Best Opening Lines in Classic Literature. 🧵 👇 Dickens' Dream by Robert William Buss, 1875
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 By Thomas Gainsborough, Public Domain
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 Claude Lorrain: Landscape with Aeneas at Delos
Read 27 tweets
May 29
Today is G.K. Chesterton's birthday, May 29, 1874.

Let's get him trending today.

In this thread, I have collected 25 of his best-loved quotes.

Which is your favorite? Share it, tell me about it, or post your own. 🧵👇 Image
“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”

~G.K. Chesterton
1/ Image
"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."

~G.K. Chesterton
2/ Image
Read 27 tweets
May 26
Poet Wilfred Owen was killed-in-action in 1918, one week before the First World War's end.

Among his papers was found, unfinished, what would become the preface to his posthumous poetry collection.

Read on, for a Memorial Day thread on the War Poets: 🧵👇 Field with Poppies by Van Gogh, 1890
Owens wrote:

"This book is not about heroes.

English Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.

Nor is it about deeds or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, dominion or power, except War... 2/ Field of Poppies by Claude Monet, 1881
"Above all, this book is not concerned with Poetry.

The subject of it is War, and the pity of War.

The Poetry is in the pity..." 3/ Poppy Field by Gustav Klimt, 1907
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Apr 27
On this day in 1882, writer Ralph Waldo Emerson breathed his last.

Emerson's transcendentalist worldview is not without its pitfalls, but it is *alive*. Few wrote about the possibilities of human achievement with more brilliance.

A thread of my favorite Emerson quotes: Image
15. "God will not have his work made manifest by cowards...

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string."

~Emerson, Self-Reliance The Oath of the Horatii by Jacques-Louis David
14. "Insist on yourself; never imitate.

Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation...

That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him."

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Apr 26
On this day in AD 121, the Philosopher Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, was born.

His diary (never meant for publication) is a reservoir of quotable sayings, preaching resilience and self-control. It's worth reading.

Here's a thread of my favorite lines from his Meditations: licensed from Adobe Stock
15. Be like the rock against which the waves break.

It stands firm and tames the fury of the waters around it. Waves Breaking on a Rocky Coast by David James, bef. 1904
14. Consider the past.

Empires rose and fell, and they will in the future, too.

So it is with a human’s life. Thomas Cole: The Course of Empire: Destruction
Read 17 tweets

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