100 best first lines from novels

Cannery row in Monterey California is a poem a stink agrating noise ,aauality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Steinbeck

From Murphy, "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new." is so typically, cynically, blankly Beckettian you have to love it, but one of my favourites still has to be the opening to Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, "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."

set the mould for so many angry teen angst novels I thrived on during high school...

"124 was spiteful" from Toni Morrison's "Beloved."

I'm glad this was on the list, we spent ages ruminating over these 3 words at uni!

It sets up, so concisely, the image of the haunted house, but in such an unfamiliar way. To create such a sense of unease in the reader in so few lines is remarkable.

"Once I was young and had so much more orientation and could talk with nervous intelligence about everything and with clarity and without as much literary preambling at this; in other words this is a story of an unself-confident man, at the same time of an egomaniac, naturally, facetious won't do - just to start at the beginning and let the truth seep out, that's what I'll do -."
Jack Kerouac, "The Subterraneans"

Cool list - I really enjoyed reading it.

From those hundred, I like:

"To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die." —Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)

And for defining the tone and attitude of the whole book in just one brilliant, enticing line:

"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." —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

In Catch-22, I think the second line is needed to really make the first line stand out: "It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him."

another recent book that had me at the first sentence was "You Shall Know Our Velocity!" by Dave Eggers:

"Everything within takes place after Jack died and before my mom and I drowned in a burning ferry in the cool Tannin-tinted Guaviare River, in East Central Colombia, with forty-two locals we hadn't yet met."

This is one of my favorite posts to Current. Thank you.

I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man.
--Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

"It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured." Shantaram
-Gregory David Roberts

Dear friend, I am writing to you because she said you listen and understand and didn't try to sleep with that person at that party even though you could have.

From what book? And no copying and pasting.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
—Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold"
-Hunter S. Thompson

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 (1813)

love that booook!!!

If all fossil fuels and their derivatives, as well as trees for paper and construction were banned in order to save the planet, reverse the Greenhouse Effect and stop deforestation...

Then there is only one known annually renewable natural resource that is capable of providing the overall majority of the world’s paper and textiles; meeting all of the world’s transportation, industrial and home energy needs; simultaneously reducing pollution, rebuilding the soil, and cleaning the atmosphere all at the same time…

And that substance is—the same one that did it all before—

Cannabis Hemp…Marijuana!

The Emperor Wears No Clothes...Jack Herer.

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

And then along came a tiger wearing a yellow cape...

Things were definitely not normal and then some...

Alright, I just made some of that up.

"My mother is standing in front of the bathroom mirror smelling polished and ready; like Jean Naté, Dippity Do and the waxy sweetness of lipstick."- Augusten Burroughs,Running with Scissors.

"It's so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself" Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish

Dr. Seuss

Athough not the first line a quote I enjoy is Shakespeare's love sonnet where he says, “Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme; ”

"A screaming comes across the sky". —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

"I write this sitting in the kitchen sink". —Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)

"When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing." —Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1983)

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, Jane Austen

What ever happened to pussy farts? - George Carlin

'I was working the hole with the sailor and we did not do bad.' (Burroughs, The Soft Machine)
'Shittr' (Jarry, Ubu Roi)
'FERRYSLIP:Three gulls wheel above the broken boxes, orangerinds, spoiled cabbage heads that heave between the splintered plank walls, the green waves spume under the round bow at the ferry, skidding on the tide, crashes, gulps the broken water, slides, settles slowly into the slip. Handwiches whirl with jingles of chains. Gates fold upwards, feet step out across the crack, men and women press through the manuresmelling wooden tunnel of the ferry-house, crushed and jostling like apples fed down a chute into a press.' (Passos, Manhattan Transfer--a cheat--but wow those 3 sentences!)
'Who am I?' (Breton, Nadja)
'Yes, Andres: that streak there over the grass, that's where the head rolls in the evening; someone picked it up once, thought it was a hedgehog.' (Büchner, Woyzeck)
'You're a fine armful now, Mary, with those twenty pounds you've gained.' (O'Neill, Long Day's Journey Into Night)

definitely "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)"

"Call me Ishmael."

Moby Dick is my winter project to get through.

it seems most peoples favorite lines are from the books they most admire.

49. It was the day my grandmother exploded. —Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)

Ahahahahaha love it.

"It was a lovely night, one of those nights, dear reader, which can only happen when you are young."
White Nights, Fyodor Dostoevsky

I have a few others but they are in spanish.

How can no one have said it was the best of times it was the worst of times.

"Once when I was six I saw a magnificent picture in a book about the jungle, called True Stories. It showed a boa constrictor swallowing a wild beast. Here is a copy of the picture."

Antoine De Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

Now i need to go home and flip through my books to find my favs!

one of my favorite lines in a book (sadly not the first) is Sarte's No Exit "Hell is other people"

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold"

- Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

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

- Stephen King, The Gunslinger

"When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton."

- J.R.R. Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring

"There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry."

- Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

"Horselover Fat's nervous breakdown began the day he got the phonecall from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals."

- Philip K. Dick, Valis

28. Mother died today. —Albert Camus, The Stranger

I feel so unoriginal, my two favorite opening sentences are both listed as number 1 and number 2.

"Call me Ishmael." From Moby Dick, I just love it.

And of course the first sentence from Pride and Prejudice.

I also like:
4. 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, One Hundred Years of Solitude

17. 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. —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

27. 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. —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

65. You better not never tell nobody but God. —Alice Walker, The Color Purple

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Gabriel Garcia Marquez , Love in the Time of Cholera

Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. —J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)

92. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. —Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921...
OR
88. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women. —Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)

It was a pleasure to burn. —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. —William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)

16. 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. —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

For sure.

38. All this happened, more or less. —Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
41. The moment one learns English, complications set in. —Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990)
47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. —C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)
62. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. —Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001)

Setting the reader up perfectly...

"Where now? Who now? When now?"

Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)

It was love at first sight. —Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

"Neuromancer" by William Gibson.

After reading that book like maybe a dozen times, I now see that the entire book is contained in that one brilliant, nihilistic sentence.