All-Time Favourite Opening Sentences

These are the all-time favourite opening sentences as voted by viewers of openingsentences.com. To vote for your favourite or favourites, hit the "Vote" button on this page. If your favourite opening sentence is not already listed, please submit it here.

1	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, 1813	MORE
2	Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
	Lolita Vladimir Nabokov, 1955	MORE
3	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 JD Salinger, 1951	MORE
4	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 Charles Dickens, 1859	MORE
5	Call me Ishmael.
	Moby Dick Herman Melville, 1850	MORE
6	The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
	The Gunslinger Stephen King, 1982	MORE
7	All children, except one, grow up.
	Peter Pan JM Barrie, 1911	MORE
8	In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat; it was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort.
	The Hobbit JRR Tolkien, 1937	MORE
9	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.
	One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1967	MORE
10	Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
	Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy, 1873-7	MORE
11	There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
	The Voyage of the Dawn Treader CS Lewis, 1952	MORE
12	As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
	The Metamorphosis Franz Kafka, 1916	MORE
13	It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
	1984 George Orwell, 1949	MORE
14	The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
	The Go-Between LP Hartley, 1953	MORE
15	Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
	Rebecca Daphne De Maurier, 1938	MORE
16	In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
	The Great Gatsby F Sott Fitzgerald, 1925	MORE
17	What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me.
	Love Story Erich Segal, 1970	MORE
18	The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
	Neuromancer William Gibson, 1984	MORE
19	It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.
	Earthly Powers Anthony Burgess, 1980	MORE
20	A screaming comes across the sky.
	Gravity's Rainbow Thomas Pynchon, 1973	MORE
21	For some time I debated over whether I should start these memoirs at the beginning or at the end, that is, whether I should put my birth or my death in the first place.
	The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, 1881 (Tr. Gregory Rabassa, 1997)	MORE
22	Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.
	A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens, 1843
23	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 Miguel de Cervantes, 1605 (tr. Edith Grossman)	MORE
24	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.
	David Copperfield Charles Dickens, 1850	MORE
25	Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.
	Gone With the Wind Margaret Mitchell, 1936
26	If I could tell you one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head.
	The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint Brady Udall, 2001	MORE
27	It was a pleasure to burn.
	Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury, 1953	MORE
28	I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.
	The Lost Continent Bill Bryson, 1989	MORE
29	Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.
	Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston, 1937	MORE
30	All this happened, more or less.
	Slaughterhouse 5 Kurt Vonnegut, 1969
31	Let me say this: bein a idiot is no box of chocolates.
	Forrest Gump Winston Groom, 1986	MORE
32	Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.
	The Stranger Albert Camus, 1942	MORE
33	The capacity for friendship is God’s way of apologising for our families.
	The Last of the Savages Jay McInerney, 1996	MORE
34	The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
	Murphy Samuel Beckett, 1938	MORE
35	In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.
	A River Runs Through it Norman Maclean, 1989	MORE
36	It was love at first sight.
	Catch-22 Joseph Heller, 1961	MORE
37	You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax.
	If on a winter's night a traveller Italo Calvino, 1979	MORE
38	When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.
	The Day of the Triffids John Wyndham, 1951
39	It was the day my grandmother exploded.
	The Crow Road Iain Banks, 1992	MORE
40	I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
	I Capture the Castle Dodie Smith, 1948	MORE
41	In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.
	The Sot-Weed Factor John Barth, 1960	MORE
42	We are each the love of someone’s life.
	The Confessions of Max Tivoli Andrew Sean Greer, 2004	MORE
43	Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.
	Back When We Were Grownups Anne Tyler, 2001	MORE
44	It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
	Love in the Time of Cholera Gabriel Garcia Marques, 1985	MORE
45	I am a sick man...I am a wicked man. An unattractive man, I think my liver hurts.
	Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1864	MORE
46	There are people who can be happy anywhere. I am not one of them.
	A Field of Darkness Cornelia Read, 2006	MORE
47	My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.
	The Lovely Bones Alice Sebold, 2002	MORE
48	It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
	City of Glass Paul Auster, 1985	MORE
49	“I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one."
	Ender's Game Orson Scott Card, 1977	MORE
50	I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.
	Out of Africa Isak Dinesen (Karin Blixen), 1937	MORE
51	I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot," or "That Claudius," or "Claudius the Stammerer," or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius," am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled.
	I, Claudius Robert Graves, 1934	MORE
52	"Take my camel, dear," said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.
	The Towers of Trebizond Rose MacAulay, 1956	MORE
53	When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
	The Last Good Kiss James Crumley, 1978
54	This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.
	Breakfast of Champions Kurt Vonnegut, 1973
55	Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
	Lady Chatterley’s Lover DH Lawrence, 1928	MORE
56	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 John Steinbeck, 1939	MORE
57	First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.
	Something Wicked This Way Comes Ray Bradbury, 1962
58	No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
	War of the Worlds HG Wells 1898	MORE
59	That was a fabulous summer. Pérez Prado and his twelve- professor orchestra came to liven up the Carnival dances at the Club Terrazas of Miraflores and the Lawn Tennis of Lima; a national mambo championship was organized in Plaza de Acho, which was a great success in spite of the threat by Cardinal Juan Gualberto Guevara, Archbishop of Lima, to excommunicate all the couples who took part; and my neighborhood, the Barrio Alegre of the Miraflores streets Diego Ferré, Juan Fanning, and Colón, competed in some Olympic games of mini-soccer, cycling, athletics, and swimming with the neighborhood of Calle San Martín, which, of course, we won.
	The Bad Girl Mario Vargas Llosa, 2006 (tr. Edith Grossman, 2007)'	MORE
60	There was a pulse, a groove, a palpable crackle in the atmosphere that summer.
	The Last Ghost Dancer Tony Bender, 2010'	MORE
61	124 was spiteful.
	Beloved Toni Morrison, 1987	MORE
62	Winnie Katz’s lesbian dance class was like God. Mankind never saw it, but you always knew it was there.
	When the Cat’s Away Kinky Friedman, 1988
63	There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it.
	Cry the Beloved Country Alan Paton, 1948	MORE
64	Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
	The Trial Franz Kafka, 1925 (tr. Breon Mitchell)	MORE
65	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.
	The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain, 1884	MORE
66	He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.
	Orlando Virginia Woolf, 1928	MORE
67	May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.
	The God of Small Things Arundhati Roy, 1997	MORE
68	I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.
	Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte, 1847	MORE
69	For my 90th birthday I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of mad love with an adolescent virgin.
	A Memoir of My Sad Whores Gabriel Garcia Marques, 2004	MORE
70	I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
	Ethan Frome Edith Wharton, 1911	MORE
71	On the afternoon it rained frogs, sun perch, and minnows, Sunset discovered she could take a beating good as Three-Fingered Jack.
	Sunset and Sawdust Joe R Lansdale, 2004	MORE
72	“Conquer taste, and you will have conquered the self,” said Jagan to his listener, who asked, “Why conquer the self?” Jagan said, “I do not know, but all our sages advise us so.”
	The Vendor of Sweets RK Narajan, 1967	MORE
73	‘Twas said better to light a candle than to curse the dark, but in the town of New York in the summer of 1702 one might do both, for the candles were small and the dark was large.
	The Queen of Bedlam Robert McCammon, 2007	MORE
74	Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.
	The Violent Bear it Away Flannery O'Connor, 1960	MORE
75	I did not realize for a long time that I was dead.
	Possessing the Secret of Joy Alice Walker, 1992	MORE
76	I don't know if my story is good enough to be a tragedy, although a lot of shitty stuff did happen.
	Theft Peter Carey, 2006	MORE
77	Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.
	Cannery Row John Steinbeck, 1939	MORE
78	It was now lunchtime and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining-tent pretending that nothing had happened.
	The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber Ernest Hemingway, 1938	MORE
79	The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.
	The Red Badge of Courage Stephen Crane, 1895	MORE
80	There is an old legend that somewhere in the world every man has his double.
	The Tenth Man Graham Greene, 1985
81	Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.
	Waiting Ha Jin, 1999	MORE
82	All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths.
	The Inheritance of Loss Kiran Desai, 2006	MORE
83	Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.
	The Tin Drum Gunter Grass, 1959	MORE
84	The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail.
	Jaws Peter Benchley, 1974	MORE
85	Christmas crept into Pine Cove like a creeping Christmas thing: dragging garland, and sleigh bells, oozing eggnog, reeking of pine, and threatening festive doom like a coldsore under the mistletoe.
	The Stupidest Angel: A Tale of Christmas Terror Christopher Moore, 2004	MORE
86	My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that.
	Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I've Learned Alan Alda, 2006	MORE
87	When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture of the Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.
	The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Haruki Murakami, 1997	MORE
88	When a journey begins badly it rarely ends well.
	The Floating Island Jules Verne, 1895
89	Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
	Ulysses James Joyce, 1922	MORE
90	One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.
	The Crying of Lot 49 Thomas Pynchon, 1966	MORE
91	I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975.
	The Kite Runner Khaled Hosseini, 2003	MORE
92	My brother Ward was once a famous man.
	The Paperboy Pete Dexter, 1995	MORE
93	All children become sad in the late afternoon, for they begin to comprehend the passage of time.
	The Theory of Clouds Stephane Audeguy, 2005 (tr. Timothy Bent, 2007)	MORE
94	I can almost touch the diamond-hard light of stars and the silky slipperiness of leaves, almost taste smoke softer than clouds and sweeter than memory, almost feel God’s breath burn off my sins.
	Leave It to Me Bharati Mukherjee, 1997	MORE
95	It was bitter cold, the air electric with all that had not happened yet.
	A Reliable Wife Robert Goolrick, 2009	MORE
96	A pickle may not remember getting pickled, but that doesn’t make it a cucumber.
	Coyote Linda Barnes, 1991	MORE
97	For a long time, I went to bed early.
	Swann's Way Marcel Proust, 1913 (tr. Lydia Davis)	MORE
98	Lyddie Berry heard the clatter of the geese and knew something was coming--Cousin Betsey, Grandson Nate, another wolf, or, knowing those fool birds, a good gust of wind--but when she heard the door snap hard against the clapboards she discounted all four of them; she whirled with the wind already in her skirts to see the Indian, Sam Cowett, just ducking beneath the lintel.
	The Widow’s War Sally Gunning, 2006	MORE
99	My mother is a virgin. (Trust me.)
	Emotionally Weird Kate Atkinson, 2000
100	“In five years, the penis will be obsolete”, said the salesman.
	Steel Beach John Varley, 1992	MORE

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