The 25 Best Opening Lines in Western Literature

Hypoxia

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The 25 Best Opening Lines in Western Literature

1. “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.”

2. “It was a pleasure to burn.”

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

4. “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.”

5. “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”

6. “Mama died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.”

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

9. “They’re out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them.”

11. “Call me Ishmael.”

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

14. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

16. “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.”

17. “It was the day my grandmother exploded.”

18. “I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased.”

23. “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

24. “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.”

25. “The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling.”

I left out the loinger ones. So sue me.
 
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, . . ."
 
"We rode into the Burney, New Mexico just after noon on the 15th of March, 2357. "
 
“Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.”
 
How could you leave out:
"It was a dark and stormy night"?

I'm a Bulwer-Lytton fan and love the contests for the WORST first sentences in Anglish literature. But you truncated that opening. It's:
“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”
BTW my fave B-W Contest entry (so far) is:
“There's more than one way to skin a cat,” she mused, as she pinned its little feet to the dissection board.
Would that more LIT stories had such an entrancing opening.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, . . ."
Also truncated. It's:
“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.”
Quite a laundry list there. Almost an abstract data dump.
 
The 25 Best Opening Lines in Western Literature

Oh goody, a quiz!

1. “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.”

100 years of solitude?

2. “It was a pleasure to burn.”

no idea

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

1984

4. “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.”

Beloved? Toni Morrison

5. “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”

Metamorphoses. Kafka

6. “Mama died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.”

don't know

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

nope

9. “They’re out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them.”

familiar but I can't place it

11. “Call me Ishmael.”

no idea

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

Anna Karenina

14. “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

16. “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.”

Lolita -obvs

17. “It was the day my grandmother exploded.”

again familiar but I can't place it

18. “I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased.”

notes from the underground (Dostievsky probably not how you spell it)

23. “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

fear and loathing?

24. “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.”

no idea

25. “The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling.”

Trainspotting
 
A bunch of yawners we've been told we're supposed to worship.

I'll take this any day

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
 
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, . . ."

Oh God, its Dickens isn't it?

Great expectations?

No, Tale of Two Cities

And #11 on Hypoxia's list is probably Moby Dick. (William Somerset Maugham - NO! Herman Melville (my mistake caught by Pilot))
#24 - Old Man and the Sea? (Hemingway)
 
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Umm, all the answers (and snide interpretations) are in the OP link.
 
"Where's Papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.

Best opener ever.
 
"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." - probably an easy one! But one that always sticks in my mind.
 
My all time favorite: "There once was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." (C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader)




I'm a Bulwer-Lytton fan and love the contests for the WORST first sentences in Anglish literature. But you truncated that opening.

Or R. Richard may have been thinking of A Wrinkle In Time by Madeliene L'Engle, in which "It was a dark and stormy night" is the opening line in its entirety.
 
6. “Mama died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.”

don't know
L'Etranger by Albert Camus (the English title is usually "The Stranger", but it's also well-known by its French title in English.)

11. “Call me Ishmael.”

no idea
Moby Dick by Herman Melville


24. “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.”

no idea

I'd have thought this would be one of the easier ones on the list: Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea.
 
17 It was the day my grandmother exploded.
The Crow Road by Iain Banks

His Final book The Quarry had a pretty good opener
"Most people are insecure, and with good reason: not me."
 
My picks

1. “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”

(Quite obvious where this came from)

2. to wound the autumnal city.
So howled out for the world to give him a name.
The in-dark answered with wind.

(The whole story is similarly cryptic. The end is actually the first part of this sentence)

3. The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul erosion produced by high gambling — a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension — becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.

(Somebody with more than gambling on his mind)

4. He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead.

(Perhaps the most under appreciated masterpiece of all time)

5. The woman pushed on the baby's stomach and sucked its penis into her mouth; it was thinner than the American menthols she smoked and a bit slimy, like raw fish.

(You think that's creepy? Read the rest of the novel)

6. And just like that, everything changed. At that terrible moment, in our hearts, we knew… “home” was a pen… and humanity, cattle.”

(Okay, I may be playing fast and loose with the word literature, but manga should count)

7. Humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is alchemy's first law of Equivalent Exchange. In those days, we really believed that to be the world's one, and only truth.

(Same point as 6)

8. I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.

(A man who promised so much more than he delivered. What a tragic shame... )

I'll add more later. I admit that I had to look up most of the openings online, but the very fact that I remember the start being memorable says a lot.
 
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