Best Ever Opening Lines In A Novel?

"This is my favourite book in all the world, though I have never read it."

Truth be told, there are very few questions that The Princess Bride isn't the right answer to.

Haha I assume you were being jocular when you asked 'who in the dickens wrote that?' :p Only because it was Dickens, my boy!

I love this topic, though, and I researched some others. Here are a few good ones:

"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)


"Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested." --Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925)


"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 (1850)


"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." --C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)

Ahh, yes takes me way back to "1984"

Of course I had to do the necessary research and the opening line actually was -

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

(note - Ken will post the most hellish reply to this)

Even though I prefer his version.

And I'm dead if he was talking about a different book.

I always like the simplicity of "Call me Ishmael." from Moby Dick.

For fans of opening lines, here's a collection of them (of which the one above is the first):

100 best first lines from novels

"Marley was dead: to begin with."

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins."

"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."

"American Psycho" - Brett Easton Ellis

Do news story headlines count?

I saw this one yesterday,

"Bride Postpones Wedding So Pet Lizard Can Get Chemotherapy"

VL

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

Offered as an outrigger to Bruce's contribution.

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

"Many years later when he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía remembered a distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." (anything by Marquez is so great as an opener)...

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

Call me Ishmael.

and of course

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.

(I guess that is two lines, sorry, I broke the rules)

hip hole and hupmobile - norman mailer, no idea of the book, never finished the first chapter

A long time ago....in a galaxy far far away.....

I couldn't resist looking up first lines from favorite books read in the past, and found a few more good opening lines:

"It was the day my grandmother exploded."
The Crow Road by Iain Banks

"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 by J.D. Salinger

"He was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken."
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

"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."
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (It's probably time to change the bait, ya think?)

"True!--nervous--very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?"
The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe

"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 by J.R.R Tolkien

"A screaming comes across the sky."
Gravity's Rainbow By Thomas Pynchon

"Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know."
The Stranger by Albert Camus

I really liked this one the first time I read it:

"Since they shot her at point-blank range while she was being kissed, she confused the pain of love with that of death."

Rosario Tijeras by Jorge Franco

Well, this one seems to have worked pretty well: "Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were."

And personally, one of my favorites would have to be: "The large ballroom was crowded with familiar ghosts come to help celebrate her birthday."

The opening lines in Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion is incomparable.

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"