100 Best First Lines from Novels100 Best First Lines from Novels.doc

100 Best First Lines from Novels 1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville,?Moby-Dick?(1851) 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) 3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon,?Gravitys Rainbow(1973) 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?(1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa) 5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov,?Lolita?(1955) 6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy,?Anna Karenina?(1877; trans. Constance Garnett) 7. riverrun, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. —James Joyce,?Finnegans Wake?(1939) 8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell,?1984?(1949) 9. 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. —Charles Dickens,?A Tale of Two Cities?(1859) 10. I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison,?Invisible Man?(1952) 11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. —Nathanael West,?Miss Lonelyhearts?(1933) 12. You dont know about me without you have read a book by the name of?The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that aint no matter. —Mark Twain,?Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?(1885) 13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything tr