Best First Lines
- Description
- Novels that have excellent or memorable first lines. Started from American Book Review's 100 Best First Lines from Novels (http://americanbookreview.org/100bestlines.asp)
- Membres
- 7 membres participants
1
de Jane Austen
75,734 membres
1,316 critiques
½ 4.4
Score 16.02
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 12:07 PM
- 5 utilisateurs
- Aquila, merrystar, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
2
de C. S. Lewis
23,521 membres
237 critiques
4
Score 14.21
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:25 PM
- 6 utilisateurs
- Aquila, hipdeep, merrystar, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it
3
88,698 membres
1,155 critiques
½ 4.3
Score 13.63
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:24 PM
4
de Dodie Smith
8,856 membres
287 critiques
4.1
Score 11.75
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:45 PM
- 5 utilisateurs
- Aquila, merrystar, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
5
- 5 utilisateurs
- Aquila, hipdeep, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
6
34,675 membres
436 critiques
3.9
Score 10.96
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 12:10 PM
- 5 utilisateurs
- Aquila, hipdeep, merrystar, aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: 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.
7
- 5 utilisateurs
- hipdeep, merrystar, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: It was a pleasure to burn.
8
23,858 membres
517 critiques
½ 4.3
Score 9.16
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:22 PM
9
22,720 membres
472 critiques
4.1
Score 8.87
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:21 PM
10
de Mark Twain
40,733 membres
507 critiques
3.9
Score 8.53
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:09 PM
- 4 utilisateurs
- hipdeep, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: 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.
11
- 4 utilisateurs
- hipdeep, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: All this happened, more or less.
12
13
17,971 membres
328 critiques
4
Score 7.51
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:24 PM
- 4 utilisateurs
- hipdeep, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.
14
42,510 membres
660 critiques
4.2
Score 6.69
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 12:08 PM
- 3 utilisateurs
- hipdeep, aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: 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.
15
- 3 utilisateurs
- Aquila, hipdeep, aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
16
- 2 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Call me Ishmael.
17
- 2 utilisateurs
- ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- ManWithAnAgenda: No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.
18
66,540 membres
1,049 critiques
3.8
Score 5.97
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:11 PM
- 3 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: 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.
19
de Sylvia Plath
26,561 membres
478 critiques
4
Score 5.92
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:38 PM
- 3 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
20
7,418 membres
109 critiques
3.9
Score 5.75
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:13 PM
- 3 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.
21
14,834 membres
360 critiques
4
Score 5.74
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 05:58 PM
22
68,032 membres
1,106 critiques
3.9
Score 5.71
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:37 PM
- 3 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
23
de James Joyce
20,324 membres
201 critiques
½ 3.7
Score 5.67
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:12 PM
- 3 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: 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.
24
19,515 membres
252 critiques
4.1
Score 5.59
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:14 PM
- 3 utilisateurs
- hipdeep, aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: 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.
25
28,807 membres
422 critiques
4.1
Score 5.52
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:17 PM
- 3 utilisateurs
- hipdeep, aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: 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.
26
- 3 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: 124 was spiteful.
27
28
- 3 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Mother died today.
29
- 2 utilisateurs
- hipdeep, aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
30
- 3 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.
31
- 3 utilisateurs
- Aquila, aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
32
10,308 membres
237 critiques
4
Score 5.19
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:52 PM
- 3 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together.
33
- 2 utilisateurs
- ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- ManWithAnAgenda: My wound is geography.
34
de Alice Walker
18,600 membres
329 critiques
4.1
Score 5.07
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:37 PM
- 3 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: You better not never tell nobody but God.
35
- 3 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
36
5,937 membres
115 critiques
4.1
Score 4.97
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:31 PM
- 3 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.
37
6,239 membres
166 critiques
3.9
Score 4.93
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:28 PM
- 3 utilisateurs
- hipdeep, aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
38
- 3 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho' not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call'd me.
39
- 3 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
40
11,485 membres
133 critiques
3.8
Score 4.67
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:37 PM
- 3 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die."
41
- 2 utilisateurs
- hipdeep, aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
42
- 2 utilisateurs
- hipdeep, aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
43
- 2 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
44
45
- 2 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: 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.
46
- 2 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
47
15,404 membres
199 critiques
4
Score 4.02
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 12:11 PM
- 2 utilisateurs
- hipdeep, aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: I am an invisible man.
48
de Alan Gordon
113 membres
3 critiques
3.8
Score 4
Ajouté 2022-06-18, 08:45 AM
49
- 2 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
50
20,799 membres
160 critiques
½ 3.7
Score 3.77
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:22 PM
51
de H. G. Wells
17,227 membres
295 critiques
3.8
Score 3.68
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:23 PM
- 2 utilisateurs
- hipdeep, ahef1963
- Explications
- hipdeep: 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 being scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
52
11,898 membres
250 critiques
4.1
Score 3.67
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:11 PM
- 2 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
53
7,437 membres
154 critiques
4
Score 3.62
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:23 PM
54
- 2 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
55
- 2 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.
56
2,115 membres
71 critiques
½ 4.3
Score 3.5
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:23 PM
57
10,562 membres
190 critiques
½ 3.7
Score 3.46
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:15 PM
- 2 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: 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.
58
- 2 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
59
- 2 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: 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.
60
- 2 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: 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.
61
16,477 membres
221 critiques
4
Score 3.34
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:16 PM
- 2 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
62
13,807 membres
185 critiques
4.1
Score 3.27
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:22 PM
63
64
10,525 membres
172 critiques
4.2
Score 3.21
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:22 PM
- 2 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: For a long time, I went to bed early.
65
28,945 membres
485 critiques
3.8
Score 3.05
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:26 PM
- 2 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: 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.
66
10,340 membres
137 critiques
4.1
Score 3.04
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 12:08 PM
- Membre
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: A screaming comes across the sky.
67
744 membres
9 critiques
3.8
Score 3.04
Ajouté 2022-06-16, 10:52 AM
- Membre
- ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- ManWithAnAgenda: The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.
68
- 2 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
69
- 2 utilisateurs
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.
70
- Membre
- ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- ManWithAnAgenda: I am thirty years old and that is nothing.
71
- Membre
- ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- ManWithAnAgenda: Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
72
de Martha Wells
4,428 membres
294 critiques
4.1
Score 2.46
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 10:54 PM
73
74
75
de Nghi Vo
632 membres
21 critiques
3.8
Score 2.25
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 11:25 PM
76
de C. S. Lewis
8,252 membres
153 critiques
4.2
Score 2.2
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:22 PM
77
1,792 membres
44 critiques
3.9
Score 2.2
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 10:50 PM
78
10,025 membres
253 critiques
4.1
Score 2.15
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 05:59 PM
79
2,356 membres
42 critiques
3.9
Score 2.07
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 07:40 PM
80
4,648 membres
117 critiques
½ 3.7
Score 2.03
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 10:59 PM
81
- Membre
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
82
- Membre
- hipdeep
- Explications
- hipdeep: Once upon a time on a small, watery, excitable planet called Earth, in a small, watery, excitable country called Italy, a soft-spoken, rather nice-looking gentleman by the name of Enrico Fermi was born into a family so overprotective that he felt compelled to invent the atomic bomb.
83
225 membres
4 critiques
½ 3.7
Score 1.89
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:23 PM
84
85
86
98 membres
1 critique
4
Score 1.85
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:15 PM
- Membre
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: 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 house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
87
- Membre
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.
88
11,754 membres
143 critiques
4.1
Score 1.7
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:18 PM
- Membre
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man.
89
- Membre
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Where now? Who now? When now?
90
430 membres
3 critiques
3.2
Score 1.67
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:19 PM
- Membre
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. "Stop!" cried the groaning old man at last, "Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree."
91
- Membre
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: In a sense, I am Jacob Horner.
92
- Membre
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: It was like so, but wasn't.
93
- Membre
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: —Money . . . in a voice that rustled.
94
- Membre
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: They shoot the white girl first.
95
- Membre
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: The moment one learns English, complications set in.
96
- Membre
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane;
97
- Membre
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation.
98
- Membre
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: It was the day my grandmother exploded.
99
1,464 membres
43 critiques
4
Score 1.5
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:27 PM
- Membre
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Elmer Gantry was drunk.
100
- Membre
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.