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
73,999 membres
1,286 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
22,814 membres
231 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
86,497 membres
1,135 critiques
½ 4.3
Score 12.05
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:24 PM
4
de Dodie Smith
8,717 membres
285 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
33,988 membres
433 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
23,374 membres
512 critiques
½ 4.3
Score 9.16
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:22 PM
9
22,063 membres
459 critiques
4.1
Score 8.87
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:21 PM
10
de Mark Twain
40,219 membres
500 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
17,560 membres
324 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
41,801 membres
646 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
64,997 membres
1,028 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
26,038 membres
463 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
7,290 membres
108 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
14,459 membres
354 critiques
4
Score 5.74
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 05:58 PM
22
66,472 membres
1,083 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
19,970 membres
199 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
19,415 membres
248 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
28,146 membres
404 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
de Jean Rhys
7,854 membres
234 critiques
½ 3.6
Score 5.25
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:54 PM
- 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
10,142 membres
228 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
18,248 membres
320 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
5,833 membres
111 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
6,155 membres
164 critiques
4
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
11,282 membres
131 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
25,643 membres
400 critiques
4
Score 4.32
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 11:01 PM
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
15,078 membres
192 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
112 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
20,551 membres
157 critiques
½ 3.7
Score 3.77
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:22 PM
51
de H. G. Wells
16,769 membres
290 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
11,674 membres
241 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
7,279 membres
151 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
2,039 membres
71 critiques
½ 4.3
Score 3.5
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:23 PM
57
10,383 membres
185 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
16,169 membres
216 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
13,626 membres
181 critiques
4.1
Score 3.27
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:22 PM
63
64
10,289 membres
165 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
28,341 membres
468 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
10,101 membres
135 critiques
4.1
Score 3.04
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 12:08 PM
- Membre
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: A screaming comes across the sky.
67
728 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
4,084 membres
277 critiques
4.1
Score 2.46
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 10:54 PM
73
74
75
de Nghi Vo
565 membres
17 critiques
½ 3.7
Score 2.25
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 11:25 PM
76
de C. S. Lewis
8,074 membres
151 critiques
4.2
Score 2.2
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:22 PM
77
1,765 membres
44 critiques
3.9
Score 2.2
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 10:50 PM
78
9,774 membres
243 critiques
4.1
Score 2.15
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 05:59 PM
79
2,300 membres
42 critiques
3.9
Score 2.07
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 07:40 PM
80
4,619 membres
113 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
218 membres
3 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
11,494 membres
142 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
406 membres
2 critiques
½ 3.3
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
1,434 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.