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)
1
de Jane Austen
80,581 membres
1,368 critiques
½ 4.4
Score 16.02
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 12:07 PM
- 5 Members
- 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
25,369 membres
257 critiques
4
Score 14.23
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:25 PM
- 6 Members
- Aquila, hipdeep, merrystar, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it
3
94,302 membres
1,189 critiques
½ 4.3
Score 13.63
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:24 PM
4
de Dodie Smith
9,200 membres
294 critiques
4.1
Score 11.75
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:45 PM
- 5 Members
- Aquila, merrystar, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
5
- 5 Members
- Aquila, hipdeep, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
6
36,627 membres
456 critiques
3.9
Score 10.98
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 12:10 PM
- 5 Members
- 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 Members
- hipdeep, merrystar, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: It was a pleasure to burn.
8
24,820 membres
530 critiques
½ 4.3
Score 9.16
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:22 PM
9
24,659 membres
525 critiques
4.1
Score 8.87
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:21 PM
10
de Mark Twain
42,947 membres
518 critiques
3.9
Score 8.53
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:09 PM
- 4 Members
- 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 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: All this happened, more or less.
12
13
19,103 membres
345 critiques
4
Score 7.51
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:24 PM
- 4 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.
14
44,413 membres
693 critiques
4.2
Score 6.7
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 12:08 PM
- 3 Members
- 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 Members
- Aquila, hipdeep, aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
16
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Call me Ishmael.
17
- 2 Members
- 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
69,524 membres
1,078 critiques
3.8
Score 5.97
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:11 PM
- 3 Members
- 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
28,088 membres
501 critiques
4
Score 5.92
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:38 PM
- 3 Members
- 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
15,953 membres
385 critiques
4
Score 5.76
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 05:58 PM
21
7,663 membres
113 critiques
3.9
Score 5.75
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:13 PM
- 3 Members
- 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.
22
72,102 membres
1,168 critiques
3.8
Score 5.71
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:37 PM
- 3 Members
- 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
21,203 membres
217 critiques
½ 3.7
Score 5.67
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:12 PM
- 3 Members
- 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
20,665 membres
275 critiques
4.1
Score 5.61
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:14 PM
- 3 Members
- 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
30,505 membres
449 critiques
4.1
Score 5.52
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:17 PM
- 3 Members
- 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 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: 124 was spiteful.
27
28
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Mother died today.
29
- 2 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
30
de Jean Rhys
8,454 membres
254 critiques
½ 3.5
Score 5.25
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:54 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.
31
- 3 Members
- 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
7,889 membres
168 critiques
4
Score 5.19
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:23 PM
- 3 Members
- hipdeep, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- hipdeep: Taran wanted to make a sword, but Coll, charged with the practical side of his education, decided on horseshoes.
33
10,716 membres
243 critiques
4
Score 5.19
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:52 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together.
34
- 2 Members
- ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- ManWithAnAgenda: My wound is geography.
35
de Alice Walker
19,714 membres
335 critiques
4.1
Score 5.07
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:37 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: You better not never tell nobody but God.
36
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
37
6,222 membres
115 critiques
4.1
Score 4.97
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:31 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.
38
6,524 membres
171 critiques
3.9
Score 4.94
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:28 PM
- 3 Members
- 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.
39
- 3 Members
- 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.
40
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
41
12,042 membres
138 critiques
½ 3.7
Score 4.67
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:37 PM
- 3 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die."
42
- 2 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
43
- 2 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
44
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
45
26,425 membres
399 critiques
4
Score 4.32
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 11:01 PM
46
- 2 Members
- 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.
47
- 2 Members
- 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.
48
16,373 membres
212 critiques
4
Score 4.04
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 12:11 PM
- 2 Members
- hipdeep, aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: I am an invisible man.
49
de Alan Gordon
118 membres
3 critiques
½ 3.7
Score 4
Ajouté 2022-06-18, 08:45 AM
50
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
51
21,964 membres
168 critiques
½ 3.7
Score 3.77
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:22 PM
52
de H. G. Wells
18,383 membres
309 critiques
3.8
Score 3.68
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:23 PM
- 2 Members
- 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.
53
12,515 membres
258 critiques
4.1
Score 3.67
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:11 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
54
2,328 membres
38 critiques
4
Score 3.6
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:44 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
55
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.
56
2,337 membres
78 critiques
½ 4.3
Score 3.5
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:23 PM
57
10,989 membres
194 critiques
½ 3.7
Score 3.46
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:15 PM
- 2 Members
- 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 Members
- 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 Members
- 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 Members
- 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
17,266 membres
226 critiques
4
Score 3.34
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:16 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
62
14,399 membres
192 critiques
4
Score 3.28
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:22 PM
63
64
11,127 membres
183 critiques
4.2
Score 3.21
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:22 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- aethercowboy: For a long time, I went to bed early.
65
30,698 membres
505 critiques
3.8
Score 3.05
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:26 PM
- 2 Members
- 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
10,746 membres
142 critiques
4.1
Score 3.04
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 12:08 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: A screaming comes across the sky.
67
776 membres
9 critiques
3.8
Score 3.04
Ajouté 2022-06-16, 10:52 AM
- Member
- 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 Members
- 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 Members
- 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
22,393 membres
243 critiques
½ 3.7
Score 2.87
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:42 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.
71
3,545 membres
77 critiques
½ 3.5
Score 2.84
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:45 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash.
72
- Member
- ManWithAnAgenda
- Explications
- ManWithAnAgenda: I am thirty years old and that is nothing.
73
9,178 membres
168 critiques
4.2
Score 2.81
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:48 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot," or "That Claudius," or "Claudius the Stammerer," or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius," am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled.
74
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space
75
11,143 membres
128 critiques
½ 3.4
Score 2.75
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:55 PM
- 2 Members
- aethercowboy, ahef1963
- Explications
- aethercowboy: The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.
76
- Member
- 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.
77
de Martha Wells
5,486 membres
343 critiques
4.1
Score 2.46
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 10:54 PM
78
79
80
de Nghi Vo
804 membres
29 critiques
½ 3.7
Score 2.25
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 11:25 PM
81
de C. S. Lewis
8,812 membres
153 critiques
4.2
Score 2.2
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:22 PM
82
1,874 membres
43 critiques
3.9
Score 2.2
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 10:50 PM
83
10,694 membres
268 critiques
4.1
Score 2.15
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 05:59 PM
84
2,519 membres
45 critiques
3.9
Score 2.07
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 07:40 PM
85
4,882 membres
121 critiques
½ 3.7
Score 2.03
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 10:59 PM
86
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
87
- Member
- 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.
88
238 membres
4 critiques
3.8
Score 1.89
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:23 PM
89
90
100 membres
1 critique
4
Score 1.85
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:15 PM
- Member
- 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.
91
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.
92
12,515 membres
155 critiques
4.1
Score 1.7
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:18 PM
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man.
93
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: Where now? Who now? When now?
94
de John Scalzi
2,359 membres
103 critiques
3.8
Score 1.67
Ajouté 2022-06-17, 01:24 PM
95
445 membres
3 critiques
3.1
Score 1.67
Ajouté 2022-06-15, 01:19 PM
- Member
- 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."
96
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: In a sense, I am Jacob Horner.
97
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: It was like so, but wasn't.
98
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: —Money . . . in a voice that rustled.
99
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: They shoot the white girl first.
100
- Member
- aethercowboy
- Explications
- aethercowboy: The moment one learns English, complications set in.