There are novels that keep us hinged from the very first line we start reading them. Here is a list of some of the novels with best opening lines:
1) “Once upon a time, there was a prostitute called Maria. Wait a minute. “Once upon a time” is how all the best children’s stories begin and “prostitute” is a word for adults. How can I start a book with this apparent contradiction? But since, at every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss, let’s keep that beginning.”
—Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho.
2) “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
—Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
3) “Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself.”
—Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
4) “I was born in the city of Bombay…once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. The time matters, too.”
—Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
5) “It was a pleasure to burn.”
—Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
6) “All this happened, more or less.”
—Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
7) “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.'”
—The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
8) “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
—Murphy by Samuel Beckett
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, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
—A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
10) “Quietly, like a shadow, I watch this drama unfold scene by scene. I am the lucid one here, the dangerous one, and nobody suspects.”
—Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Triptych by Marie Vieux-Chauvet
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