First sentences in world literature

"I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man."

“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.”

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

"It was a pleasure to burn."

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

"Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested."

“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.”

"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."

"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."

"Mother died today."

"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."

"All this happened, more or less."

"For a long time, I went to bed early."

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."

"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."

"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed."

"Call me Ishmael."

"This morning Rino telephoned. I thought he wanted money again and I was ready to say no. But that was not the reason for the phone call: his mother was gone."

"We slept in what had once been the gymnasium."

"Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway. At 0627 hours on January 1, 1975, Alfred Archibald Jones was dressed in corduroy and sat in a fume-filled Cavalier Musketeer Estate facedown on the steering wheel, hoping judgement would not be too heavy upon him."

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect."

"To the worm who first gnawed on the cold flesh of my corpse, I dedicate with fond remembrance these Posthumous Memoirs"

"Snowman wakes before dawn."

"‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."