First Lines of Novels

Hint

Answer

Call Me Ishmael

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

A screaming comes across the sky.

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia 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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

This is the saddest story I have ever heard.

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.

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

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.

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.

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.

Mother died today.

All this happened, more or less.

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.

It was the day my grandmother exploded.

It was a pleasure to burn.

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.

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

It was love at first sight.

Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

You better not never tell nobody but God.

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

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

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.

I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.

The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

I will not drink more than fourteen alcohol units a week.

At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin.

You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.

1801 – I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.

"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.

Amergo Bonasera sat in New York Criminal Court Number 3 and waited for justice; vengeance on the men who had so cruelly hurt his daughter, who had tried to dishonor her.

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills.

The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door.

ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn't seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, ‘Be My Baby’ on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.

To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.