Openings to Novels

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 bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way towards the lagoon.

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

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf stream and he had gone eight-four days now without taking a fish.

On an evening in the latter part of May, a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blackmoor or Blackmoor.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll 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 snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

All this happened, more or less.

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

When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.

Marianne answers the door when Connell rings the bell.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins

...I know, I understand, I shouldn't have done it.

My father's name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.

I am an invisible man.

Somebody must have made a false accusation against Josef K., for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong.

They're out there.

Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond.

Master was a little crazy; he had spent too many years reading books overseas, talked to himself in his office, did not always return greetings, and had too much hair.

Among other public buildings in the town of Mudfog, it boasts one which is common to most towns great or small, to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse there was born on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events, the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter.

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.

Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.

The day was flat

The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got nothing much to say. About anything.