Famous Opening Lines

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Answer

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.

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

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

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.

'What's it going to be then, eh?' That was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.

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

Call me Ishmael.

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

Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of 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.

Two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona where we lay our scene.

Many years later, in front of the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon his father took him to see ice.

What a dump.

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.

'I have been here before,' I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.

When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.