Some of My Favorite Opening Lines

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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.

 —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

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

 — L. P. Hartley (Leslie Poles Hartley), The Go-Between (1954)

I’m pretty much fucked. That’s my considered opinion.

 — Andy Weir, The Martian (2014)

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.

 —Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)

I was surprised to see a white man walk into Joppy’s bar.

 — Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990)

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.

 — J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

Justice? — You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.

 — William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)

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.

 — Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

Either foreswear fucking others or the affair is over.

 — Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater (1995)

If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head. As formative events go, nothing else comes close.

 — Brady Udall, The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint (2012)

All this happened, more or less.

 — Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.

— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)

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

— George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive….” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.

— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)

Mommy forgot to warn the new babysitter about the basement.

 — Kelley Armstrong, The Summoning (2008)

I’ve confessed to everything and I’d like to be hanged. Now, if you please.

 —Franny Billingsley, Chime (2011)

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

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.”

 — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can’t ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can’t lose what you lacked at conception.

 — James Ellroy, American Tabloid (1995)