Opening Lines Quotes

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”
― Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“It was a pleasure to burn.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whole misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“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

“Who is John Galt?”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.”
― Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

“In the beginning we were a group of nine.

Three are gone, dead.
There are six of us left.
They are hunting us, and they won't stop until they've killed us all.

I am Number Four.

I know that I am next.”
― Pittacus Lore, I Am Number Four

“Call me Ishmael.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Where shall we three meet again in thunder, lightning, or in rain? When the hurlyburly 's done, when the battle 's lost and won”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“That's why I love spiders. 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle

“If you're going to read this, don't bother.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“You think you know how this story is going to end, but you don't.”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”
― H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

“There are gods in Alabama: Jack Daniel's, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, Gods in Alabama

“There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

“Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

“There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.”
― Louis Sachar, Holes

“It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.”
― Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines