I don't think any of my four novels have lines that will make the top 100 opening lines of all time. Even if I do like, 'The door opened inwardly, and air burst into the plane’s cabin, sucking the passengers towards it.' This will surely improve before Book 4 is finished, and maybe it will make the list!
American Book Review published a list of the top 100 opening lines from novels. You can find it at American Book Review. I am not going to copy them all here, but I will list my favourites. What do you think? Would these draw you in and make you want to read more?
American Book Review published a list of the top 100 opening lines from novels. You can find it at American Book Review. I am not going to copy them all here, but I will list my favourites. What do you think? Would these draw you in and make you want to read more?
- Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)
- 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 (1813)
- It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
- I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
- The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. —William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
- It was the day my grandmother exploded. —Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)
- I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. —Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)
- Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. —J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)
- High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. —David Lodge, Changing Places (1975)