10 of the Greatest Opening Lines in Classic Literature

(Read on a facebook wall -Classic Literature- some days ago)

Some books grab your attention from the very first sentence. Here are ten opening lines from classic literature that have stayed with readers across generations.

 

1. “Call me Ishmael.”

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville.

 

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

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

 

3. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.

 

4. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness...”

 A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

 

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

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.

 

6. “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.

 

7. “You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.”

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark

 

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

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

 

9. “1801. I have just returned from a visit to my landlord, the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.”

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.

 

10. “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.”

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.