100 Best First Lines From Novels

Also by American Book Review. Here are some:

1. Call me Ishmael. ~ Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

2. 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)

5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

10. I am an invisible man. ~ Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. ~Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)

18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard. ~ Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)

24. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. ~ Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)

28. Mother died today. ~ Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert)

32. Where now? Who now? When now? ~ Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)

37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. ~ Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. ~ C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)

59. It was love at first sight. ~ Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)

64. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

78. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. ~ L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)

88. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women. ~ Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)

The whole list is here.