American Book Review 100 Best First Lines from Novels

[Richard Fiero]

http://www.litline.org/ABR/100bestfirstlines.html

100 Best First Lines from Novels

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)

3. A screaming comes across the sky. --Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

4. 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)

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