Great First Lines

1. Great First Lines Peggy Korman CNM

2. First lines of a novel. The first line sets the scene, the tone, sheds just enough light on the upcoming story to make you keep reading.

3. A great first line stays with you long after you finish the novel.

4. “I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong hills.”

5. Out of Africa

6. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

7. A Tale of Two Cities

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

9. Pride and Prejudice

10. “All children, except one, grow up.”

11. Peter Pan

12. “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

13. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

14. “Call me Ishmael.”

15. Moby Dick

16. “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversation?”

17. Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland

18. “On May 18,1860, the day when the Republican Party would nominate its candidate for president, Abraham Lincoln was up early.”

19. Team of Rivals

20. “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I d0n’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

21. The Cather in the Rye J.D. Salinger

22. “From the west-facing window of the room in which Meriwether Lewis was born on August 18,1774, one could look out at Rockfish Gap, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, an opening to the West that invited exploration.”

23. Undaunted Courage Merriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West Stephen Ambrose

24. “A mile above OZ, the witch balanced on the wind’s forward edge, as if she were a green fleck of the land itself, flung up and sent wheeling away by the turbulent air.”

25. Gregory Maguire Wicked

26. “The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails and was at rest.”

27. Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness

28. “When he was thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.”

29. Harper Lee To Kill a mockingbird

30. “In the cold, nearly colorless light of a New England winter, two men on horseback traveled the coast road below Boston, heading north.

31. David McCollough John Adams