A-Team Famous Opening Lines

Call me Ishmael.

Moby Dick, Herman Melville

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, Jane Austen

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, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

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

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

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

1984, George Orwell

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

I am an invisible man.

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

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.

Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

All this happened, more or less.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

For a long time, I went to bed early

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

It was a pleasure to burn

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

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

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.

Stephen Crane, Red Badge of Courage

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.

Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God