Learn Literary Opening Lines
Learn Literary Opening Lines with free spaced-repetition flashcards. Study 94 cards and track your memory as you go.
94 free flashcards · by Ben Jenkins · Arts & Literature / Literature
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What you'll learn in Literary Opening Lines
- Call me Ishmael. — Moby-Dick
- 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
- A screaming comes across the sky. — Gravity's Rainbow
- 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
- Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. — Lolita
- Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. — Anna Karenina
- riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. — Finnegans Wake
- It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. — 1984
- 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
- I am an invisible man. — Invisible Man
- The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. — Miss Lonelyhearts
- 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
- Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. — The Trial
- You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. — If on a winter's night a traveler
- The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. — Murphy
- 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 don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. — The Catcher in the Rye
- 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
- This is the saddest story I have ever heard. — The Good Soldier
- 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
- Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. — Ulysses
- It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. — Paul Clifford
- One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. — The Crying of Lot 49
- 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. — City of Glass
- Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. — The Sound and the Fury
- 124 was spiteful. — Beloved
- 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. — Don Quixote
- Mother died today. — The Stranger
- Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. — Waiting
- The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. — Neuromancer
- I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. — Notes from Underground
- Where now? Who now? When now? — The Unnamable
- Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.” — The Making of Americans
- In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. — The End of the Road
- It was like so, but wasn't. — Galatea 2.2
- —Money . . . in a voice that rustled. — J R
- Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. — Mrs. Dalloway
- All this happened, more or less. — Slaughterhouse-Five
- They shoot the white girl first. — Paradise
- For a long time, I went to bed early. — Swann's Way
- The moment one learns English, complications set in. — Chromos
- Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. — The Debut
- I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; — Pale Fire
- Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. — Their Eyes Were Watching God
- I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. — Ethan Frome
- Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation. — Alphabetical Africa
- There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. — The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
- 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. — The Old Man and the Sea
- It was the day my grandmother exploded. — The Crow Road
- I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. — Middlesex
- Elmer Gantry was drunk. — Elmer Gantry
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