First Lines that will Last and Last

First lines in stories are like first impressions. Good ones intrigue. They pull us in, make us eager to get to know the story, to learn what happens next. Here are some of my favorite first lines from great classic and contemporary stories I’ve read over the years. Some are simple, others elaborate. All of them are unforgettable. Except for the first one—my hands-down favorite first line of all time—they are in no particular order.

“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

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida.”—Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find.

“ ‘Where’s Papa going with that ax?’ said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.”—E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web.

“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.” —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”—Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

“Maggie and Ira Moran had to go to a funeral in Deer Lick, Pennsylvania.”—Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons.

“In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him.”—F.Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned.

“I am an invisible man.” —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal.”—Kurt Vonnegut, Harrison Bergeron.

“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.” —Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

“This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night.”—Raymond Carver, Cathedral.

“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”—John Irving, A Prayer For Owen Meany.

“Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.”—Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind.

“It was a pleasure to burn.”—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451.

“On the afternoon of October 12, 1990, my twin brother Thomas entered the Three Rivers, Connecticut Public Library, retreated to one of the rear study carrels, and prayed to God the sacrifice he was about to commit would be deemed acceptable.”—Wally Lamb, I Know This Much Is True.

“I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.”—Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome.

“First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey.”—Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

“124 was spiteful.” —Toni Morrison, Beloved

“ ‘Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,’ ” said Mrs. Ramsay.—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse.

“It was late and every one had left the café except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light.”—Ernest Hemingway, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.

“Theodore is in the ground.”—Caleb Carr, The Alienist.

“I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man.” —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground.

“In the next room Pavel Romanovich was roaring with laughter, as he related how his wife had left him.”—Vladimir Nabokov, A Slice of Life.

“Everything within takes place after Jack died and before my mom and I drowned in a burning ferry in the cool tannin-tinted Guaviare River, in East-Central Colombia, with forty-two locals we hadn’t yet met.”—Dave Eggers, We Shall Know Our Velocity.

“This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children’s eyes.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Offshore Pirate.

“Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.” —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

“Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.” —George Eliot, Middlemarch

“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

“The telephone rang, and Richard Maple, who had stayed home from work this Friday because of a cold, answered it: ‘Hello?’”—John Updike, Your Lover Just Called.

“Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.”—Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady.

“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”—Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis.

“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