Introducing a story to a reader is a lot like dropping a pickup line on someone: do it the wrong way and they’ll wind up under the covers with a different… book.
Here to show you how it’s done are the top twenty-five cold openings in Western literature. For some additional insight, we’ve included speculations as to the thought process that might have influenced each author’s writing. Enjoy!
1. Ice, Ice Ba—Whaaat?
Opener: “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.”
Book: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Author: Gabriel García Márquez
Creative Thought Process: Before getting into that whole “ice” thing, unceremoniously mention that Buendía eventually has to stare down a firing squad. That’ll buy at least a hundred pages of curiosity.
2. A Real Page-Burner
Opener: “It was a pleasure to burn.”
Book: Fahrenheit 451
Author: Ray Bradbury
Creative Thought Process: Juxtapose the anarchic verb “to burn” with an alluring noun like “pleasure.” Hope a major cigarette company doesn’t steal the phrase some forty years down the road.
3. April Cowers
Opener: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
Book: 1984
Author: George Orwell
Creative Thought Process: To properly set the mood for a futuristic dystopia, combine the elements of springtime, coldness, an unlucky number, and bells tolling. Then, watch people fight over the feasibility of a clock that can strike thirteen.
4. Post-Partum Possession
Opener: “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.”
Book: Beloved
Author: Toni Morrison
Creative Thought Process: Make the subject of the sentence an obscure sequence of numbers to get the reader’s attention. In case that doesn’t work, follow up with a terrifying, baby-related metaphor.
5. F. M. L.
Opener: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”
Book: Metamorphosis
Author: Franz Kafka
Creative Thought Process: Ease the reader into Gregor Samsa’s misfortunes by describing his nightsweats about… Meh, skip to the giant cockroach.
6. Ve Believe In Nah-sing, Lebowski!
Opener: “Mama died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.”
Book: The Stranger
Author: Albert Camus
Creative Thought Process: In order to sell the whole involuntary-manslaughter thing, start by making the guy seem detached. Okay, more detached. Just a little more. PERFECT!
7. Hole-y Middle-earth, Batman!
Opener: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”
Book: The Hobbit
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien
Creative Thought Process: In the interest of thoroughness, approach the most epic alternate universe in all of literature by starting with a hole in the ground.
8. Gray-Per-View
Opener: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
Book: Neuromancer
Author: William Gibson
Creative Thought Process: Methinks I shall write the greatest opening line ever. Donesies.
9. Out There
Opener: “They’re out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them.”
Book: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Author: Ken Kesey
Creative Thought Process: First, open with something that conveys paranoia. Mentioning the ambiguous ol’ “they” is a good start, but driving it home will require something more specific. Hmm…
10. Fragile: Do Not Stack
Opener: “When I was three and Bailey four, we had arrived in the musty little town, wearing tags on our wrists which instructed – ‘To Whom It May Concern’ – that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson Jr., from Long Beach, California, en route to Stamps, Arkansas, c/o Mrs. Annie Henderson.”
Book: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Author: Maya Angelou
Creative Thought Process: Casually inform the reader that these children might not be in the best hands. Start by Fed-Ex-ing them 1,600 miles.
11. Hi, My Name Is (WHAT?!)
Opener: “Call me Ishmael.”
Book: Moby-Dick
Author: Herman Melville
Creative Thought Process: Well, you should probably include at least one short sentence.
12. …Goes To-gether Like a Horse and Car-riage!
Opener: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Book: Anna Karenina
Author: Leo Tolstoy
Creative Thought Process: Give the readers an impossibly oversimplified statement about mankind, then sit back and watch them realize that it’s actually true.
13. The Reckonin’
Opener: “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. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.”
Book: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Author: Mark Twain
Creative Thought Process: Write a 43-chapter novel entirely in rural slang. From the perspective of a 13-year-old boy. Who’s uneducated. While you’re at it, make it the greatest novel in American history.
14. Universal Spoof
Opener: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
Book: Pride and Prejudice
Author: Jane Austen
Creative Thought Process: Write sarcastically during an era so prudish that future generations will actually mistake you as being serious.
15. Whatever, Nevermind
Opener: “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.”
Book: The Catcher in the Rye
Author: J.D. Salinger
Creative Thought Process: Offhandedly trash-talk the classics, gloss over any specifics, and leave everyone wanting more. Make sure Holden, the narrator, is one hundred percent unable to repeat this technique on women.
16. Great Balls of Fire
Opener: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.”
Book: Lolita
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Creative Thought Process: Subtly allude to the fact that the love interest is only thirteen by writing her name in the diminutive, “-ita” form. Throwing the word “sin” in there probably isn’t a bad idea either.
17. Bombs Over Bag-Lady
Opener: “It was the day my grandmother exploded.”
Book: The Crow Road
Author: Iain Banks
Creative Thought Process: Open with a bang. Scratch that – open with a violent human combustion. See where it takes you…
18. Old Man Liver
Opener: “I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased.”
Book: Notes from the Underground
Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
Creative Thought Process: Start with some creepy character building. Sick? Check. Spiteful? Check. Unattractive? Check. TMI? Double check.
19. Prose In Different Area Codes
Opener: “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, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
Book: A Tale of Two Cities
Author: Charles Dickens
Creative Thought Process: It was earth, it was sky, it was sun, it was moon, it was salt, it was pepper… Um…
20. That Peaceful, Queasy Feeling
Opener: “My mother is standing in front of the bathroom mirror smelling polished and ready; like Jean Naté, Dippity Do and the waxy sweetness of lipstick. Her white, handgun-shaped blow-dryer is lying on top of the wicker clothes hamper, ticking as it cools. She stands back and smoothes her hands down the front of her swirling, psychedelic Pucci dress, biting the inside of her cheek. ’Damn it,’ she says, ’something isn’t right.’”
Book: Running with Scissors
Author: Augusten Burroughs
Creative Thought Process: Throw the reader into the body of an innocent young kid. Drop some hints that mom may be a lot of work. Buckle up; this ain’t The Brady Bunch.
21. Nowhere Man
Opener: “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”
Book: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Author: Douglas Adams
Creative Thought Process: Put the readers in their place. You know, light-eons away from anything of significance.
22. A Nicens Little Title
Opener: “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.”
Book: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Author: James Joyce
Creative Thought Process: What haven’t you tried yet ah yes baby talk that will be new.
23. Road Trippin’
Opener: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”
Book: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Author: Hunter S. Thompson
Creative Thought Process: Dropkick the readers into chaos. Right after dropping some… ahem.
24. Shark Bait Hoo-Ha-Ha!
Opener: “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.”
Book: The Old Man and the Sea
Author: Ernest Hemingway
Creative Thought Process: Write about an old, grizzled man’s man who takes on an entire ocean. To distract everyone from the fact that mother used to dress you as a girl.
25. Scottish Rogue
Opener: “The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling.”
Book: Trainspotting
Author: Irvine Welsh
Creative Thought Process: If readin aboot heroin junkies disnae make ya sweat, readin throo mah brogue will.
“All this happened, more or less.” – Kurt Vonnegut, _Slaughterhouse-Five_
Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It – “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.”
And the final line — ” I am haunted by waters.”
“Camped beside the mountain that should not have been there, wrapped in cold desert darkness, Edward Shaw could not sleep.”
– Greg Bear “The Forge of God”
[...] Schmoop picks The 25 Best Opening Lines in Western Literature. [...]
“It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain, he fell madly in love with him.” -Catch-22, Joseph Heller
“Who is John Galt?”
I concur with those who have also said, “The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.” No opening line on this list gives me chills like that short sentence does.
What about Ender’s Game? “‘I’ve watched through his eyes, I’ve listened through his ears, and I tell you he’s the one.’”
“You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.” Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights. City
How is that not on the list, probably one of the most intriquing opening lines ever
Where’s Holden Caufield?!
MASON CITY.
“To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new. Or was new, that day we went up it. You look up the highway and it is straight for miles, coming at you, with the black line down the center coming at and at you, black and slick and tarry-shining against the white of the slab, and the heat dazzles up from the white slab so that only the black line is clear, coming at you with the whine of the tires, and if you don’t quit staring at that line and don’t take a few deep breaths and slap yourself hard on the back of the neck you’ll hypnotize yourself and you’ll come to just at the moment when the right front wheel hooks over into the black dirt shoulder off the slab, and you’ll try to jerk her back on but you can’t because the slab is high like a curb, and maybe you’ll try to reach to turn off the ignition just as she starts the dive.”
Robert Penn Warren, All The King’s Men
I nominate the first sentence of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne for the best first sentence in the English speaking world.
“I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what they were then doing;-that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;-and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;-Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,-I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me.”
My favorite is Jane Austen, but here’s another good one. It’s rather long, but here it is: To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem’s fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury. His left arm was somewhat shorter than his right; when he stood or walked, the back of his hand was at right angles to his body, his thumb parallel to his thigh. He couldn’t have cared less, so long as he could pass and punt.
When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.
What about Earthly powers by Anthony Burgess
“It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.”
I agree with several others here: I think one of the most memorable opening lines of all time is Stephen King’s, “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
I wonder what you guys would say about these two openings:
“She was right when she said that my life is going to be like the day I was born, the umbilical cord is wrapping me from head to feet.
In the womb I was a zygote just like everybody else, except, it was fate that destined this zygote while in the blastocyst phase to undergo a dextrorotation. I don’t know left to right people are or right to left, I know the whole world is spinning like the pilgrimage in Mecca while you’re viewing it from the top.”
——-
“If you ever manage to read these words Louise, or ever manage to figure me out, I want you to know that I always had you in my heart. I’ve known you as the Angel of the Shadow, and ever since I became the Shadow of the Angel, ever grabbed the rainbow that night would’ve been you the last and the only love of my Heart … These words are for you.”
[...] The 25 Best Opening Lines in Western Literature [...]
“Now is the winter of our discontent” – Richard III
The opening of One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of my all time favorites. Was a bit surprised that Sabatini’s Scaramouche didn’t make the cut. I recall it’s first sentence as: He was born with the gift of laughter and with a feeling that the world was mad, and this was his entire inheritance.
[...] Schmoop picks The 25 Best Opening Lines in Western Literature. [...]
“What’s it going to be then, eh?”
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter basard though dry.”
-Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.
-Their Eyes Were Watching God
- Zora Neale Hurston
Makes you wonder doesn’t it?
To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.
-The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
It’s a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.” – First lines from Matilda by Roald Dahl
Every R. Dahl book has an outstanding first line….
Here’s the opening of Richard Peck’s “The Teacher’s Funeral: A Comedy in Three Acts”:
“If your teacher has to die, August isn’t a bad time of year for it. You know August. The corn is earring. The tomatoes are ripening on the vine. The clover’s in full bloom. There’s a little less evening now, and that’s a warning. You want to live every day twice over because you’ll be back in the jailhouse of school before the end of the month.
“Then our teacher, Miss Myrt Arbuckle, hauled off and died. It was like a miracle, though she must have been forty. …”
How about books that begin and end with the same sentence? There is a Robert B. Parker Spencer novel with “She slapped my face” as the beginning and the end but I cannot now remember or locate it (I work in a library and have checked many of his books). Any help?
Enjoyed this list, by the way.
I love how we’ve all memorized the first lines of our favorite books…I love book nerds! Haha! I’m surprised Fahrenheit 451 isn’t #1 though because to me that’s the ultimate first line that will ever be written ever.
I love reading all of these, but this might be my favorite:
“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”
- The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
And I agree with Flora that ““You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.” from Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City is also one of the all-time great starters!
I can’t believe you overlooked the memorable opening lines from Frank McCourt’s coming-of-age memoir, Angela’s Ashes: “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”
“They shoot the white girl first.”
Chilling; from Paradise by Toni Morrison.
“The telephone rang, and she knew she was going to die.”
QUEEN OF THE SOUTH
Arturo Perez Reverte
Really fun to read the list, and even more fun to realize that I’ve read most of the books on it. And to those Constant Readers out there, I couldn’t agree more. To Roland and his Ka Tet!
“I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of the gods. I have no husband or child, nor hardly a friend, through whom they can hurt me.” – C. S. Lewis, TILL WE HAVE FACES
(And speaking of C. S. Lewis, it’s hard to top, “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” – from THE VOYAGE OF THE DAWNTREADER)
What about Ellen Foster?
When I was little I used to think of ways to kill my daddy.
Really, now!!!
A screaming comes across the sky.
What could possibly better introduce a piece of work concerning modern history and paranoia, which are usually the same thing?
One of my all-time favorite first lines is from A Prayer For Owen Meany by John Irving, “Owen Meany is the reason I believe in God.”
Oh, yeah, definately, “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” I honestly don’t know why it didn’t end up on the list.
Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. – David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (1987)
Do you come here often?
Oh…
This list is trite and obvious–who wrote it? Not a student of literature, maybe Cliff’s Notes. In addition to many of the glaring omissions already mentioned, where’s “Gravity’s Rainbow”? “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.” Widely regarded as one of the great openers in contemporary fiction. & yet Augusten Burroughs is here? I am going to be sick.