Pantagraph.com posted the American Book Review's list of the "100 best first lines from novels." I chose my top ten from their list. (The numbers indicate where these fell on their list):
1. Call me Ishmael. -- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. -- George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
10. I am an invisible man. --Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
12. 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. --Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
26. 124 was spiteful. --Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. --Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
50. 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. --Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)
64. 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 (1925)
65. You better not never tell nobody but God. --Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)
97. He -- for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it --was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. --Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)
For the other 90, click here.
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And something that has nothing at all to do with this blog: How can you resist a cat that plays Philip Glass?
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