100 best first lines from novels

[YNCS]

"They call me, Ishmael." Best opening line ever from Moby Dick.

There are other opening lines from Moby Dick?

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. -Genesis 1:1

 

[Taliesin]

Urederra and Rambuchan: that's Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier.

 

[RameNoodle]

"It was love at first sight."
Heller, Catch-22. Not so original, but, I love the book, it had to be included.
However, I love #5, "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins." NabokovLolita. Absolutely the best written book I have ever read. Everyone here should read it. It might sound perverted, but it is done in the most tasteful way.

 

[RameNoodle]

Argh, laggy CFC! Double post.

 

[Bill3000]

I can't believe they don't have this.

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun." - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Althoug the second sentance is better...

"Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green plajet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea."

 

[Leifmk]

A Wrinkle in Time actually starts with that exact line. I wonder if L'Engle or Snoopy thought of it first. I hope it was Snoopy.

Edward George Bulwer-Lytton thought of it first. In 1830. He's already been mentioned in this very thread.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. —William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
It is great. The rest of the book is not but hey, you cant have eveything.

 

[Rambuchan]

Urederra and Rambuchan: that's Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier.

Dunno the book but that reads like Daphne Du Maurier. Am I right?

EDIT: Or even some Angela Carter?

Ahem .

Here's the first line of a classic short story I still need to read (owing to another outbreak of 'Name of the Rose' fever):

"The universe (which other call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite, number of hexagonal galleries, with enormous ventilation shafts in the middle, encircled by very low railings."

~ "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges.

 

[Urederra]

I can't believe they don't have this.

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun." - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

CarlosMM already quoted the HitchHicker's,


And I agree, the second sentence is much better. Actually, one every three or four sentences in that book is "quotable" if you allow me the expression

 

[C~G]

"It was love at first sight."
Heller, Catch-22. Not so original, but, I love the book, it had to be included.
However, I love #5, "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins." NabokovLolita. Absolutely the best written book I have ever read. Everyone here should read it. It might sound perverted, but it is done in the most tasteful way.

I agree with everything you said.

 

[Cu Chulainn]

Two that I regard to be very very good that haven't been mentioned yet.

"Imagine that you have to break someone's arm."
from The Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie

"This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it."
or
"The year that Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette."
both from The Princess Bride by William Goldman the first being the forward and the second the actual story

 

[Sidhe]

I look to Gemmell:

Wolf In Shadow's encapsulated quest for Jerusalem is terrific, but the Last Guardian trumps it:

"But he did not die."

My dog ate The Last Guardian, seriously he has a penchant for paper, if only he was my dog in school, I could of genuinely claimed he ate my homework

I thought I was alone as a Gemmel fan, books that make fantasy real, by clever use of realistic characters, not knights in shining armour but tainted people with tainted experiences of humaity wrapped up with essentially good moral codes in an oft morally bankrupt environment. People are grey there are no black and white individuals, fancy a fantasy book making that clear.