100 best first lines
October 22, 2010
No, I’m not referring to the best lines the Situation has used in this year’s Jersey Shore. I’m talking instead about the 100 best first lines from novels as selected by American Book Review.
1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
2. 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 (1813)
3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
“It was a dark and stormy night” also made the cut.
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Posted by: Matthew Rodriguez
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