Famous opening lines of books: 64 examples, sorted by technique

Most famous opening lines of books lead with one of seven techniques: they set a voice, make a claim, start a scene, plant a question, open on dialogue, put you in a place or sum up a person. This page sorts 64 of them by technique, with a note on what each line does, so you can borrow the move rather than the words.

It's a page about technique, not history: the notes say how each line works on the page, not how it became famous. Few of the lines are hooks in the advertising sense. Most are quiet. What they share is that a reader who stops after the first sentence already knows something specific about the book and wants one more fact.

One opening line, revised three ways

Here is a typical first-draft opening for an imagined novel about a court stenographer, then three rewrites using techniques from the list below.

Nothing in it is wrong, and nothing in it is hers. Waking up, weather, age and job in one sentence: it's a form being filled in. The rewrites keep her job and change what the sentence does.

Each version promises a different book. The first is a character study about a woman who records judgments and never makes them. The second is a thriller, and the question (why does the record say no?) will drive the plot. The third is first person, wry and secretive, and the margins could become a structure for the whole novel. Choosing between them is choosing the book, which is why the steps further down put this choice after the draft.

Opening lines built on voice

The narrator talks before anything happens, and the way they talk is the hook. This is the natural opening for a book told in first person, and it works best when the voice sounds like nobody else's.

1. “Call me Ishmael.” — Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851). Three words and a request. He doesn't say his name is Ishmael, only what to call him, and the next sentence keeps the offhand tone: “never mind how long precisely.”
2. “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 (1884). The grammar tells you who's talking before he gives his name, and the line waves off Twain's earlier book so new readers can come in.
3. “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 (1850). A grown man doubting his own importance, under a chapter titled “I Am Born.” The reader starts the book wondering whose story it is.
4. “I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864), translated by Constance Garnett. Three self-diagnoses, each worse than the last. He insults himself before you can, which is the defensive spite the book is about.
5. “In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing.” — Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605), translated by John Ormsby. The narrator won't name the village, and that coyness is the voice. The list of shabby gear has already started the joke.
6. “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....” — James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). A nursery story, in nursery language. The next sentence names the teller (“His father told him that story”), and the book's prose grows up as Stephen does.
7. “1801—I have just returned from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.” — Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847). A dated diary entry by a newcomer pleased with himself. Lockwood misreads almost everyone he meets at the Heights, and his confident tone is the first hint not to trust him: an early unreliable narrator.
8. “My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.” — Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861). A boy names himself, and the novel's question arrives with him: who Pip is, and who decides. The tone is an older man smiling at a child.
9. “If you really want to hear about it…” — J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Holden starts by talking to you, then refuses the childhood-and-parents opening of a book like David Copperfield, which he names. The voice is built on what he won't tell.
10. “You better not never tell nobody but God.” — Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982). A threat set above the first letter, and it explains the form: Celie writes her letters to God because there is no one else she is allowed to tell.

Opening lines that make a claim

A general truth, often ironic, that the book then tests on particular people. It needs a narrator who sounds sure of the claim, which is why it often suits third-person omniscient narration, though Ford's and Greene's first-person narrators use it too. It fails when the claim is a platitude nobody would argue with.

11. “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). The claim is about rich men, but the joke is that families with daughters are the ones doing the acknowledging. One sentence gives you the narrator's irony and the plot: a hunt for husbands.
12. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” — Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1878), translated by Constance Garnett. A rule, then the exception the novel is about. The next sentence turns straight to one house: “Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house.”
13. “All children, except one, grow up.” — J. M. Barrie, Peter and Wendy (1911). Six words with the whole premise tucked into a clause. “Except one” is the hook: the reader has to find out who.
14. “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” — Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915). A narrator grading his story before he tells it. He says “heard,” but he was in it, and the gap between those two words is the novel.
15. “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.” — Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Seven pairs of opposites in 119 words. It moves like a speech, it describes a whole era, and the last clause turns the paradox on the reader's own time.
16. “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 (1881). A leisurely claim with a hedge in its first three words. James announces his subject, manners, and his method: nothing will be said without a qualification.
17. “In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women.” — Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (1853). “In the first place” is how a gossip begins. The claim is funny and exact, and the second clause backs the metaphor with a fact about rent.
18. “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” — Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938). A statement that turns the old saying about nothing new under the sun into a joke about necessity. The voice is bleak and funny at once, and that mix is the book.
19. “A story has no beginning or end…” — Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951). The narrator admits that every starting point is a choice, which makes the reader wonder why he chose this one.

Opening lines that start a scene

Someone is already doing something when the book begins, and the reader learns the world by watching. Writers call it starting in medias res. It is hard to get badly wrong, as long as the action matters to the person doing it.

20. “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” — James Joyce, Ulysses (1922). A character, a place and a prop in one sentence, and the prop is a joke: the shaving bowl is carried like a chalice, and Mulligan's mock Mass begins a line later.
21. “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” — Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925). An errand, reported secondhand and already a little in the past. It drops you into one ordinary June day in London, which is the whole novel's span.
22. “The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home.” — Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (1908). A chore every reader knows. Within a paragraph he flings down his brush and bolts outside, so the first sentence exists to be interrupted.
23. “On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment (1866), translated by Constance Garnett. Heat, a garret, initials instead of street names. “As though in hesitation” is the whole book in four words.
24. “A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over: ‘Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi! That’s all right!’” — Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899). The first voice in the book belongs to a caged bird saying “Go away!” in French. Sound, setting and symbol at once, and readers only later see how much the cage matters.
25. “It was four o’clock when the ceremony was over and the carriages began to arrive.” — Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906). The book opens as a wedding feast begins, a celebration a Lithuanian family in Chicago can barely pay for, with the stockyards waiting just outside.
26. “I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751, when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father’s house.” — Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped (1886). A date, a key and a door closed for good. David tells you he is leaving home before he tells you why.
27. “A screaming comes across the sky.” — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973). No subject you can name, only a sound in motion. The reader hears the rocket before knowing what it is, which is how the people under it hear it.
28. “Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.” — William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929). A scene seen by a narrator who can't name what he watches: men playing golf. The reader has to work from the first sentence.

Opening lines that plant a question

The line raises a question and holds back the answer. It is a staple of crime, horror and suspense, and it works when the next pages start paying it off.

29. “Marley was dead: to begin with.” — Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843). Insisting on a death at the start of a ghost story promises it won't stay simple. The next sentence insists again: “There is no doubt whatever about that.”
30. “Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.” — Jack London, The Call of the Wild (1903). The comedy of a dog who skips the news makes the second half land as a warning.
31. “One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it:—it was the black kitten’s fault entirely.” — Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1871). A verdict before we know the crime. What the black kitten did carries the first page.
32. “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 (1911). The narrator collected the story secondhand and every teller changed it, so the reader starts out looking for the true version.
33. “The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand.” — H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man (1897). Snow, a nameless stranger, a bag, gloves: every detail says covered up. You don't know why yet, but you've been made to notice.
34. “Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a land owner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880), translated by Constance Garnett. A family tree, then a death the narrator promises to describe later. He tells you it's coming and makes you wait.
35. “The intense interest aroused in the public by what was known at the time as ‘The Styles Case’ has now somewhat subsided.” — Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). Hastings opens after the scandal has cooled, which lets him promise the full story behind the headlines. The case already has a name.
36. “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). An ordinary spring day and one wrong number. A clock striking thirteen is a small impossibility that tells you this world runs on other rules.
37. “124 was spiteful.” — Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987). A number with a mood. Nothing yet says that 124 is a house, or that it is haunted, so you have to ask what kind of thing can be spiteful.

Opening lines in dialogue

The book opens on a voice, and the reader meets a character by ear. It works when the line is something only this character would say, and when the narration soon tells us who spoke. The guide to writing dialogue covers the mechanics.

38. “‘Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,’ grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.” — Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868). A complaint, a name and a pose. The grumble sets up the family's poverty, and “lying on the rug” gives Jo a body before she gets a description.
39. “‘Tom!’ No answer.” — Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). A shout and a silence, then the same again. You learn about Tom from where he isn't, and about Aunt Polly from how she calls him.
40. “‘Now, what I want is, Facts.’” — Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854). A speech already under way, in a schoolroom, from a man who values nothing else. The chapter title, “The One Thing Needful,” tells you what the narrator thinks of him.
41. “‘Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes.’” — Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869), translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. Gossip at a party, about Napoleon. A war novel that begins in a drawing room joins the two halves of its title in the first line.
42. “‘I wonder when in the world you’re going to do anything, Rudolf?’ said my brother’s wife.” — Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda (1894). A complaint about an idle man, which sets up the adventure that forces him to do something. Her tone promises the book won't be solemn about it.
43. “‘So of course,’ wrote Betty Flanders, pressing her heels rather deeper in the sand, ‘there was nothing for it but to leave.’” — Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room (1922). The words are being written, not spoken, in a letter on a beach. The sentence breaks for her heels in the sand, so you get her words and her body at once.
44. “‘Where's Papa going with that ax?’” — E. B. White, Charlotte's Web (1952). A child's question with danger in it. The threat to the runt pig arrives before the reader has met the pig.
45. “‘When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,’ Papa would say…” — Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1989). A father telling his children a family story about their mother's carnival act. The endearment and the word “geek” pull against each other, and that pull is the book's tone.

Opening lines built on setting

The place comes first and the people later. It works when the place is doing something, burning or darkening or trying not to blow away, and when it sets a mood the story will need. The trap is weather for its own sake (see the mistakes below).

46. “London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather.” — Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853). A city, a court term and the weather, with no main verbs. The fragments work like a camera panning, and the court they find is the book's target.
47. “Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day.” — Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1857). Time, place and heat in eleven words, with “one day” tacked on like an afterthought. The chapter, “Sun and Shadow,” moves from that glare into a prison, and prisons are what the novel is about.
48. “A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment.” — Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (1878). The heath is the main character of the first chapter, darkening before a single person appears.
49. “The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest.” — Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899). Stillness on the Thames while a boat waits for the tide. The calm is the frame story: Marlow tells his tale of the Congo aboard this yawl.
50. “The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.” — Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895). The land seems to wake, and the fog lifts on an army at rest: the calm before the battle the book is waiting for.
51. “Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851). A guidebook sentence that walks you to the door. The house gets the main verb, and the novel's family curse lives inside it.
52. “One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away.” — Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913). A town with a will of its own. The novel is about people holding on to hard land, and the first sentence makes the town do it first.
53. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” — J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937). A fairy-tale cadence and a word nobody knew, so you need the next sentence to learn what a hobbit is. Tolkien recalled writing the line on a blank page of an exam paper he was marking.
54. “The sky above the port was the color of television…” — William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984). Nature described by a machine. The sentence finishes the image with a dead channel, the gray of static, and the whole book's world is in the comparison.

Opening lines built on character

One sentence that tells you who someone is and, usually, what will go wrong for them. The best ones carry a contradiction or a warning. For the traits to build them from, see the character traits list.

55. “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.” — Jane Austen, Emma (1815). Three adjectives, then the trap. A heroine with nothing wrong in her life is one the plot is about to correct, and “seemed” warns you.
56. “Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.” — George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–72). A paradox about clothes that gives you Dorothea's looks and her seriousness in one observation.
57. “Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable.” — Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). A list of drawbacks that turns on its last three words. The horror story opens with its most respectable man, the one who will witness the strangeness.
58. “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine.” — Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1817). A heroine defined by what she isn't. The novel sends up Gothic fiction, and the first line already pokes at the rules for heroines.
59. “When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen.” — Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (1911). Burnett makes her heroine unlikable on purpose, so the change in her will show.
60. “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” — Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921). A temperament instead of a description, and a promise that this hero will meet a world mad enough to test it.
61. “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). Nick starts with himself, and the advice, given in the next sentence, is about not criticizing anyone. A narrator who says he reserves judgment, and then judges everyone.
62. “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.” — Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926). A man summed up by an old title. “Once” does the damage: his best days are already behind him, and the narrator wants you to know it.
63. “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” — C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952). A name and a verdict on it, cruel and friendly at once. The book is about whether Eustace can stop deserving it.
64. “Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.” — Anita Brookner, The Debut (1981). Name, age and a diagnosis: the character has already judged her own life, and the reader wants to see the evidence.

What the best opening lines share

Set the 64 side by side and a few patterns show. None of them is a rule, but a draft opening that breaks all of them is usually in trouble.

• They are specific. A parrot, a razor, a key, a black portmanteau, a clock striking thirteen. Concrete nouns do more than adjectives, even in the statement lines, which pin their claims to fortunes, rents and afternoon tea.
• They are shorter than you'd think. Counted by first sentence, the 50 public-domain openings above run from one word (“London.” and “Tom!”) to 119 (A Tale of Two Cities). The median is 22 words. Ten are under ten words, and only six run to 40 or more. The long ones are built from short parts: Dickens's sentence is seven pairs of opposites.
• They raise one question. Who is the one child who doesn't grow up? Why is the stranger covered from head to foot? A first line with five mysteries gives the reader nothing to hold.
• They sound like the rest of the book. The voice of line one is usually the voice of page 300, or the start of a change the book makes on purpose, as Joyce's nursery language is in A Portrait of the Artist. A comic opening on a grief novel, or a grand one on a quiet book, is a promise the book then breaks.
• They're followed by a good second sentence. Several of the notes above quote it, because the first line sets up and the second delivers: Marley is dead, and there is no doubt whatever about that.

How to write an opening line

An opening line invites endless rewriting, and it is easy to overwork. These steps keep the work in the right order. For the rest of the first page and the first chapter, see how to start a story.

1. Draft the chapter before you polish the sentence

   A first line is a promise, and you can't word a promise until you know what the book delivers. Put down any opening and keep going. Come back when the chapter, or the draft, is done.

2. Write down what the line has to promise

   Three things: who is telling the story, what kind of book this is, and the question the reader will carry into chapter two. If you can't fill in the third, the opening isn't the problem yet.

3. Find where the story starts

   Cover your first paragraph and read from the second. Then from the third. Drafts often begin a page early, with the alarm clock, the drive, the background. Start where something is already at stake, and fold the background into later scenes. A chapter outline with one line per scene makes the real starting point easier to see.

4. Write the line seven ways

   One version per technique on this page: a voice, a claim, a scene, a question, a line of dialogue, a place, a character. It takes about fifteen minutes, and it often turns up a line you wouldn't have reached by polishing the first one.

5. Test it with the page covered

   Show the line alone to a reader, or read it alone yourself the next morning. Does it make you ask something? Does the second sentence start to answer it? Read it aloud too: a first line has to survive being heard.

   For one more reader, paste your seven versions into a document and ask the Strokes Assistant what question each one raises. Where its answer differs from the question you meant to raise, look at that line again.

6. Check it against the last line

   Put the first and last sentences of the book side by side. They don't need to echo each other, but they should belong to the same book. If they don't, check whether one of them is left over from an earlier draft.

Opening line mistakes to avoid

Each of these turns up in first drafts again and again. All of them can be done well, but most drafts that use them would be better starting a sentence or a page later.

• Waking up. The alarm, the ceiling, the stretch. The day hasn't started, so neither has the story.
• Weather with nobody in it. The most famous example is Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Paul Clifford (1830): “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents,” and the sentence goes on through wind, housetops and lamps without a single person in it. Its author's name went on a contest for the worst possible opening sentence. Weather earns a first line when it does something to someone, as the wind does to Cather's town.
• The mirror. A character describing their own face and hair to themselves. Nobody looks in a mirror and thinks, “My auburn hair falls to my shoulders.”
• The cheat. “I killed him.” Then: in the video game. A shock that the second sentence takes back trains the reader not to trust you.
• Throat-clearing. A paragraph of history, geography or philosophy before anyone appears. A claim can open a book, as Austen's does, but it has to be sharp and short, and a person has to follow quickly.
• The crowd. Four names and a place name in the first sentence. One new name is easy to hold on to; four, before the reader knows why any of them matters, are a list.
• The wrong promise. A wisecracking first line on a quiet, sad book, or an action opening on a slow literary novel. The first sentence tells readers what kind of book they're in, and most of them believe it.

If your opening is a quotation from another writer, that's an epigraph, and it sits before the first line rather than replacing it. If it's a scene from another time or place, check that it needs to be a prologue at all. For practice, the first-line prompts in the creative writing prompts are written to be continued, and essay writers have their own version of this page in the essay hook examples.