“It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

Christopher Isherwood, ‘Mr. Norris Changes Trains’

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez, ‘100 Years of Solitude’

Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Dead Man’

“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’

Charlotte Brontë, ‘Jane Eyre’

“Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.”

François Rabelais, ‘Gargantua and Pantagruel’

Miguel de Cervantes, ‘Don Quixote’

“It was a pleasure to burn.”

H.G. Wells, ‘The Invisible Man’

Ray Bradbury, ‘Fahrenheit 451’

“Call me Ishmael. Some years ago ‒never mind how long precisely‒ having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.”

Charles Dickens, ‘Great Expectations’

Herman Melville, ‘Moby Dick’

“One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me.”

Marguerite Duras, ‘The Lover’

“We were in class when the head-master came in, followed by a "new fellow," not wearing the school uniform, and a school servant carrying a large desk. Those who had been asleep woke up, and every one rose as if just surprised at his work.”

Gustave Flaubert, ‘Madame Bovary’

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect."

Franz Kafka, ‘The Metamorphosis’

Robert Musil, ‘The Man Without Qualities’

“An unassuming young man was travelling, in midsummer, from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Canton of the Grisons, on a three weeks’ visit.”

Thomas Mann, ‘The Magic Mountain’

Ernst Jünger, ‘The Adventurous Heart’

“The little town of Verrieres can pass for one of the prettiest in Franche-Comte. Its white houses with their pointed red-tiled roofs stretch along the slope of a hill, whose slightest undulations are marked by groups of vigorous chestnuts.”

Honoré de Balzac, ‘Lost Illusions’

Stendhal, ‘The Red and the Black’

“I have just returned from a visit to my landlord ‒the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist's heaven: and Mr Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us.”

Emily Brontë, ‘Wuthering Heights’

Jane Austen, ‘Sense and Sensibility’

“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 Dostoevsky, ‘Crime and Punishment’

Henry James, ‘The American’

“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.”

Sebastian Junger, ‘The Perfect Storm’

Ernest Hemingway, ‘The Old Man and the Sea’

“For a long time I would go to bed early. Sometimes, the candle barely out, my eyes closed so quickly that I did not have time to tell myself: “I’m falling asleep.”

Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Catriona’

Marcel Proust, ‘In Search of Lost Time’

QUIZ: Can you identify these famous opening lines of books?

Do you know these famous opening lines of famous books? I’m sure you do. But do you remember where they come from?

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