100 Best Opening Lines from Books (Updated!)

The best opening lines from books are those that captivate you and make you want to keep reading. They create a sense of character, conflict, mood, setting, style, theme, or a combination of any of these things. A good opening line reflects the heart of the story.

You might decide to pick up a book because it is a well-known author’s work or a classic that everyone reads in school. It could also be because of the cover. However, the first paragraph of a story can also pique curiosity and make you want more.

This post lists some of the best opening lines from books that will keep you engrossed in the story. 

100 of the most compelling opening lines to must-read books

Some books don’t even need a paragraph to draw you in. Sometimes it is the first sentence that hooks you in and makes you want to continue with the story. Here are some of the best opening lines from popular books.

1. Moby Dick: Call me Ishmael.
2. Pride and Prejudice: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
3. One Hundred Years of Solitude: 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.
4. Anna Karenina: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
5. A Tale of Two Cities: 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 were all going direct.to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.
6. Gravity’s Rainbow: A screaming comes across the sky.
7. 1984: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
8. Invisible Man: I am an invisible man.
9. Miss Lonelyhearts. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble? Do-you-need-advice? Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard.
10. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: 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. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.
11. The Metamorphosis: One morning, as Gregor Samsa awoke from anxious dreams, he discovered that during the night he had been transformed into a monstrous bug.
12. The Trial: Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
13. The Catcher in the Rye: If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: 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.
15. The Nightingale: If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.
16. The Good Soldier: This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
17. Frankenstein: You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.
18. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea: The year 1866 was signalized by a remarkable incident, a mysterious and inexplicable phenomenon.
19. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe: Once, there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids.
20. The Godfather: Amerigo Bonasera sat in New York Criminal Court Number 3 and waited for justice; vengeance on the men who had so cruelly hurt his daughter, who had tried to dishonor her.
21. The Alchemist: The boy’s name was Santiago.
22. David Copperfield: 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.
23. The Stranger: Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.
24. The Great Gatsby:  In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
25. Gone with the Wind: Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.
26. Mrs. Dalloway: Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
27. Slaughterhouse-Five:  All this happened, more or less.
28. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: Mr. & Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
29. A Thousand Splendid Suns: Mariam was five years old the first time she heard the word harami.
30. The Gunslinger: The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.
31. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
32. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens:  MARLEY WAS DEAD, to begin with.
33. Catch-22: It was love at first sight.  The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain, he fell madly in love with him.
34. The Old Man and the Sea: 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.        
35. Alice in Wonderland:  Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations.
36. Markus Zusak: Here is a small fact: You are going to die.
37. Paradise: They shoot the white girl first.
38. Fahrenheit 451: It was a pleasure to burn.
39. The Push by Ashley Audrain: Your house glows at night like everything inside is on fire.
40. The Outsiders:  When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.
41. Neuromancer: The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
42. The Lonely Bones: My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.
43. Middlesex: I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on the remarkably smogless Detroit day January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
44. The Bell Jar:  It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
45. The Go-Between:  The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
46. The Five People You Meet in Heaven: This is the story of a man named Eddie, and it starts at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It may seem strange to start a story with an ending, but all endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.
47. The Princess Bride:  This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.
48. White Oleander:  The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw.
49. The Crow Road: It was the day my grandmother exploded.
50. Little Fires Everywhere: Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow. People are like that, too.
51. All the Light We Cannot See: At dusk they pour from the sky. They blow across the ramparts, turn cartwheels over rooftops, flutter into the ravines between houses. Entire streets swirl with them, flashing white against the cobbles. Urgent message to the inhabitants of this town, they say. Depart immediately to open country.
52. The Bad Beginning: If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle.
53. Peter Pan:  All children, except one, grow up.
54. The Five People You Meet in Heaven: This is the story of a man named Eddie and it starts at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It may seem strange to start a story with an ending, but all endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.
55. A Frolic of His Own: Justice? You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.
56. Little Fires Everywhere: Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow. People are like that, too.
57. Howl’s Moving Castle:  In the land of Ingary when such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exists, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of the three.
58. Ulysses:  Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
59. The Haunting of Hill House:  No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality walked alone.
60. The Year of Magical Thinking: Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.
61. The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe: The story so far: In the beginning, the Universe was created.
62. All the Light We Cannot See: At dusk, they pour from the sky. They blow across the ramparts, turn cartwheels over rooftops, flutter into the ravines between houses. Entire streets swirl with them, flashing white against the cobbles. Urgent message to the inhabitants of this town, they say. Depart immediately to open country.
63. The Hobbit:  In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.
64. The Secret History:  The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.
65. An Execution: You are a fingerprint. When you open your eyes on the last day of your life, you see your own thumb.
66. Their Eyes Were Watching God: Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some, they come in with the tide. For others, they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time.
67. Back When We Were Grownups: Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.
68. The Haunting of Hill House: book: No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality walked alone.
69. Waiting: Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.
70. Beloved: 124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children.
71.  The Making of Americans:  Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.”
72. The Road: When he woke in the woods in the dark and cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.
73. Lolita:  Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lol. Lee. Ta.
74. The Shadow of the Wind: I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.
75. City of Glass: It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
76. The Night Circus: The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.
77. Paul Clifford: It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
78. The Color Purple: You better not never tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy.
79. Murphy: The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
80. Night Watch: Sam Vimes sighed when he heard the scream, but he finished shaving before he did anything about it.
81. Charlotte: Where’s Papa going with that ax? said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
82. White Oleander: The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw.
83. Don Quixote: 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.
84.  Tristram Shandy:  I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.
85.  If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver): You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.
86.  Goldfinger: James Bond, with two double bourbons inside him, sat in the final departure lounge of Miami Airport and thought about life and death.
87.  Middlemarch: Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
88.  The Crying of Lot 49: One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.
89.  Cat’s Eye: Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.
90.  Swann’s Way: For a long time, I went to bed early.
91.  The Brief History Of The Dead: When the blind man arrived in the city, he claimed that he had traveled the desert of living sand. 
92.  The Invisible Man: 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 as it seemed from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand.
93.  Changing Places: A Tale Of Two Campuses: High, high above the North Pole on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.
94.  The Napoleon Of Notting Hill: The human race, to which so many of my readers belong has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.
95.  A River Runs Through It: In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing. 
96.  To Kill A Mockingbird: When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.
97.  High-Rise: Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.
98.  And Then There Were None: In the corner of a first-class smoking carriage, Mr. Justice Wargrave, lately retired from the bench, puffed at a cigar and ran an interested eye through the political news in the Times.
99.  A Clockwork Orange: That was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.
100. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream: We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.

Final thoughts

Opening lines give a reader the idea behind a book. They can get you excited to begin a new story.

Someone might decide to read a book because of the author, cover, or first paragraph. But sometimes, the first sentence is enough to get your attention. Never underestimate the power of a book’s first sentence. 

What’s your favorite opening line to a book? Let us know in the comments!