20 of Our Favorite Famous First Lines in Literature

"You better not never tell nobody but God."

"Where's Papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast."

"What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask."

"In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together."

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." 

"There was no possibility of taking a walk that day."

"My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call."

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”

"Call me Ishmael."

“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.”

"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."

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

"It was a dark and stormy night."

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

“Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions..." 

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

"A screaming came across the sky."

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."