A good first line is a way to turn your novel into a classic. As it doesn't grant you readers, it might very well spark a second and third reading and make your novel a timeless piece. Here's the top 100, compiled by the American Book Review. Follow the link if you want the whole thing, but here are my 10 favorites. Whether I read the novel or not is irrelevant, only the quality of the line matters.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way
-Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
George Orwell, 1984
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
-Samuel Beckett, Murphy
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
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
-William Gibson, Neuromancer
Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.
-Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
All this happened, more or less.
-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
You better not never tell nobody but God.
-Alice Walker, The Color Purple
When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson.
-Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
L.P Hartley, The Go-Between
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