This is free advice from an expensive psychologist. If you’re an anxious person, do everything for fun. Go to a job interview for fun. Submit documents for fun. Start a blog for fun. Anxiety feeds on importance. Don’t make everything a matter of life and death.
A book has one sentence to make you enter its world.
The great ones do it instantly. They pull you in, disturb you, charm you, or make you feel that something important has already begun.
Here are 20 of my favorite opening lines.
What is yours?
1. “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
– 1984 by George Orwell
2. “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.”
– The Stranger by Albert Camus
3. “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.”
– The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
4. “Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.”
– 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
5. “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.”
– Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. “Call me Ishmael.”
– Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
7. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
– Gospel of John 1:1 (New Testament, Bible)
8. “All this happened, more or less.”
– Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut
9. “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.”
– The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
10. “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.”
– The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
11. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
– Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12. “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.”
– A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
13. “In the middle of our life's journey, I found myself in a dark forest, for the straight path was lost.”
-The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
14. “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”
– Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
15. “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.”
- The Bible
16. “Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm.”
- Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
17. “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.”
- A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean
18. “Read in the Name of your Lord Who created — Created man from a clinging clot (or clot of blood).”
- The Quran
19. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
20. “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.”
– One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Bonus:
“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.”
– Tao Te Ching, Chapter 1 (attributed to Lao Tzu, Daoism)