The first line of a novel is like a hand shake: firm and confident or limp and clammy. Although I always read through the first paragraph, if not the first page, it is the first line that draws me in – or shuts me out. Some of my favorite first lines are short and concise, some winding and lyrical. But in every case they set the mood for the entire book.
Here are a few that stuck with me over the last several years:
“I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975.” – Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
“We are all haunted, not by unexplained rappings or spectral auras, much less headless horsemen and weeping queens – real ghosts pace the battlements of memory, endlessy whispering, Remember me.” – Jennifer Lee Carrell, Interred With Their Bones
“The summer I turned thirteen, I thought I’d killed a man.” – Jennifer Erin Valent, Fireflies in December
“I am ninety. Or ninety three. One or the other.” – Sara Gruen, Water For Elephants
“It’s hard being left behind. I wait for Henry.” – Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Travelers Wife (Updated thanks to Bekah in her comment below.)
A first line is a beautiful thing. It draws. It beckons. We are welcomed into a story with a sentence. Sometimes the effect is a contented sigh – knees drawn tight to chest and a smile playing on our face. Or those words may create a question. Perhaps they cause our heart to race, adrenaline to course. Regardless, they make us feel. And that is power of story.
So how about you? What are your favorite first lines? Why?
“It’s hard being left behind. I wait for Henry.” (The Time Traveler’s Wife) is one of my favorite opening lines. It sets the tone of the whole book, as Claire spend her life doing just that.
“It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that a man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Jane Austen, Pride and Predjudice. I love that Jane Austen basically tipped the tables of the stigma of a woman unable to be happy with out a husband, and placed it on a man….such subtle humor, I love it!!!!
“It was the best of times. It was the worst of times…”
“Call me Ishmael.”
I could go on forever, but for brevity’s sake I’ll stop!
“No one’s ever accused me of being balanced.” -Ivy Schneider, Club Sandwich by Lisa Samson. That line drew me in because, in all honesty, who is balanced all of the time?! It made me laugh and I knew I was hooked!