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Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
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The Broom of the System
David Foster Wallace
“Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.”
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Waiting
Ha Jin
“Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.”
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Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
“I am an invisible man.”
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Paradise
Toni Morrison
“They shoot the white girl first.”
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Calling Invisible Women
Jeanne Ray
“I first noticed I was missing on a Thursday.”
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All My Mother's Lovers
Ilana Masad
“Maggie is in the midst of a second lazy orgasm when her brother, Ariel, calls to tell her their mother has died.”
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David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
“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.”
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Tell the Wolves I'm Home
Carol Rifka Brunt
“My sister, Greta, and I were having our portrait painted by our uncle Finn that afternoon because he knew he was dying.”
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The Mothers
Brit Bennett
“We didn’t believe when we first heard because you know how church folk can gossip.”
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Uprooted
Naomi Novik
“Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley.”
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The Chaperone
Laura Moriarty
“The first time Cora heard the name Louise Brooks, she was parked outside the Wichita Library in a Model-T Ford, waiting for the rain to stop.”
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May We Be Forgiven
A. M. Homes
“Do you want my recipe for disaster?”
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Middlemarch
George Eliot
“Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.”
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True Believers
Kurt Andersen
“My publishers signed me up a year ago to write a book, but not THIS book.”
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Swimming Studies
Leanne Shapton
“Water is elemental, it’s what we’re made of, what we can’t live within or without.”
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The People of Forever Are Not Afraid
Shani Boianjiu
“There is dust in this caravan of a classroom, and Mira the teacher’s hair is fake orange and scorched at the tips.”
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The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
Rachel Joyce
“The letter that would change everything arrived on a Tuesday.”
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San Miguel
T.C. Boyle
“She was coughing, always coughing, and sometimes she coughed up blood.”
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The Empty Glass
J.I. Baker
“After a while, everything started to blur.”
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Inside
Alix Ohlin
“At first glance, she mistook him for something else.”
You can’t judge a book by its cover, so they say, but you can judge it by its first line. One sentence is all it takes: we’re intrigued, we’re shocked, we have to keep reading. The best first lines, though, stand alone; they’re like one-sentence poems. When read aloud, they carry the whole of the novel in them. Take a peek at the opening lines—poems? masterpieces?—of these 21 exquisite novels.
Featured Image: Nikada/iStock
