Creatives know how important a great first line can be. It has the power to capture and grab an audience in a noisy world that’s jealous of the attention. Best opening lines help us master the skill of capturing our audience.
I’ve invested hours upon hours identifying the best opening lines in creative works so that you could use this resource for inspiration and improve the art of opening lines.
Check out these 300+ best opening lines!
Top opening lines
Opening lines are the first lines in a creative or informational work. They can be written text like the first sentence in a book or spoken like the first sentence in a Movie. Opening lines can teach us to pique interest in promoting our products, creative works, and services.
This extensive list resulted from research, crowdsourcing favorite lines, and personal experience. Over a thousand creators have benefited from the resource.
Tonight we’re going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.
Joe Haldeman, The Forever War (Fiction)
Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.”
Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (Fiction)
I first saw the light in the city of Boston in the year 1857.
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (Fiction)
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.
Gabriel García Márquez, 100 Years of Solitude (Fiction)
Sooner or later, it was bound to happen.
Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama (Fiction)
It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
Paul Auster, City of Glass (Fiction)
There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.
Louis Sachar, Holes (Fiction)
The manhunt extended across more than one hundred light years and eight centuries.
Vernor Vinge, A Deepness In The Sky (Fiction)
In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together.
Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (Fiction)
After I killed him, I dropped the gun in the Thames, washed the residue off me hands in the bathroom of a Burger King, and walked home to await instructions.
Martin McDonagh, In Bruges (Screenplay)
In the beginning we were a group of nine. Three are gone, dead. There are six of us left. They are hunting us, and they won’t stop until they’ve killed us all. I am Number Four. I know that I am next.
Pittacus Lore, I Am Number Four (Fiction)
Carcass. Cut in half. Stunner. Slaughter line. Spray wash.
Agustina Bazterrica, Tender is the Flesh (Fiction)
Death is only the beginning; afterward comes the hard part.
Jed Rubenfeld, The Death Instinct (Fiction)
The student wouldn’t stop doing her homework, and it was going to kill her.
Annalee Newitz, Autonomous (Fiction)
Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.
Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (Fiction)
I will tell you of William Wallace. Historians from England will say I am a liar. But history is written by those who have hung heroes.
Randall Wallace, Braveheart (Screenplay)
It was a pleasure to burn.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (Fiction)
Theodosia writes me a letter every day…
Leslie Odom Jr.; Cast of Hamilton, Wait for It (Poetry/Song)
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
George Orwell, 1984 (Fiction)
They shoot the white girl first.
Toni Morrison, Paradise (Fiction)
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the See (Fiction)
This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (Fiction)
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.
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (Fiction)
When you love someone, you’ve gotta trust them. There’s no other way. You’ve got to give them the key to everything that’s yours. Otherwise, what’s the point? And, for a while… I believed that’s the kind of love I had.
Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese, Casino (Screenplay)
‘Where’s Papa going with that axe?’ said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web (Fiction)
The moment one learns English, complications set in.
Felipe Alfau, Chromos (Fiction)
Surgeon one: Is this the last one?
Surgeon two: God, what a mess… at least there’s no gangrene.
Surgeon one: There will be if it doesn’t come off.
Surgeon two: Well I can’t saw if I can’t keep my eyes open. Let’s coffee up… he can wait a few more minutes.
Michael Blake, Dance With Wolves (Screenplay)
You better not never tell nobody but God.
Alice Walker, The Color Purple (Fiction)
High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.
David Lodge, Changing Places (Fiction)
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.
Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye (Fiction)
He woke, and remembered dying.
Ken MacLeod, The Stone Canal (Fiction)
There was a boy. A very strange enchanted boy.
Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce, Moulin Rouge! (Screenplay)
None of them knew the color of the sky.
Stephen Crane, The Open Boat (Fiction)
You never hear about a sportsman losing his sense of smell in a tragic accident, and for good reason; in order for the universe to teach excruciating lessons that we are unable to apply in later life, the sportsman must lose his legs, the philosopher his mind, the painter his eyes, the musician his ears, the chef his tongue.
Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole (Fiction)
When I was a young boy / My father took me into the city…
My Chemical Romance, Welcome to the Black Parade (Poetry/Song)
God! Whose hand was I holding?
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (Fiction)
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (Fiction)
It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.
Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines (Fiction)
Tom: What’s your name again?
Chrissie: Chrissie.
Tom: Where are we going?
Chrissie: Swimming.
Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb, Jaws [Film] (Screenplay)
Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day.
Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (Fiction)
It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs Shears’ house. Its eyes were closed.
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime (Fiction)
Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrival’s gate at Heathrow airport.
Richard Curtis, Love Actually (Screenplay)
None of the merry-go- rounds seem to work anymore.
John Gregory Dunne, True Confessions (Fiction)
Call me Ishmael.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick (Fiction)
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (Fiction)
Where shall we three meet again in thunder, lightning, or in rain? When the hurlyburly ‘s done, when the battle’s lost and won.
William Shakespeare, Macbeth (Play/Drama)
I am an invisible man.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (Fiction)
The great fish moved silently through the night water.
Peter Benchley, Jaws [Novel] (Fiction)
Life’s not fair, is it? You see I — well, I shall never be King. Heh. And you shall never see the light of another day. (chuckles) Adieu…
Irene Mecchi; Jonathan Roberts; Linda Woolverton, The Lion King [Film, 1994] (Screenplay)
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (Fiction)
I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte.
Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (Fiction)
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
William Gibson, Neuromancer (Fiction)
Today is a good day to die.
Peter Filardi Flatliners [Film] (Screenplay)
When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.
John Wyndam, The Day of the Triffids (Fiction)
The space lift rose from the Pacific, climbing the cords of anthrax bacteria.
Joan Slonczewski, The Highest Frontier (Fiction)
I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand…
Warren Zevon, TheseWereThePlaces (Poetry/Song)
A long, long time ago / I can still remember how / That music used to make me smile…
Don McLean, American Pie (Poetry/Song)
The Hovitos are near. The poison is still fresh, three days. They’re following us. If they knew we were here, they would have killed us already.
Lawrence Kasdan, Raiders of the Lost Ark (Screenplay)
The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (Fiction)
Look, I didn’t want to be a half-blood.
Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief (Fiction)
For a long time, I went to bed early.
Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (Fiction)
If you’re going to read this, don’t bother.
Chuck Palahniuk, Choke (Fiction)
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Fiction)
Marley was dead, to begin with.
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (Fiction)
I need to make a confession at the outset here. Little over 20 years ago, I did something that I regret. Something that I’m not particularly proud of. Something that in many ways I wish no one would ever know but that here I feel kind of obliged to reveal.
Daniel Pink, The Puzzle of Motivation: TED Talk (Speech/Talk)
124 was spiteful.
Toni Morrison, Beloved (Fiction)
To the as-yet- unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.
Kurt Vonnegut, Deadeye Dick (Fiction)
Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
How could you hide from a murderer who lives under your skin?
Nick Cutter, The Troop (Fiction)
Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
William Shakespear, Romeo and Juliet (Play/Drama)
The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do- you-need- advice?—Write- to-Miss- Lonelyhearts- and-she-will- help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard.
Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (Fiction)
Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer, harried for years on end, after he plundered the stronghold on the proud height of Troy.
Homer; Robert Fitzgerald, The Odyssey (Poetry/Song)
Somebody once told me / The world is gonna roll me…
Smash Mouth, All Star (Poetry/Song)
All children, except one, grow up.
J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan (Fiction)
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (Fiction)
As one of the last survivors of my battalion of the Gordon Highlanders, the majority of whom were either killed or captured by the Japanese Imperial Army in Singapore, I know that I am a lucky man.
Alistair Urquhart, The Forgotten Highlander (Nonfiction)
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (Fiction)
As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.
Martin Scorsese & Nicholas Pileggi, Goodfellas [Film] (Screenplay)
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
Samuel Beckett, Murphy (Play/Drama)
Today, on this island, a miracle happened: summer came ahead of time.
Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel (Fiction)
The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of the Dancers.
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (Fiction)
The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Fiction)
When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (Fiction)
Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.
William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (Fiction)
Most of us have two lives: the life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.
Steven Pressfield, The War of Art (Nonfiction)
Go, traveler. Go anywhere. The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.
Philip Jose Farmer, Venus on the Half- Shell (Fiction)
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
Moses, Genesis (Religious/Historic/Philosophical)
There must be some kinda way out of here / Said the joker to the thief…
Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower (Poetry/Song)
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (Fiction)
Remember, remember, the Fifth of November, the gunpowder treason and plot. I know of no reason why the gunpowder treason should ever be forgot. But what of the man? I know his name was Guy Fawkes and I know, in 1605, he attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament. But who was he really? What was he like? We are told to remember the idea, not the man, because a man can fail. He can be caught, he can be killed and forgotten, but 400 years later, an idea can still change the world.
The Wachowskis, V for Vendetta [Film] (Screenplay)
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.
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Fiction)
Coming out of my cage / And I’ve been doing just fine…
The Killers, Mr. Brightside (Poetry/Song)
Once upon a time…
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Grimm’s Fairy Tales (Fiction)
All right, everyone! This is a stick-up. Don’t anybody move!
Joss Whedon; Andrew Stanton; Joel Cohen; Alec Sokolo, Toy Story [Film] (Screenplay)
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany (Fiction)
Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.
Ha Jin, Waiting (Fiction)
“Tell us your story,” the voices said. “We want to hear your story – all of it….”
Ian Beck, The Casebooks of Captain Holloway: the Disappearance of Tom Pile (Fiction)
Only ever met one man I wouldn’t wanna fight.
Paul Haggis, Million Dollar Baby [Film] (Screenplay)
If you want to find Cherry-Tree Lane all you have to do is ask the Policeman at the cross-roads.
P. L. Travers, Mary Poppins (Fiction)
Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
Franz Kafka, The Trial (Fiction)
This book is predominantly concerned with making money, and from its pages a reader may learn much about the character and the literary integrity of the authors. Of boggies, however, he will discover next to nothing…
The Harvard Lampoon, Bored of the Rings (Fiction)
Hello, hello, hello. Is that the clinic? This is Senf, the Head Porter, Grand Hotel. How’s my wife? Is she in pain? Isn’t the child coming soon? Patience? Would you have patience?
William A. Drake, The Grand Hotel [Film, 1932] (Screenplay)
As soon as I got home from school, Aunt Baba noticed the silver medal dangling from the left breast- pocket of my uniform.
Adeline Yen Mah, Chinese Cinderella (Screenplay)
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold
Hunter S Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Fiction)
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Fiction)
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (Fiction)
Even the dead tell stories.
Marcus Sedgwick, Revolver (Fiction)
I read the news today, oh boy…
The Beatles, A Day in the Life (Poetry/Song)
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (Fiction)
I’m 36 years old, I love my family, I love baseball, and I’m about to become a farmer. But until I heard the voice, I’d never done a crazy thing in my whole life.
Phil Alden Robinson, Field of Dreams (Screenplay)
He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (Fiction)
Now this is the story all about how / My life got flipped, turned upside down…
DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince, Yo Home to Bel-Air (Poetry/Song)
Hello. My name’s Forrest, Forrest Gump. You want a chocolate?
Eric Roth, Forrest Gump [Film] (Screenplay)
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 (Fiction)
The Moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.
Neal Stephenson, Seveneves (Fiction)
Somebody’s comin’, Pa.
Well, let him come.
A. B. Guthrie Jr. and Jack Sher, Shane [Film, 1953] (Screenplay)
Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.
Anita Brookner, The Debut (Fiction)
As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death / I take a look at my life and realize there’s not much left…
Coolio, Gangsta’s Paradise (Poetry/Song)
Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
Oscar Wilde, Quote, Referenced in Penguin Classic Collection of same name (Witticism/Tweet/OneLine)
In the cornor of a first-class smoking carriage, Mr. Justice Wargrave, lately retired from the bench, puffed at a cigar and ran an interested eye through the political news in the Times.
Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None (Fiction)
Old man, look at my life / I’m a lot like you were…
Neil Young, Old Man (Poetry/Song)
There’s two kinds of people in the world – winners… and losers.
Michael Arndt, Little Miss Sunshine (Screenplay)
On behalf of the great state of Illinois, crossroads of a nation, land of Lincoln, let me express my deep gratitude for the privilege of addressing this convention. Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely.
Barrack Obama, Democratic National Convention 2004 Speech (Speech/Talk)
Hello darkness, my old friend…
Simon & Garfunkel, The Sound of Silence (Poetry/Song)
I believe in America; America has made my fortune, and I raised my daughter in the American fashion…
Francis Ford Coppola & Mario Puzo, The Godfather [Film] (Screenplay)
He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche (Fiction)
According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way that a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway. Because bees don’t care what humans think is impossible.
Jerry Seinfeld; Andy Robin; Barry Marder; Spike Feresten, Bee Movie (Screenplay)
Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Dante, Divine Comedy / Inferno (Poetry/Song)
The world is a vampire…
The Smashing Pumpkins, Bullet with Butterfly Wings (Poetry/Song)
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.
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (Fiction)
Life was given to us a billion years ago. What have we done with it?
Luc Besson, Lucy [Film, 2014] (Screenplay)
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (Fiction)
Good luck. Hi, uh, I have an appointment with Emily Charlton? Andrea Sachs? Yes. Great. Human resources certainly has an odd sense of humor. Hah. Follow me. Okay, so I was Miranda’s second assistant, but her first assistant recently got promoted, and so now I’m the first.
Aline Brosh McKenna, The Devil Wears Prada [Film, 2006] (Screenplay)
The year 1866 was signalized by a remarkable incident, a mysterious and puzzling phenomenon, which doubtless no one has yet forgotten.
Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Fiction)
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (Fiction)
It was strange going back to Spain again. I had never expected to be allowed to return to the country that I loved more than any other except my own and I would not return so long as my friends there were in jail.
Ernest Hemingway, The Dangerous Summer (Nonfiction)
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (Fiction)
As in every stone of this size, there is a flaw. A flaw? The slightest flaw, your excellency. If you look deep into the stone, you will perceive the tiniest discoloration. It resembles an animal. An animal? A little panther.
Maurice Richlin and Blake Edwards, The Pink Panther [Film, 1963] (Screenplay)
My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered.
Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones (Fiction)
The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air.
Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson, The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring [Film] (Screenplay)
Mother died today.
Albert Camus, The Stranger (Fiction)
Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (Fiction)
A long time ago in a galaway far, far away…
George Lucas, Star Wars (Screenplay)
When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man.
Richard Stark, Firebreak (Fiction)
Beware the beast man, for he is the Devil’s pawn. Alone among God’s primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother’s land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him, for he is the harbinger of death.
Michael Wilson and Rod Serling, Planet of the Apes [Film, 1968] (Screenplay)
I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (Fiction)
You love your sister? You make any noise, know what happens?
Frank Darabont, The Green Mile [Film] (Screenplay)
At the first bullfight I ever went to I expected to be horrified and perhaps sickened by what I had been told would happen to the horses.
Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (Nonfiction)
Clare: It’s hard being left behind. I wait for Henry, not knowing where he is, wondering if he’s okay. It’s hard to be the one who stays.
Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Travellers Wife (Fiction)
When the car stopped rolling, Parker kicked out the windshield and crawled through onto the wrinkled hood, Glock first.
Richard Stark, Backflash (Fiction)
All right, so this is the world and there are five billion people on it. When I was a kid there were three. It’s hard to keep up.
Cameron Crowe, Jerry Maguire (Screenplay)
There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.
Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book (Fiction)
With the coming of the Second World War, many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully or desperately toward the freedom of the Americas. Lisbon became the great embarkation point.
Julius J. Epstein; Philip G. Epstein; Howard Koch; Casey Robinson, Casablanca (Screenplay)
Let’s get down to business…
Donny Osmond, I’ll Make a Man Out of You (Poetry/Song)
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Fiction)
Who is John Galt?
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (Fiction)
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.
Joan Didion, The Year Of Magical Thinking (Nonfiction)
Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I’ve come to learn, is women.
Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (Fiction)
When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (Fiction)
The world’s worst boss. That would be you.
Seth Godin, The World’s Worst Boss (Essay/Article)
The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum!
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Fiction)
I owe everything to George Bailey. Help him, Dear Father.
Frances Goodrich; Albert Hackett; Frank Capra, It’s a Wonderful Life (Screenplay)
When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent.
Patrick McCabe, The Butcher Boy (Fiction)
I get the willies when I see closed doors.
Joseph Heller, Something Happened (Fiction)
My name is Walter Hartwell White. I live at 308 Negra Arroyo Lane, Albuquerque, New Mexico. 87104.
Vince Gilligan, Breaking Bad [Pilot Episode] (Screenplay)
See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (Fiction)
At first I was afraid, I was petrified / Kept thinking I could never live without you by my side…
Gloria Gaynor, I Will Survive (Poetry/Song)
His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god; he preferred to drop the Maha- and -atman, and called himself Sam.
Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light (Fiction)
By this year, the year “forty-five”, the Germans had already lost command of the air-space over our little town. Over the whole region, in fact, and for that matter, the whole country. The dive- bombers were disrupting communications to such an extent that the morning trains ran at noon, the noon trains in the evening, and the evening trains in the night, so that now and then it might happen that an afternoon train came in punctual to the minute, according to the time-table, but only because it was the morning passenger train running four hours late.
Bohumil Hrabal, Closely Watched Trains (Fiction)
Hey boy, what you doin’ with my Mama’s car? Wait there!
David Newman; Robert Benton, Bonnie and Clyde [Film] (Screenplay)
Since it’s Sunday and it’s stopped raining, I think I’ll take a bouquet of roses to my grave.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Someone Has Been Disarranging These Roses (Fiction)
Then there was the bad weather.
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (Nonfiction)
Where now?
Samuel Beckett The Unnamable (Play/Drama)
Who now? When now?
Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions…
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (Fiction)
She isn’t coming yet, Toto. Did she hurt you? She tried to, didn’t she? Come on. We’ll go tell Uncle Henry and Auntie Em.
Noel Langley; Florence Ryerson; Edgar Allan Woolf, The Wizard of Oz [FIlm] (Screenplay)
It was prophesied I would live to see one hundred and having achieved that age I see no reason to doubt it. I am not dying a Christian though my scalp is intact and if there is an eternal hunting ground, that is where I am headed.
Philipp Meyer, The Son (Fiction)
His glory, by whose might all things are mov’d, Pierces the universe, and in one part Sheds more resplendence, elsewhere less.
Dante, Divine Comedy / Paradiso (Poetry/Song)
Son: Baba?
Father: Yes, my son?
Son: Tell me a story.
Father: Which one?
Son: The story of home.
Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole, Black Panther [Film] (Screenplay)
If it doesn’t come roaring out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it.
Charles Bukowski, So You Want to be a Writer, (Poetry/Song)
Psychics can see the color of time it’s blue.
Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away (Fiction)
Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.
Graham Greene, Brighton Rock (Fiction)
My name is Lester Burnham. This is my neighbourhood; this is my street; this is my life. I am 42 years old; in less than a year I will be dead. Of course I don’t know that yet, and in a way, I am dead already.
Alan Ball, American Beauty (Screenplay)
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (Fiction)
The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…
Fredric Brown, Knock (Fiction)
What do we care if we were expelled from college, Scarlett. The war is gonna start any day now, so it won’t affect college anyhow.
Sidney Howard, Gone with the Wind [Film] (Screenplay)
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Fiction)
When you wish that a Saturday was actually a Monday, you know there is something seriously wrong.
Polly Ho-Yen, Boy in the Tower (Fiction)
It was the day my grandmother exploded.
Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (Fiction)
First the colours. Then the humans. That’s how I usually see things. Or at least, how I try. *** HERE IS A SMALL FACT *** You are going to die.
Markus Zusak, The Book Thief (Fiction)
“Take my camel, dear,” said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.
Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (Fiction)
Vada: I was born jaundiced. Once I sat on a toilet seat at a truck stop and caught hemorrhoids. And I’ve learned to live with this chicken bone that’s been lodged in my throat for the past three years, so I knew Dad would be devastated when he learned of my latest affliction.
Vada: Dad, I don’t wanna upset you, but my left breast is developing at a significantly faster rate than my right. It can only mean one thing. Cancer. I’m dying.
Harry: OK. Sweetie, hand me the mayonnaise out of the fridge.
Laurice Elehwany, My Girl [Film] (Screenplay)
I hurt myself today / To see if I still feel / I focus on the pain / The only thing that’s real…
Nine Inch Nails, Hurt (Poetry/Song)
In Fort Repose, a river town in Central Florida, it was said that sending a message by Western Union was the same as broadcasting it over the combined networks. This was not entirely true. It was true that Florence Wechek, the manager, gossiped.
Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon (Fiction)
Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Bob Dylan, A Hard Rain’s A- Gonna Fall (Poetry/Song)
In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.
David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress (Fiction)
We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
Louise Erdrich, Tracks (Fiction)
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
John the Apostle, Book of John (Religious/Historic/Philosophical)
A dead man fell from the sky, landing at my feet with a thud.
Gary Corby, The Pericles Commission (Fiction)
It was now lunch time and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had happened.
Ernest Hemingway, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber (Fiction)
I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.
Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream (Speech/Talk)
All stories are love stories.
Robert McLiam Wilson, Eureka Street (Fiction)
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licóur Of which vertú engendred is the flour…
Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (Poetry/Song)
Are you watching closely?
Christopher Nolan & Jonathan Nolan, The Prestige [Film] (Screenplay)
There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass- covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it. The road climbs seven miles into them, to Carisbrooke; and from there, if there is no mist, you look down on one of the fairest valleys of Africa.
Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country (Fiction)
It’s not my fault.
Toni Morrison, God Help the Child (Fiction)
On Friday, June 12th, I woke up at six o’clock and no wonder; it was my birthday.
Anne Frank, The Diary Of a Young Girl (Nonfiction)
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (Fiction)
Late one evening towards the end of March, a teenager picked up a double- barrelled shotgun, walked into the forest, put the gun to someone else’s forehead and pulled the trigger.
Fredrik Backman, Beartown (Fiction)
Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Fiction)
I was an ambitious girl child. I knew even then that I had to be, in that environment of thugs, thieves, killers, prostitutes, gamblers – you name it, you’d find it in Trench Town.
Rita Marley, No Woman, No Cry: My life With Bob Marley (Nonfiction)
If a man walks in dressed as a hick and acting as if he owned the place, he’s a spaceman.
Robert Heinlein, Double Star (Fiction)
My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.
Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Fiction)
Carry on my wayward son…
Kansas (Poetry/Song)
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (Fiction)
Daisy: What are you looking at, Caroline?
Caroline: The wind, mom. They say the hurricane is coming.
Eric Roth, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button [Film] (Screenplay)
That’s why I love spiders. ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.
Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle (Fiction)
I was not sorry when my brother died.
Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (Fiction)
As a child I lived in Lewis Carroll’s house in Guildford.
David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man (Nonfiction)
In the spring of 1978, I was seduced by a river.
Elaine Sciolino, The Seine: The River that Made Paris (Nonfiction)
This is the story of a man named Eddie and it starts at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It may seem strange to start a story with and ending, but all endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.
Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven (Religious/Historic/Philosophical)
They murdered him.
Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War (Fiction)
Let me say this: bein a idiot is no box of chocolates. People laugh, lose patience, treat you shabby. Now they say folks sposed to be kind to the afflicted, but let me tell you— it ain’t always that way. Even so, I got not complaints, cause I reckon I done live a pretty interestin life, so to speak.
Winston Groom, Forrest Gump [Novel] (Fiction)
Even in death the boys were trouble.
Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys (Fiction)
The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men [Film] (Screenplay)
It’s a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.
Roald Dahl, Matilda (Fiction)
Earth is dead! They murdered our earth!
Paul Anderson, After Doomsday (Fiction)
Mmm. I look good. I mean, really good. Hey, everyone! Come and see how good I look!
Adam McKay and Will Ferrell, Anchorman (Screenplay)
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.
Robert Louise Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Fiction)
It was the summer of 1963, when everybody called me Baby and it didn’t occur to me to mind. It was before Kennedy got shot, before The Beatles, when I wanted to join the Peace Corps and I didn’t think I’d ever find a guy as great as my dad.
Eleanor Bergstein, Dirty Dancing (Screenplay)
Meaningless! Meaningless! says the Teacher. Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.
King Solomon, Ecclesiastes (Religious/Historic/Philosophical)
I was looking for a quite place to die.
Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies (Fiction)
Slave in the magic mirror. Come from the farthest space. Through wind and darkness I summon thee. Speak! Let me see thy face.
Ted Sears; Richard Creedon; Otto Englander; Dick Rickard; Earl Hurd; Merrill De Maris; Dorothy Ann Blank; Webb Smith, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Screenplay)
This morning, my mother didn’t get out of bed.
Melina Marchetta, Saving Francesca (Fiction)
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Fiction)
This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.
William Goldman, The Princess Bride (Fiction)
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.
Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis (Fiction)
It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (Fiction)
I had the craziest dream last night. I was dancing the white swan.
Mark Heyman; Andres Heinz; John McLaughlin, Black Swan [Film] (Screenplay)
What ever happened to details?
Seth Godin, The Elegance of Nothing (Essay/Article)
He – for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it – was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.
Virginia Woolf, Orlando (Fiction)
When King David was very old, he could not keep warm even when they put covers over him.
Jeremiah, 1 Kings (Religious/Historic/Philosophical)
The baby is dead.
Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny (Fiction)
Yo, ho, yo, ho, a pirate’s life for me. Yo, ho, yo, ho, it’s a pirate’s life for me…
Ted Elliott; Terry Rossio; Stuart Beattie; Jay Wolpert, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (Screenplay)
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (Fiction)
When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventyifirst birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
J.R.R. Tolkein, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Fiction)
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Erye (Fiction)
The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years – if it ever did end – began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.
Stephen King, It (Fiction)
How can I explain the never-ending irrationality of human behavior?
Seth Godin, Quieting the Lizard Brain (Essay/Article)
How do you explain when things don’t go as we assume? Or better, how do you explain when others are able to achieve things that seem to defy all of the assumptions?
Simon Sinek, How Great Leadears Inspire Action: TED Talk (Speech/Talk)
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.
Donna Tartt, The Secret History (Fiction)
She shivers in the wind like the last leaf on a dying tree.
Frank Miller and Robert Rodriquez, Sin City [Film] (Screenplay)
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (Fiction)
It was five o’clock on a winter’s morning in Syria.
Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express (Fiction)
People do not give it credence that a young girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood, but it did happen.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, True Grit [Film 2010] (Screenplay)
Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash.
J. G. Ballard Crash (Fiction)
Maycomb was a tired old town, even in 1932 when I first knew it. Somehow, it was hotter then. Men’s stiff collars wilted by 9 in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon after their three o’clock naps. And by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frosting from sweating and sweet talcum. The day was 24 hours long but it seemed longer.
Horton Foote, To Kill a Mockingbird [Film] (Screenplay)
When the guy with asthma finally came in from the fire escape, Parker rabbit-punched him and took his gun away.
Richard Stark, The Mourner (Fiction)
I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind (Fiction)
I’ve watched through his eyes, I’ve listened through his ears, and I tell you he’s the one.
Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game (Fiction)
Sir Thomas: I received a formal request for marriage today for Anne. From the Carey family.
Lady Elizabeth: But that’s wonderful.
Sir Thomas: I turned it down.
Lady Elizabeth: What?
Sir Thomas: And offered them Mary instead.
Peter Morgan, The Other Boleyn Girl [Film] (Screenplay)
The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.
George Orwell, Coming Up for Air (Fiction)
While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years.
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (Fiction)
We are snugly insulated from the natural world.
Simon Sarris, Nature (Essay/Article)
I was sitting with my friend Arthur Cornrom in a restaurant. It was a cafeteria and this beautiful girl walked in and I turned to Arthur and I said, ‘Arthur, you see that girl? I’m going to marry her’. And two weeks later we were married and it’s over fifty years later and we are still married.
Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally (Screenplay)
THE FIRST TIME HE TRIED IT, the vomiting started after 67 miles, and it didn’t stop until six hours later.
Steve Friedman, It’s Gonna Suck To Be You (Essay/Article)
The manhunt extended across more than one hundred light years and eight centuries.
Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky (Fiction)
Seated opposite me in the railway carriage, the elderly lady in the fox-fur shawl was recalling some of the murders that she had committed over the years.
John Boyne, The Absolutist (Fiction)
I tried to make meat loaf out of the girl but it becomes too frustrating a task and instead I spend the afternoon smearing her meat all over the walls, chewing on strips of skin I ripped from her body.
Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (Fiction)
The first time Caesar approached Cora about running north, she said no.
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (Fiction)
The voice you hear is not my speaking voice, but my mind’s voice. I have not spoken since I was six years old. No one knows why, not even me. My father says it is a dark talent and the day I take it into my head to stop breathing will be my last.
Jane Campion, The Piano [Film] (Screenplay)
We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.
M.T. Anderson, Feed (Fiction)
Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue- eyed type like me.
Günter Grass, The Tin Drum (Fiction)
The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking as it seemed from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand.
H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man (Fiction)
Once upon a time, there was a lovely princess. But she had an enchantment upon her of a fearful sort, which could only be broken by love’s first kiss. She was locked away in a castle, guarded by a terrible fire- breathing dragon.
Ted Elliot; Terry Rossio; Joe Stillman; Roger S. H. Schulma, Shrek (Screenplay)
You’re not paying attention. Nobody is. It’s not your fault.
Seth Godin, Permission Marketing (Nonfiction)
The hills are alive with the sound of music.
Ernest Lehman, The Sound of Music [Film] (Screenplay)
I’ve begun this letter five times and torn it up five times.
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (Nonfiction)
A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Fiction)
Show them the courage of Allah!
Pen Densham and John Watson, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (Screenplay)
Monday morning when I answered the door there were twenty-one new real estate agents there, all in horrible polyester gold jackets.
Rudy Rucker,The Hacker And The Ants, Version 2.0 (Fiction)
Sandy: I’m going back to Australia; I might never see you again.
Danny: Don’t… don’t talk that way, Sandy.
Sandy: But it’s true! I’ve just had the best summer of my life, and now I have to go away. It isn’t fair.
Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, Grease (Screenplay)
He believed he was safe.
Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (Fiction)
Oh, no! It wasn’t the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast.
James Creelman and Ruth Rose, King Kong [Film, 1933] (Screenplay)
One day you have a home and the next you don’t, but I’m not going to tell you my particular reasons for being homeless, because it’s my secret story, and Indians have to work hard to keep secrets from hungry white folks.
Sherman Alexie, What You Pawn I Will Redeem (Fiction)
Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.
Emily St. John Mandel,Station Eleven (Fiction)
Had I been dreaming, I would have dreamt of being someone else, with a little creature burrowed in my body, clawing at the walls inside my chest—a recurring nightmare.
Aleksandar Hemon, Passover (Fiction)
You wouldn’t have known me a year ago.
Amy Bloom, The Story (Fiction)
Wendy? Darling? Light of my life. I’m not gonna hurt ya. I’m just going to bash your brains in.
Stephen King, The Shining (Fiction)
When I was lying there in the V.A. hospital, with a big hole blown through the middle of my life, I started having these dreams of flying. I was free. Sooner or later though, you always have to wake up.
James Cameron, Avatar [Film] (Screenplay)
When I think of my wife, I always think of her head.
Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (Fiction)
The morning after he killed Eugene Shapiro, Andre Deschenes woke early.
Elizabeth Bear, Undertow (Fiction)
These are the first words I’ve written since J. fell down the stairs, unless you count lists.
Dani Shapiro, Plane Crash Theory (Fiction)
I was 12 going on 13 the first time I saw a dead human being.
Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon, Stand by Me (Screenplay)
He was one hundred and seventy days dying, and not yet dead.
Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination (Fiction)
I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness (Fiction)
We are going to invent a death for Aida South Wiley, and let’s make it magnificent, because I knew the real Aida South Wiley and she deserves a better death than the one she had.
Martha Otis, Aida South, Flower (Fiction)
Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we?
N.K. Jemison, The Fifth Season (Fiction)
No matter what they say, it’s all about money.
J. F. Lawton Pretty Woman [Film] (Screenplay)
At the end, the bottom, the very worst of it, with the world afire and hell’s flamewinged angels calling him by name, Lee Crane blamed himself.
Theodore Sturgeon, Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea (Fiction)
All of this happened, more or less.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughter-House Five (Fiction)
By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. So vague, yet so immense. He did not want to live with it. Yet he knew that, during this night, unless he lived with it very well, he might have to live with it all the rest of his life.
Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes (Fiction)
These are over 300 best opening lines that you can study for inspiration. To get famous opening lines in books and all first sentences referenced in this article, click here to download it on Notion.
