Opening lines. They can pull you into book and urge ya to go further, or turn ya off so’s ya move on.

Mom and me, we’ve been around long enough to know some good opening lines when we see ‘em. So we made a list. Checked it twice. And came up with our 100% unscientific, totally subjective list of 35 Most Memorable Opening Lines Ever. From books we’ve actually read.

How Many?

Some are pretty well-known. Easy-peasy. Others are a bit more obscure. How many do you recognize? (No fair scrolling or Googling. You either know ‘em or you don’t.) Answers are at the bottom. In no particular order:

1. All children, except one, grow up.
2. I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.
3. 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.
4. When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.
5. When I left my office that beautiful spring day, I had no idea what was in store for me.
6. For many years my home has been in the Northern Frontier Province of Kenya, that vast stretch of semiarid thornbush, covering some hundred and twenty thousand square miles, which extended from Mount Kenya to the Abyssinian border.
7. On the morning of August 8, 1965, Robert Kincaid locked the door to his small two-room apartment on the third floor of a rambling house in Bellingham, Washington.
8. 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 seasons of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we have everything before us, we have nothing us…
9. Although these details in no way essentially concern that which we have to tell…
10. My name is India Opal Buloni, and last summer my daddy, the preacher, sent me to the store for a box of macaroni-and-cheese, some white rice, and two tomatoes and I came back with a dog.
11. I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull.
12. One frightfully hot morning, when she was about nine years old, she awakened feeling very cross, and she became crosser still when she saw that the servant who stood by her bedside was not her Ayah.
13. ONCE UPON A TIME a girl named Cinderella lived with her stepmother and two stepsisters.
14.  “What’s that noise?” said Mrs. Hogget, sticking her comfortable round red face out of the kitchen window.
15. Serene wasn’t a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York.
16. Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse; The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,…
17. In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
18. Mrs Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops, and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde’s Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream…
19. In the great green room, there was a telephone And a red balloon And a picture of a cat jumping over the moon…
20. A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin.
21. The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house all that cold, cold, wet day.
22. The Santa Juana is under way. White stars breaking through a high mist. Half moon. The deep burn of phosphorus running in the wake. Long, easy rolling and the push of a steady wind.
23. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
24. Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.
25. If you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to ask for a glass of milk.
26. I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America. 
27. The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it.
28. On the first Monday of the month of April, 1625, the market town of Meung, in which the author of ROMANCE OF THE ROSE was born, appeared to be in as perfect a state of revolution as if the Huguenots had just made a second La Rochelle of it.
29. “In the beginning…” or “Once upon a time…” It’s a wonderful phrase, isn’t it, full of legend and myth, promise and mystery, and a sort of invitation.
30. The family of Dashwood had been long settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property, where for many generations, they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance.
31. Call me Ishmael.
32. A Chinese immigrant, when she lived in China, had bought a swan from a vendor who told her it was a duck who “stretched its neck in hopes of becoming a goose.”
33. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
34. The first week in August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning.
35. It was a dark and stormy night.

Answers

1. Peter Pan – J.M.Barrie
2. Out of Africa – Isak Dinesen
3. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
4. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
5. Where the Red Fern Grows – Willson Rawls
6. Born Free: A Lioness of Two World – Joy Adamson
7. The Bridges of Madison County – Robert James Waller
8. A tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
9. Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
10. Because of Winn Dixie – Kate DiCamillo
11. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
12. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
13. Oh, come on!
14. Babe The Gallant Pig – Dick King-Smith
15. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith
16. You’ve got this, right?
17. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
18. Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
19. Goodnight Moon – Margaret Wise Brown
20. Little House on the Prairie – Laura Ingalls Wilder
21. The Cat in the Hat – Dr. Seuss
22. Through Gates of Splendor – Elisabeth Elliot
23. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
24. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
25. If You Give a Mouse a Cookie – Laura Numeroff
26. My Antonia – Willa Cather
27. Black Beauty – Anna Sewell
28. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
29. Epic – John Eldredge
30. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
31. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
32. The Joy Luck Club (Prologue) – Amy Tan
33. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
34. Tuck Everlasting – Natalie Babbitt
35. A Wrinkle in Time – Madeleine L’Engle

So. How’d ya do? What would you add?