Top 10 Opening Lines of Books

Lily Of The City via  i-D magazine (official)

 “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.” From Lolita by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

“We were just outside of Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs kicked in.” From Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson 

 “On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide– it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese– the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.” From The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

 “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” From 1984 by George Orwell

 “I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call, my life on the road.” From On the Road by Jack Kerouac

 “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.” From The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” From Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

 “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” From The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

 “The final dying sounds of their dress rehearsal left the Laurel Players with nothing to do but stand there, silent and helpless, blinking out over the footlights of an empty auditorium.” From Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” From Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen