Famous First Lines in Literature

A surging, seething, murmuring crowd, of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures...

I often dream about the Dolphin Hotel. In these dreams, I'm there, implicated in some kind of ongoing circumstance. All indications are that I belong to this dream continuity.

People said that there was a new arrival on the Promenade: a lady with a little dog.

Sure I stole.

A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.

This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.

Here's how it started.

ESTRAGON: Nothing to be done.

The sky had been covered with rain clouds since early morning; it was calm, not hot and oppressive as it is on grey overcast days when clouds have been hanging over the fields for a long time and you wait for rain but it does not come.

It looked like a good thing; but what till I tell you.

Evening twilight.

I am a ridiculous man.

Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over.

It was a glorious July day, one of those days which only come after many days of fine weather.

Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.