Fifty First Sentences that stays with you long after that book is read
1. The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925)
“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.”
2. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee, 1960)
“When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.”
3. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller, 1961)
“It was love at first sight.”
4. Beloved (Toni Morrison, 1987)
“124 was spiteful.”
5. Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison, 1952)
“I am an invisible man.”
6. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger, 1951)
“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born.”
7. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez, 1967)
“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.”
8. Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury, 1953)
“It was a pleasure to burn.”
9. Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut, 1969)
“All this happened, more or less.”
10. Neuromancer (William Gibson, 1984)
“The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
11. The Secret History (Donna Tartt, 1992)
“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we understood the gravity of our situation.”
12. I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith, 1948)
“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.”
13. Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston, 1937)
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.”
14. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini, 2003)
“I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975.”
15. Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005)
“My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years.”
16. The Night Circus (Erin Morgenstern, 2011)
“The circus arrives without warning.”
17. Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides, 2002)
“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”
18. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (Ransom Riggs, 2011)
“I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen.”
19. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (Stephen King, 1999)
“The world had teeth and it could bite you with them any time it wanted.”
20. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (Stephen King, 2000)
“I don’t sit down at the typewriter and say to myself, ‘Today I’m going to write a horror novel.’”
21. Normal People (Sally Rooney, 2018)
“The morning one of us left the other, we woke up with our arms around each other.”
22. It Ends with Us (Colleen Hoover, 2016)
“The first time I saw her, I knew she was going to change everything.”
23. The Goldfinch (Donna Tartt, 2013)
“I was born with a fever of unknown origin.”
24. Great Big Beautiful Life (Emily Henry, 2025)
“Alice Scott had never believed in fate, but the island air felt thick with possibility.”
25. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (C.S. Lewis, 1952)
“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
26. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Hunter S. Thompson, 1971)
“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”
27. Paradise (Toni Morrison, 1997)
“They shoot the white girl first.”
28. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving, 1989)
“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice.”
29. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (Italo Calvino, 1979)
“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.”
30. The Color Purple (Alice Walker, 1982)
“You better not never tell nobody but God.”
31. A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens, 1843 / evergreen)
“Marley was dead, to begin with.”
32. Murphy (Samuel Beckett, 1938)
“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
33. Black Beauty (Anna Sewell, 1877 / evergreen)
“The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it.”
34. The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkien, 1937)
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”
35. Back When We Were Grownups (Anne Tyler, 2001)
“Once upon a time there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.”
36. The Red Badge of Courage (Stephen Crane, 1895 / evergreen)
“The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.”
37. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy, 1877 / evergreen)
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
38. The Trial (Franz Kafka, 1925)
“Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.”
39. Moby-Dick (Herman Melville, 1851 / evergreen)
“Call me Ishmael.”
40. The Stranger (Albert Camus, 1942)
“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.”
41. The Go-Between (L.P. Hartley, 1953)
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
42. The Gunslinger (Stephen King, 1982)
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
43. The Catcher Was a Spy (Nicholas Dawidoff, 1994)
“Moe Berg was a curious fellow.”
44. The Return of the King (J.R.R. Tolkien, 1955)
“Pippin looked out from the high window of the tower of Minas Tirith.”
45. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel García Márquez, 1985)
“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”
46. Atonement (Ian McEwan, 2001)
“The play was over and it was that time of the evening when the first stars make themselves visible.”
47. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood, 1985)
“We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.”
48. Pachinko (Min Jin Lee, 2017)
“History has failed us, but no matter.”
49. Americanah (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2013)
“Princeton, New Jersey, 2009.”
50. Where the Crawdads Sing (Delia Owens, 2018)
“Marsh is not swamp.”