First Lines of Texts

First Line

Book

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

"Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes..."

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in posession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona, where we lay our scene, from ancient grudgebreak to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

Who's there?

Call me Ishmael.

Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, in as much as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter.

Marley was dead: to begin with.

Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy.

Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

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, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde's door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.