Best First Lines

Aquila: I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.

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

hipdeep: In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

hipdeep: Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

Aquila: "Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents."

aethercowboy: There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it

Aquila: I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites.

Aquila: In the myriadic year of our lord—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!—Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.

Aquila: Hal was not yet a prince when she fell in love with Lady Hotspur, but she would be within the hour.

Aquila: The wind came into the house from the Sound, and it blew Daisy and me around her East Egg mansion like puffs of dandelion seeds, like foam, like a pair of young woman in white dresses who had no cares to weigh them down.

Aquila: The note said: someone in this class is a witch.

Aquila: There was a wall.

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

Aquila: Apart from the one in the church tower, there were five clocks in the village that kept reasonable time, and my father owned one of them.

Aquila: I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other.

hipdeep: This is my favorite book in all the world, though I've never read it.

aethercowboy: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

aethercowboy: 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 season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

aethercowboy: I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

aethercowboy: I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

Aquila: All children, except one, grow up.