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First lines from novels: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Flaubert. Faulkner
A quiz for our readers
The Creation of Adam by Michaelangelo. A "first line announces a new world’s creation."
The Book of Genesis begins this way: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” A story or novel or essay or poem’s first line announces a new world’s creation. First lines are tricky to write. You want that initial sentence to beguile, enchant, seduce, invite, plop the reader right down, at once, in this new world you’ve made. Plus, you want this first sentence to work the old abracadabra, to actually bring that new world into being.
Below you will find some of my favorite first lines, all from novels. Author and title are printed further below.
- I shall soon be dead at last in spite of it all.
- This is a story to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night.
- A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment.
- At the beginning of the summer I had lunch with my father, the gangster, who was in town for the weekend to transact some of his vague business.
- I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life.
- “I have been here before,” I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were white with fools’ parsley and meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendor, such as our climate affords once or twice a year, when leaf and flower and bird and sun-lit stone and shadow seem all to proclaim the glory of God; and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.
- In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.
- “All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,” says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880).
- Our prison stood at the edge of the fortress grounds, close to the fortress wall.
- The cabin-passenger wrote in his diary a parody of Descartes: “I feel discomfort, therefore I am alive,” then sat pen in hand with no more to record.
- Forgive me my denomination and my town; I am a Christian minister, and an American.
- Once I was young and had so much more orientation and could talk with nervous intelligence about everything and with clarity and without as much literary preambling as this; in other words this is the story of an unself-confident man, at the same time of an egomaniac, naturally, facetious won’t do — just to start at the beginning and let the truth seep out, that’s what I’ll do •—.
- No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine.
- There was only one bench in the shade and Converse went for it, although it was already occupied.
- Iam all alone in my pad, man, my piled-up-to-the-ceiling-with-junk pad.
- If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
- Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tidewater dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.
- See the child.
- He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.
- A screaming comes across the sky.
- On a cold blowy February day a woman is boarding the ten a.m. flight to London, followed by an invisible dog.
- When he is sick, every man wants his mother; if she is not around, other women must do.
- Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks, “I have come from Alabama: a fur piece.”
- “When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she~ made the nipping off of hoggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned towards her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.”
- We were in study hall when the headmaster walked in, followed by a new boy not wearing a school uniform, and by a janitor carrying a large desk.
- The station wagons arrived at noon.
- It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
- Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?
- If this typewriter can’t do it, then fuck it, it can’t be done.
- In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.
ANSWERS
Answers:
- Samuel Beckett: Malone Dies
- John Cheever: Oh, What a Paradise It Seems
- Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Native
- F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
- James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room
- Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited
- Richard Brautigan: In Watermelon Sugar
- Vladimir Nabokov: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The House of the Dead
- Graham Greene: A Burnt-Out Case
- John Updike: A Month of Sundays
- JackKerouac: The Subterraneans
- Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey
- Robert Stone: Dog Soldiers
- William Kotzwinkle: The Fan Man
- Saul Bellow: Herzog
- Jack London: The Call of the Wild
- Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian
- Ernest Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls
- Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow
- Alison Lurie: Foreign Affairs
- Philip Roth: The Anatomy Lesson
- William Faulkner: Light in August
- Katherine Dunn: Geek Love
- Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
- Don DeLillo: White Noise
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Love in the Time of Cholera
- Walker Percy: Love in the Ruins
- Tom Robbins: Still Life with Woodpecker
- Carson McCullers: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Here's something you might be interested in.
First lines from novels: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Flaubert. Faulkner
A quiz for our readers
First lines from novels: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Flaubert. Faulkner
A quiz for our readers
The Creation of Adam by Michaelangelo. A "first line announces a new world’s creation."
The Book of Genesis begins this way: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” A story or novel or essay or poem’s first line announces a new world’s creation. First lines are tricky to write. You want that initial sentence to beguile, enchant, seduce, invite, plop the reader right down, at once, in this new world you’ve made. Plus, you want this first sentence to work the old abracadabra, to actually bring that new world into being.
Below you will find some of my favorite first lines, all from novels. Author and title are printed further below.
- I shall soon be dead at last in spite of it all.
- This is a story to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night.
- A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment.
- At the beginning of the summer I had lunch with my father, the gangster, who was in town for the weekend to transact some of his vague business.
- I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life.
- “I have been here before,” I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were white with fools’ parsley and meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendor, such as our climate affords once or twice a year, when leaf and flower and bird and sun-lit stone and shadow seem all to proclaim the glory of God; and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.
- In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.
- “All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,” says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880).
- Our prison stood at the edge of the fortress grounds, close to the fortress wall.
- The cabin-passenger wrote in his diary a parody of Descartes: “I feel discomfort, therefore I am alive,” then sat pen in hand with no more to record.
- Forgive me my denomination and my town; I am a Christian minister, and an American.
- Once I was young and had so much more orientation and could talk with nervous intelligence about everything and with clarity and without as much literary preambling as this; in other words this is the story of an unself-confident man, at the same time of an egomaniac, naturally, facetious won’t do — just to start at the beginning and let the truth seep out, that’s what I’ll do •—.
- No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine.
- There was only one bench in the shade and Converse went for it, although it was already occupied.
- Iam all alone in my pad, man, my piled-up-to-the-ceiling-with-junk pad.
- If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
- Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tidewater dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.
- See the child.
- He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.
- A screaming comes across the sky.
- On a cold blowy February day a woman is boarding the ten a.m. flight to London, followed by an invisible dog.
- When he is sick, every man wants his mother; if she is not around, other women must do.
- Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks, “I have come from Alabama: a fur piece.”
- “When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she~ made the nipping off of hoggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned towards her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.”
- We were in study hall when the headmaster walked in, followed by a new boy not wearing a school uniform, and by a janitor carrying a large desk.
- The station wagons arrived at noon.
- It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
- Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?
- If this typewriter can’t do it, then fuck it, it can’t be done.
- In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.
ANSWERS
Answers:
- Samuel Beckett: Malone Dies
- John Cheever: Oh, What a Paradise It Seems
- Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Native
- F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
- James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room
- Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited
- Richard Brautigan: In Watermelon Sugar
- Vladimir Nabokov: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The House of the Dead
- Graham Greene: A Burnt-Out Case
- John Updike: A Month of Sundays
- JackKerouac: The Subterraneans
- Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey
- Robert Stone: Dog Soldiers
- William Kotzwinkle: The Fan Man
- Saul Bellow: Herzog
- Jack London: The Call of the Wild
- Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian
- Ernest Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls
- Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow
- Alison Lurie: Foreign Affairs
- Philip Roth: The Anatomy Lesson
- William Faulkner: Light in August
- Katherine Dunn: Geek Love
- Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
- Don DeLillo: White Noise
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Love in the Time of Cholera
- Walker Percy: Love in the Ruins
- Tom Robbins: Still Life with Woodpecker
- Carson McCullers: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter