“All this happened, more or less.” —Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
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2. "The war in Zagreb began over a pack of cigarettes."
—Girl at War by Sara Nović
3. "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."
—100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
4. "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
—Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
5. "What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask."
—Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
6. "I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead."
—On the Road by Jack Kerouac
7. "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure."
—The Stranger by Albert Camus
8. "Once upon a time, in a far-off land, I was kidnapped by a gang of fearless yet terrified young men with so much impossible hope beating inside their bodies it burned their very skin and strengthened their will right through their bones."
—An Untamed State by Roxane Gay
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10. "The play—for which Briony had designed the posters, programs and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crêpe paper—was written in her two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch."
—Atonement by Ian McEwan
11. "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul."
—Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
12. "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed."
—Ulysses by James Joyce
13. "He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters."
—Orlando by Virginia Woolf
14. "Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself."
—Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
15. "Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet."
—Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
16. "The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we understood the gravity of our situation."
—The Secret History by Donna Tartt
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53 Of The Best Opening Lines In Literature