Famous first lines

 

• From Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera: “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”
• From William Kennedy’s Ironweed: “Riding up the winding road of Saint Agnes Cemetery in the back of the rattling old truck, Francis Phelan became aware that the dead, even more than the living, settled down in neighborhoods. The truck was suddenly surrounded by fields of monuments and cenotaphs of kindred design and striking size, all guarding the privileged dead.”
• From Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”
• From Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”
• From Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
• From Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
• From Christopher Buckley’s Thank You For Smoking: “Nick Naylor had been called many things since becoming the chief spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, but until now no one had actually compared him to Satan.”
• From Toni Morrison’s Paradise: “They shoot the white girl first.”
• And, of course, this inimitable portal from J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan: “All children, except one, grow up.