Opening Lines of Books

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

Call me Ishmael.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.

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

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

When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen.

"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.

We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.

When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.

The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years - if it ever did end - began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.

The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play, so we sat in the house all that cold, cold wet day.

The hottest day of the summer so far was drawing to a close and a drowsy silence lay over the large, square houses of Privet Drive.

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.