Famous & Favorite First Lines in a Novel

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
-Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
- Jane Austen, Emma

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice ‘without pictures or conversation?’
-Lewis Carrol, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

In a village of La Mancha the name of which I have no desire to recall, there lived not so long ago one of those gentlemen who always have a lance in the rack, an ancient buckler, a skinny nag, and a greyhound for
the chase.
-Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, General Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant
afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

My suffering left me sad and gloomy.
- Yann Martel, Life of Pi