This list was missing two of my favorite opening lines, one by Stephen King himself, "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." The other, "Lessa woke, cold." by Anne McCaffrey, Dragonflight
. Anyone have any favorite first lines to share?
In a 2013 interview with Joe Fassler, horror fiction maestro Stephen King reflected on the magnitude of a novel's introductory sentence. "An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story," he said.
There are thousands of classic opening lines in fiction—A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison come to mind—but often the most well-known are not always the best. First sentences, of course, have different functions—to amuse, to frighten, to mystify—and the mechanics a writer uses to achieve this connection vary from genre to genre. In looking for the best opening lines, we took all of this into consideration. What follows are the 50 best. These are the sentences that say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.
"Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe.” -King T'Challa, Black Panther
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it. ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. ~Winston Churchill
