Pursuant to yesterday's list of the world's funniest books, here's another, more informal list. A good writer's voice is distinctive from the very first line, and the following first lines of novels, some painfully famous, others less so, are ideal instances of this.

 Call me Ishmael.

 —--Herman Melville, Moby-Dick  

 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  

 Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.  

 —--Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita  

 Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.  

 —--Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina  

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

 —--George Orwell, 1984  

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 was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.  

--—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities  

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.  

--—Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  


 Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.

—--Franz Kafka, The Trial


The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —

--Samuel Beckett, Murphy 

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

--—James Joyce, Ulysses  

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane

—--Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire  

--Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression.

 --—Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. 

 —--L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between

I am an American, Chicago born-- Chicago, that somber city.  

 —--Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.   

—--David Lodge, Changing Places  

One brutally hot summer's morning, Paul Trilby--ex-husband, temp typist, cat murderer—--slouched sweating in his T-shirt on his way to work, waiting behind the wheel of his car for the longest red light in Central Texas.

 —--James Hynes, Kings of Infinite Space

Verrières is said to be one of the most charming little towns in Franche-Comté.

 —--Stendhal, The Red and the Black          

I have long gone to bed early.

 —--Marcel Proust, Swann's Way