The Most Elegant Opening Sentences In All Of Literature

“The American flag is the most exquisite and artistic of all the banners of all the nations.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel, amazon.com

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

— Vladimir Nabokov, amazon.com

“Seeing that I must shortly approach mankind with the heaviest demand that has ever been made on it, it seems to me indispensable to say who I am.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, amazon.com

“Abandon all hope ye who enter here is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices…”

— Bret Easton Ellis, amazon.com

“I was 50 years old and hadn’t been to bed with a woman for four years.”

— Charles Bukowski, amazon.com

“There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I’d been treated by at least six of them.”

— Erica Jong, amazon.com

“One day Karen DeCilia put a few observations together and realized her husband Frank was sleeping with a real estate woman in Boca.”

— Elmore Leonard, amazon.com

“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides, amazon.com

“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.”

— Ernest Hemingway, amazon.com

“When Zarathustra was thirty years old he left his home and the lake of his home and went into the mountains.”

— Robert Pippin, amazon.com

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”

— C.S Lewis, amazon.com

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to k…”

— J.D Salinger, amazon.com

“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, amazon.com

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

— Gabriel Garcia Marquez, amazon.com

“A WOLF, meeting with a Lamb astray from the fold, resolved not to lay violent hands on him, but to find some plea to justify to the Lamb the Wolf’s right to eat him.”

— Aesop, amazon.com

“East of my home, the long ridge lies across the skyline like the low hull of a submarine.”

— J.A. Baker, amazon.com

“Wars and a man I sing— an exile driven on by Fate, he was the first to flee the coast of Troy, destined to reach Lavinian shores and Italian soil, yet many blows he took on land and sea from the gods above— thanks to cruel Juno’s relentless rage— and many losses he bore in battle too, before he coul…”

— Virgil, amazon.com

“Call me Ishmael.”

— Herman Melville, amazon.com

“SQUIRE Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen…”

— Robert Louis Stevenson, amazon.com

“All natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity.”

— Simone Weil, amazon.com

“There was a depression over the Atlantic.”

— Robert Musil, amazon.com

“THE AMERICAN ACADEMY of Emergency Medicine confirms it: Each year, between one and two dozen adult US males are admitted to ERs after having castrated themselves.”

— David Foster Wallace, amazon.com

“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, amazon.com

“When I was seventeen and in full obedience to my heart’s most urgent commands, I stepped far from the pathway of normal life and in a moment’s time ruined everything I loved— I loved so deeply, and when the love was interrupted, when the incorporeal body of love shrank back in terror and my own body…”

— Scott Spencer, amazon.com

“The driveway began to dip to the long pitch of the bluff.”

— William Sloane, amazon.com

“Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.”

— Dante Alighieri, amazon.com

“She's really, really rich. Besides I love her.”

— Jill Eisenstadt, amazon.com

“Almost all our discovers are due to our violences, to the exacerbation of our instability.”

— E. M. Cioran, amazon.com

“If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.”

— Lemony Snicket, amazon.com

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

— Charles Dickens, amazon.com