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16 of the greatest opening lines in literature

TNN | Last updated on - Mar 15, 2019, 18:34 IST

1/16

Anna Karenina

By Leo Tolstoy

2/16

A Tale of Two Cities

By Charles Dickens

3/16

Nineteen Eighty-Four(Often published as 1984)

By George Orwell

4/16

Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone

By J.K. Rowling

(Image: Pexels)

5/16

Paradise

by Toni Morrison (Image: Pexels)

6/16

Middlesex

By Jeffrey Eugenides

7/16

Never Let Me Go

By Kazuo Ishiguro (Image: Pexels)

8/16

The Metamorphosis

By Franz Kafka (Image: Pexels)

9/16

Murphy

By Samel Beckett (Image: Pexels)

10/16

A Thousand Splendid Suns

By Khaled Hosseini (mage: Pexels)

11/16

Midnight's Children

By Salman Rushdie (Image: Pexels)

12/16

The Bell Jar

By Sylvia Plath (Image: Pexels)

13/16

Everything I Never Told You

By Celeste Ng (Image: Pexels)

14/16

Lolita

By Vladimir Nabokov (Image: Pexels)

15/16

The Stranger

By Albert Camus (Image: Pexels)

16/16

Pride and Prejudice

By Jane Austen (Image: Pexels)

Top Comment

Skrishna Skrishna

2631 days ago

Thank you for the soul-filler of the opening lines of classics and near classics. Tolstoy's almost biographical rumination (Anna Karenina) and Dickens's age of wisdom and foolishness (A Tale of two cities) are immortal not to speak of the sudden strikes of thirteen hours by Orwell. Such writings are the stuff of super human sensitivity and inspiration.

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