First Lines, Part II

Okay, here's the next 25 Best First Lines of all time:

26. 124 was spiteful. � Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

27. Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. � Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605; trans. Edith Grossman)

28. Mother died today. � Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert)

29. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. � Ha Jin, Waiting (1999)

30. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. � William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

31. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. � Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz)

32. Where now? Who now? When now? � Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)

33. Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. "Stop!" cried the groaning old man at last, "Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree." � Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1925)

34. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. � John Barth, The End of the Road (1958)

35. It was like so, but wasn't. � Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)

36. �Money . . . in a voice that rustled. � William Gaddis, J R (1975)

37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. � Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

38. All this happened, more or less. � Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

39. They shoot the white girl first. � Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)

40. For a long time, I went to bed early. � Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (1913; trans. Lydia Davis)

41. The moment one learns English, complications set in. � Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990)

42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. � Anita Brookner, The Debut (1981)

43. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; � Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

44. Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. � Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. � Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)

46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation. � Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (1974)

47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. � C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)

48. 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, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

49. It was the day my grandmother exploded. � Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)

50. 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, Middlesex (2002)