Famous Opening Lines

Seeing a headline like that, how can you not be curious?
(With 665,000 views in the first two weeks, this is a high-performer – Indy)

Then, you just need to deliver what you promised so that you avoid the accusation of “clickbait.” 

They like it. They subscribe for more.

See? This is really pretty easy. 

“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

“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

“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 García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Call me Ishmael.”
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
— George Orwell, 1984

“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 know the truth.”
— J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“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

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
— C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

“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