Top Ten Tuesday Seventy Nine – Top Ten Best Opening Lines

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature/ meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.

This week we are talking about our favourite opening lines, yet another topic that I was super excited for as I often forgot how good first lines can be.  An opening line can instantly immerse you in the story or put you off the book from the start, so getting to look back over first lines of books I’ve read was super interesting and something I loved doing.

So here are ten best opening lines!

‘What he wants most in the world is to cut off his own hands’

How can this first line not draw you in?!  It just instantly raises so many questions and makes me desperate to discover what this story is about, serving as the perfect opening for this beautiful contemporary story.

‘After they found the third body that year, Justin Hawthorne knelt in his backyard and prepared to hear his future.’ 

This is another opening line that just instantly makes you want to know more – what happened to the body?  How is he hearing his future? – and sends you straight into the heart of this story.

‘Its not the end of the world’

For a book about an asteroid that is hurtling towards earth, the irony in this first line serves as the perfect incentive to keep reading this gorgeous book.

‘First the colours.  Then the humans.’ 

This line is etched into my memory for so many different reasons, and is one that instantly sets up death as our strange narrator for this beautiful book.

‘I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen’

Although this book isn’t one of my favourites, that doesn’t mean I can’t love this opening line that instantly makes you wonder what extraordinary things may be in store.

‘I have a heart for every year I’ve been alive’

This is the perfect first line to hook you in to the story whilst also setting the scene for this book focusing on deadly siren’s who hunt prince’s hearts.

‘The circus arrives without warning’

This first line is so iconic as it is the perfect start to this story of magic, wonder and mystery.  Its no surprise that it sticks into people’s minds so much.

‘Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she’d been told that she would kill her true love’

If this doesn’t tell you that you are about to start an amazing series that will rip your heart to shreds, then I don’t know what will.

‘At the time I first realized I might be fictional, my weekdays were spent at a publicly funded institution on the north side of Indianapolis called White River High School, where I was required to eat lunch at a particular time — between 12:37 P.M. and 1:14 P.M. — by forces so much larger than myself that I couldn’t even begin to identify them’

I adore this line with all my heart, particularly the first part of it in which we are simultaneously reminded that we are reading a story and engulfed into this world that now seems that little bit more real than it did moments before.

‘It is the first day of November and so, today, someone will die.’

I tried so hard to not include two Maggie Stiefvater books on this list, but there is no denying that this is a spectacular first line that instantly draws you in and lets you know how good of a story you are about to indulge in.

What are some of your favourite opening lines?  Do you agree with my choices?  Have you read any of these – what did you think?

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