FIRST LINES FROM BOOKS

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, 1813

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, David Copperfield, 1850

They order, said I, this matter better in France.
~ Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey, 1768

While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton's academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour.
~ William Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 1848

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
~ Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, 1881

I sit down, my friend, to comply with thy request.
~ Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, 1799

The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking as it seemed from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand.
~ H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man, 1897

The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry.
~ Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 1895

Mr. Hungerton, her father, really was the most tactless person upon the earth-a fluffy feathery, untidy cockatoo of a man, perfectly good-natured, but absolutely centred upon his own silly self.
~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World, 1912

"Are we rising again?"
~ Jules Verne, The Mysterious Island, 1874

1801-I have just returned from a visit to my landlord-the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.
~ Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, 1847

For many days we had been tempest-tossed.
~ Johann Wyss, The Swiss Family Robinson, 1814

A wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea, and the loving tide rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace.
~ George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860

In the days when the spinning-wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses-and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread-lace, had their toy spinning-wheels of polished oak-there might be seen, in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race.
~ George Eliot, Silas Marner, 1861

One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away.
~ Willa Cather, O Pioneers!, 1913

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