Opening Lines Of Books

ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn't seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, "Be My Baby" on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.
-American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

Who is John Galt?
-Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

This one isn't the best QUOTE, but look at the title of the book. Then think. Keep thinking. Yep. Chuckle. What would happen if Atlas shrugged? The sky would fall down! It's like a cliche without it being a cliche! Genius!

If you were going to give a gold medal to the least delightful person on Earth, you would have to give that medal to a person named Carmelita Spats, and if you didn’t give it to her, Carmelita Spats was the sort of person who would snatch it from your hands anyway.
-The Austere Academy by Lemony Snicket

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.
-The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.
-The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham

If youth, throughout all history, had had a champion to stand up for it; to show a doubting world that a child can think; and, possibly, do it practically; you wouldn’t constantly run across folks today who claim that “a child don’t know anything.” A child’s brain starts functioning at birth; and has, amongst its many infant convolutions, thousands of dormant atoms, into which God has put a mystic possibility for noticing an adult’s act, and figuring out its purport.
-Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
-The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings
-Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
-Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

Kidnapping children is never a good idea; all the same, sometimes it has to be done.
-Island of the Aunts Eva Ibbotson

Mr Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he stayed up all night, was seated at the breakfast table.
-The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Arthur Conan Doyle

For a long time, I went to bed early.
-In Search Of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.

That one seems normal, but it's like a 6 word story really. Like, why? there are so many reasons to not stay up late.

The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
-Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams

The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way towards the lagoon.
Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Call me Ishmael.
-Moby-Dick by Herman Melville.

After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off Quinn's for an oyster supper.
-"The Meaning of Night" by Micheal Cox

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
-Neuromancer by William Gibson.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...
-A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
-Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: "Have they discovered evolution yet?"
-The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

I heard the mailman approach my office door, half an hour earlier than usual. He didn't sound right. His footsteps fell more heavily, jauntily, and he whistled. A new guy. He whistled his way to my office door, then fell silent for a moment. Then he laughed.
-Storm Front by Jim Butcher

I didn't get that until i started wondering, "What was in the mail, then. Or was it something about the door itself?" Is that what you thought of?

Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

True! - nervous - very, very nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?
The Tell-Tale Heart, by Edgar Allan Poe.

Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while.
This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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