"Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you

very much."

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling

435 votes, 5.8%

"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

389 votes, 5.2%

"I write this sitting in the kitchen sink."

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

373 votes, 5.0%

"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."

Scaramouche by Raphael Sabatini

356 votes, 4.8%

"It was a pleasure to burn."

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

324 votes, 4.3%

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis

311 votes, 4.2%

"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

287 votes, 3.8%

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

The Hobbit: Or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien

263 votes, 3.5%

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was

doing in New York."

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

239 votes, 3.2%

"All children, except one, grow up."

Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie

216 votes, 2.9%

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

210 votes, 2.8%

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small,

unregarded yellow sun."

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

199 votes, 2.7%

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

1984 by George Orwell

198 votes, 2.7%

Bah! Foolish poll-maker-person! The nostril seizing power of these paltry lines is minimal, at best! Look to the

comments section where I shall carefully type out my choice, which you have so imprudently omitted!

189 votes, 2.5%

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buenda was to remember that distant

afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garca Mrquez

179 votes, 2.4%

"As Gregor Samsa awoke from a night of uneasy dreaming, he found himself transformed in his bed into a

gigantic insect."

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

176 votes, 2.4%

"All this happened, more or less."

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

171 votes, 2.3%

"It was the day my grandmother exploded."

The Crow Road by Iain Banks

171 votes, 2.3%

"He for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it was in

the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters."

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

171 votes, 2.3%

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins."

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

169 votes, 2.3%

'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die.'

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

160 votes, 2.1%

"There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife."

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

158 votes, 2.1%

"Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person."

Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler

152 votes, 2.0%

"Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women."

Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

150 votes, 2.0%

"Mother died today."

The Stranger by Albert Camus

148 votes, 2.0%

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

Neuromancer by William Gibson

123 votes, 1.6%

"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest

person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I

believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany."

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

119 votes, 1.6%

"I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man."

Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

117 votes, 1.6%

"Call me Ishmael."

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

100 votes, 1.3%

"No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that this world was being watched keenly

and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about

their various concerns they were being scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a

microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water."

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

97 votes, 1.3%

"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."

Murphy by Samuel Beckett

90 votes, 1.2%

'When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,' Papa would say, 'she made the nipping off of noggins such a

crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.'

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

89 votes, 1.2%

"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."

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

88 votes, 1.2%

"There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim and we sat in the Korova milkbar

trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening."

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

86 votes, 1.2%

"The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the

beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up."

The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton

84 votes, 1.1%

"Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden."

The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace

72 votes, 1.0%

"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named

Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine

spring afternoon."

The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley

71 votes, 1.0%

"For a long time, I went to bed early."

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

69 votes, 0.9%

"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

59 votes, 0.8%

"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."

Alphabetical Africa by Walter Abish

58 votes, 0.8%

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a

violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-

tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

Paul Clifford by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

43 votes, 0.6%

"I have never begun a novel with more misgiving."

The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

43 votes, 0.6%

"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."

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

35 votes, 0.5%

"My lady and I are being shut up in a tower for seven years"

Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale

35 votes, 0.5%

"Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature."

The Debut by Anita Brookner

32 votes, 0.4%

"The moment one learns English, complications set in."

Chromos by Felipe Alfau

31 votes, 0.4%

"Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror."

Herbert West: Reanimator and Other Stories by H.P. Lovecraft

28 votes, 0.4%

"'Barabbas came to us by sea', the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy."

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

27 votes, 0.4%

"When I was three and Bailey was four, we had arrived in the musty little town, wearing tags on our wrists which

instructed - 'To Whom It May Concern' - that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson Jr., from Long Beach,

California, en route to Stamps, Arkansas, c/o Mrs. Annie Henderson."

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

25 votes, 0.3%

"Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu."

Waiting by Ha Jin

22 votes, 0.3%

Worst opening lines

1. Sue Fondrie Cheryls mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her

sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten

memories.

2. Ali Kawashima As the dark and mysterious stranger approached, Angela bit her lip anxiously,

hoping with every nerve, cell, and fiber of her being that this would be the one man

who would understand who would take her away from all this and who would

not just squeeze her boob and make a loud honking noise, as all the others had.

3. Chris Wieloch She strutted into my office wearing a dress that clung to her like Saran Wrap to a

sloppily butchered pork knuckle, bone and sinew jutting and lurching

asymmetrically beneath its folds, the tightness exaggerating the granularity of the

suet and causing what little palatable meat there was to sweat, its transparency the

thief of imagination.

4. Janine Beacham The fairies of Minglewood, which is near Dingly Pool, were having a grand revel

with flower-cakes, and butterfly dances, looking ever so pretty, while Queen

Bellaflora swept her wand oer the waterfalls foam, making it pop like the snot-

bubbles on your baby sisters face.

5. Molly Ringle For the first month of Ricardo and Felicitys affair, they greeted one another at

every stolen rendezvous with a kiss a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping

and sucking at Felicitys mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle

and he were the worlds thirstiest gerbil.

6. Jordan Kaderli Betty had eyes that said come here, lips that said kiss me, arms and torso that said

hold me all night long, but the rest of her body said, Fillet me, cover me in

cornmeal, and fry me in peanut oil; romance wasnt easy for a mermaid.

7. Rephah Berg On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been

rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a

little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear

the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back

into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.

8. Cathy Bryant As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted

the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to

eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle,

causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if

so, his soul needed regrouting.

9. David S. Nelson The Mushroom Men of Knarf were silently advancing on the unsuspecting

earthlings, and their thin milky blood ran colder when they smelled spores from

fungal toenail infections rising from many of the invaders feet, for to them it was a

wondrous and shocking scent of kinship, homeland, and asexual reproduction.

10. Tonya Lavel It was such a beautiful night; the bright moonlight illuminated the sky, the thick

clouds floated leisurely by just above the silhouette of tall, majestic trees, and I was

viewing it all from the front row seat of the bullet hole in my car trunk.

11. David Pepper As an ornithologist, George was fascinated by the fact that urine and feces mix in

birds rectums to form a unified, homogeneous slurry that is expelled through

defecation, although eying Gretas face, and sensing the reaction of the

congregation, he immediately realized he should have used a different analogy to

describe their relationship in his wedding vows.

12. Ron D. Smith As the sun dropped below the horizon, the safari guide confirmed the approaching

cape buffaloes were herbivores, which calmed everyone in the group, except for

Herb, of course.

13. Elizabeth Muenster Sterben counted calcium bars in the storage chamber, wondering why women back

on Earth paid him little attention, but up here they seem to adore him, in fact, six

fraichemaidens had already shown him their blinka.

14. Andrew Bowers Hmm thought Abigail as she gazed languidly from the veranda past the bright

white patio to the cerulean sea beyond, where dolphins played and seagulls sang,

where splashing surf sounded like the tintinnabulation of a thousand tiny bells,

where great gray whales bellowed and the sunlight sparkled off the myriad of

sequins on the flyfishs bow ties, time to get my meds checked.

15. Pamela Patchet The notion that they would no longer be a couple dashed Helens hopes and

scrambled her thoughts not unlike the time her sleeve caught the edge of the open

egg carton and the contents hit the floor like fragile things hitting cold tiles, more

pitiable because they were the expensive organic brown eggs from free-range

chickens, and one of them clearly had double yolks entwined in one sac just the

way Helen and Richard used to be.

16. David S. Nelson He swaggered into the room (in which he was now the smartest guy) with a

certain Wikipedic insouciance, and without skipping a beat made a beeline

towards Dorothy, busting right through her knot of admirers, and she threw her

arms around him and gave him a passionate though slightly tickly kiss, moaning

softly, Oooohh, Scarecrow!

17. Jeanne Villa She sipped her latte gracefully, unaware of the milk foam droplets building on her

mustache, which was not the peachy-fine baby fuzz that Nordic girls might have,

but a really dense, dark, hirsute lip-lining row of fur common to southern

Mediterranean ladies nearing menopause, and winked at the obviously charmed

Spaniard at the next table.

18. Jessica Sasishara On their first date hed asked how much she thought Edgar Allan Poes toe nails

would sell for on eBay, and on their second he paid for subway fair with nickels he

fished out of a fountain, but he was otherwise charming and she thought that they

could have a perfectly tolerable life together.

19. Beth Fand Incollingo Like a mechanic who forgets to wipe his hands on a shop rag and then goes home,

hugs his wife, and gets a grease stain on her favorite sweater love touches you,

and marks you forever.

20. Shannon Wedge Leopold looked up at the arrow piercing the skin of the dirigible with a sort of

wondrous dismay the wheezy shriek was just the sort of sound he always

imagined a baby moose being beaten with a pair of accordions might make.

21. Charles Howland The professor looked down at his new young lover, who rested fitfully, lashed as

she was with duct tape to the side of his stolen hovercraft, her head lolling gently in

the breeze, and as they soared over the buildings of downtown St. Paul to his secret

lair he mused that she was much like a sweet ripe juicy peach, except for her not

being a fuzzy three-inch sphere produced by a tree with pink blossoms and that

she had internal organs and could talk.

22. Kathryn Minicozzi As she slowly drove up the long, winding driveway, Lady Alicia peeked out the

window of her shiny blue Mercedes and spied Rodrigo the new gardener standing

on a grassy mound with his long black hair flowing in the wind, his brown eyes

piercing into her very soul, and his white shirt open to the waist, revealing his

beautifully rippling muscular chest, and she thought to herself, I must tell that

lazy idiot to trim the hedges by the gate.

23. Jim Gleeson Gerald began but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten

percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of

the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them permanently meant the

next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash

to pee.

24. Dennis Barry Despite the vast differences it their ages, ethnicity, and religious upbringing, the

sexual chemistry between Roberto and Heather was the most amazing he had ever

experienced; and for the entirety of the Labor Day weekend they had sex like

monkeys on espresso, not those monkeys in the zoo that fling their feces at you,

but more like the monkeys in the wild that have those giant red butts, and access to

an espresso machine.

25. Randy Groom Colin grabbed the switchgear and slammed the spritely Vauxhall Vixen into a

lower gear as he screamed through the roundabout heading toward the familiar

pink rowhouse in Puking-On-The-Wold, his mind filled with the image of his

comely Olive, dressed in some lacy underthing, waiting on the couch with only a

smile and a cucumber sandwich, hoping that his lunch hour would provide

sufficient time for both a naughty little romp and a digestive biscuit.

26. Leslie Muir He was a dark and stormy knight, and this excited Gwendolyn, but admittedly not

as much as last night when he was Antonio Banderas in drag, or the night before

that when he was a French Legionnaire who blindfolded her and fed her pommes

frites from his kepi.

27. Linda Boatright Corinne considered the colors (palest green, gray and lavender) and texture

(downy as the finest velvet) and wondered, How long have these cold cuts been in

my refrigerator?

28. Emma DeZordi Chain-smoking as he stood in the amber glow of the street lamp, he gazed up at the

brownstone wherein resided Bunny Morgan, and thought how like a bunny Bunny

was, though he had read somewhere that rabbits were coprophages, which meant

that they ate their own feces, which was really disgusting now that he thought

about it, and nothing like Bunny, at least he hoped not, so on second thought

Bunny wasnt like a bunny after all, but she still was pretty hot.

29. Dan Winters Sex with Rachel after she turned fifty was like driving the last-place team on the

last day of the Iditarod Dog Sled Race, the point no longer the ride but the finish,

the difficulty not the speed but keeping all the parts moving in the right direction,

not to mention all that irritating barking.

30. James Pokines Bring a bottle of wine and wear something uncomplicated Im in no mood for a

struggle tonight, rolled from Jean-Pierres lips like a bowling ball shooting up the

return ramp, only to slow itself abruptly at the top before ka-whonking! into the

balls already lined up there like all the lines she had heard before, and Sylvia knew

at last that all the good ones were not married, gay, or in Mexican prisons.

31. Stephen Farnsworth When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be

celebrating his eleventy-first birthday, his children packed his bags and drove him

to Golden Pastures retirement complex just off Interstate 95.

32. Howie McLennon Before they met, his heart was a frozen block of ice, scarred by the skate blades of

broken relationships, then she came along and like a beautiful Zamboni flooded

his heart with warmth, scraped away the ugly slushy bits, and dumped them in the

empty parking lot of his soul.

33. Mary E. Patrick As I gardened, gazing towards the autumnal sky, I longed to run my finger through

the trail of mucus left by a single speckled slug innocuously thrusting past my

rhododendrons and in feeling that warm slime, be swept back to planet Alderon,

back into the tentacles of the alien who loved me.