A book has one sentence to make you enter its world. The great ones do it instantly. They pull you in, disturb you, charm you, or make you feel that something important has already begun. Here are 20 of my favorite opening lines. What is yours? 1. “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” – 1984 by George Orwell 2. “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.” – The Stranger by Albert Camus 3. “Once, there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids.” – The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis 4. “Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.” – 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke 5. “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter.” – Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain 6. “Call me Ishmael.” – Moby-Dick by Herman Melville 7. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” – Gospel of John 1:1 (New Testament, Bible) 8. “All this happened, more or less.” – Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut 9. “If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.” – The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah 10. “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” – The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford 11. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” – Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy 12. “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, we had everything before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.” – A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens 13. “In the middle of our life's journey, I found myself in a dark forest, for the straight path was lost.” -The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri 14. “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” – Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams 15. “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.” - The Bible 16. “Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm.” - Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell 17. “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.” - A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean 18. “Read in the Name of your Lord Who created — Created man from a clinging clot (or clot of blood).” - The Quran 19. “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 20. “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.” – One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez Bonus: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” – Tao Te Ching, Chapter 1 (attributed to Lao Tzu, Daoism)

Timothée Chalamet CANNOT BELIEVE the Knicks pulled off the comeback 😱

. @JohnMbadiN, this youth says that you dispatched them to disrupt a meeting at All Saints Cathedral that was scrutinizing the budget you presented yesterday. Mbadi, you cannot distance yourself from this attack by the goons. You must take responsibility for your actions and for those of the goons who acted at your behest. Public participation and scrutiny of the national budget are our democratic rights.

. @JohnMbadiN, this youth says that you dispatched them to disrupt a meeting at All Saints Cathedral that was scrutinizing the budget you presented yesterday. Mbadi, you cannot distance yourself from this attack by the goons. You must take responsibility for your actions and for those of the goons who acted at your behest. Public participation and scrutiny of the national budget are our democratic rights.

People who come from healthy family backgrounds are extremely, almost unbelievably naive about how bad things can get

As a girl kama hujai andika jina ya boyfriend yako kwa pad ndio akue obsessed you have a long way😂😂😂

I finally understand what Machiavelli meant when he said, “Never play fair in a game where others cheat.” It doesn’t mean become evil. It means stop being naive. Stop bringing honesty to people who study manipulation, stop giving access to people who weaponize closeness, and stop expecting clean hands from people who already showed you they’ll throw dirt. Sometimes wisdom is not revenge. Sometimes wisdom is learning the rules of the room before the room uses your goodness against you.

"You're allowed to think about the worst case scenario, but you gotta do something about it"