Call Me Ishmael and Other Things Men Have Said to Me with Unearned Confidence

A Deeply Unserious Survey of Literature’s Most Iconic Opening Lines

Here is what no one tells you about the first sentence of a novel: it is a pickup line.

The whole game is this: an author walks up to you, a stranger, a person with a whole life and a phone full of unread texts, and delivers one sentence designed to make you stay. To make you turn the page instead of checking your phone. Some of these authors have game. Others have been coasting on reputation for centuries. And a few of them wrote one sentence so devastating that it has been living in the collective unconscious rent-free since before your great-grandmother was born. Not all of them earned it.

I am a curator by trade. I work with objects. I know what it means to walk into a room and have three seconds to make someone care about a thing behind glass. A first sentence is that: the label on the case, the docent’s opening line, the moment you either have them or you don’t. So I take this personally. I take this very personally.

What follows is a guided tour through ten of the most iconic opening lines in literature. I will be providing commentary. Some of it is scholarly. Some of it is not. I make no apologies.

“Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles” — Homer, The Iliad

We’re starting at the literal beginning, because someone has to, and it might as well be a blind poet who may or may not have been several people. What Homer does here is open his poem by asking someone else to tell the story. “Sing, O goddess.” Not “I will now tell you.” Not “Listen up.” He turns to the Muse, a woman, and says: you do it. I’m just the vessel. This is the original “I’m just a girl” energy and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. A man, standing at the beginning of all of Western literature, and the first thing he does is credit a woman. We have been going downhill ever since.

“Call me Ishmael.” — Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

“Call me Ishmael” is not “My name is Ishmael.” It’s not “I am Ishmael.” It’s “call me,” which is a command, a suggestion, an alias. Right out of the gate, this narrator is telling you that you will not be getting his real name, that the relationship between you and him will be conducted on his terms, and that you should be fine with this. This is the man at a bar who leans in and starts a story you didn’t ask for but can’t walk away from. Three words and he already has you.

Here’s my problem: he doesn’t keep you. Melville follows this perfect opening with six hundred pages about whale biology. He lets Ishmael disappear for entire chapters. He gives you a whole section on the whiteness of the whale that reads like a philosophy dissertation no one asked for. The opening line writes a check the rest of the book only intermittently cashes. Ishmael, baby, you hooked me and then you showed me your cetology notes. That is not how you keep a girl’s attention.

“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

I need everyone to understand that this is the most misread sentence in the English language.

People quote this straight. They put it on tote bags. They cross-stitch it on pillows. And every single one of those people has missed that Jane Austen is being a stone-cold bitch. This is not a statement of fact. This is satire. Austen is telling you, in her very first sentence, that the entire world she’s about to show you is built on a collective delusion: that rich men want wives, that women’s job is to be wanted, that this is a “truth universally acknowledged” when it is, in fact, a truth universally imposed. She’s laughing at you. She’s laughing at her characters. She’s laughing at the entire marriage market of Regency England and she’s doing it with a smile so polite you don’t even notice the knife.

This is the opening line of a woman who understood that the most devastating thing you can do is say something outrageous in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice. It is the literary equivalent of “bless your heart.” Austen didn’t just write the best opening line in English literature. She invented a whole register of violence. I am forever in her debt.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” — Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Everyone knows this line. Almost no one has read the rest of the sentence, and I mean the rest of the sentence, not the rest of the book, because this sentence goes on for approximately forty-five more clauses. Dickens was paid by the word, and you can tell. This is a man who looked at the concept of “contrast” and said, what if I did it seven times in a row? It’s giving guy who starts telling a story at a party and you can see the end is nowhere in sight and your drink is empty but you can’t leave because he’s blocking the door. And yet it has become one of the most useful sentences ever written. People use it to describe 2020. People use it to describe their situationships. It has transcended its source material entirely, which is honestly the most Dickens thing possible: a line so good it doesn’t need the rest of the book.

“All children, except one, grow up.” — J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

I wasn’t going to include this one. It’s a children’s book. It doesn’t belong on a list with Tolstoy and Morrison and Orwell. And then I reread the sentence and I couldn’t leave it off, because it’s doing something none of the others are: it’s mourning.

“All children, except one, grow up.” Barrie isn’t making a whimsical promise. He’s stating a loss. The sentence is about the children who do grow up, which is all of them, except one, and the grief of that. Growing up is the universal condition. Peter is the exception, and exceptions are lonely things.

There’s something almost clinical about the phrasing. “All children, except one.” It sounds like a diagnosis. It does not sound like a fairy tale, and I think that’s the tell. Barrie wrote a story about eternal childhood that is secretly about the impossibility of eternal childhood, and the first sentence gives the whole thing away if you’re paying attention. The tragedy is right there on page one, dressed up as enchantment.

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” — Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by doing something absolutely unforgivable: he says something so true that you can never un-hear it. Every Thanksgiving dinner you survive, every phone call with your mother that goes slightly off the rails, every time you watch someone else’s family and think “what is happening in there”: Tolstoy already wrote the thesis statement. Happiness is generic. Misery is bespoke. He understood.

In one sentence he’s handed you the entire architecture of the novel and made a promise that this unhappiness will be interesting, that the specificity of this family’s suffering will reveal something that generic contentment never could. It’s also a line that has launched approximately ten thousand therapy sessions. Every therapist in America owes Tolstoy royalties. “In what way is your family unhappy?” is basically just the clinical rephrasing.

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Nick Carraway. My nemesis. My beloved unreliable fraud.

This line is doing something so sneaky that people have been falling for it for a hundred years. Nick opens by positioning himself as the recipient of wisdom: the humble son, the listener, the student. “My father gave me some advice.” How wholesome. How midwestern. How trustworthy this narrator must be, if he’s telling us about his dad’s advice in the very first sentence.

Except Nick Carraway is one of the least reliable narrators in American fiction and Fitzgerald knew that and this opening line is the proof. “In my younger and more vulnerable years” tells you he is no longer young and no longer vulnerable. He is telling you this story from a position of safety and distance. He has already decided what it means. He has already curated the memory. And “more vulnerable” compared to what? More vulnerable than now? What happened to you, Nick? What did Jay Gatsby do to your vulnerability?

The trick of this line is that it sounds like honesty while being the opposite. Nick is performing openness. He’s giving you just enough confession to make you trust him, and then he’s going to spend the rest of the novel lying to you about his own complicity in everything that happens. This is the opening line of a man who watched his friend get murdered and decided the real story was about the green light. Unreal.

“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” — J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Holden Caulfield is already annoyed with you for opening the book. He hasn’t even told you his name yet and he’s already condescending to you. “If you really want to hear about it”: the “really” is doing so much work here. He’s implying that you probably don’t actually want to hear about it, that you’re a tourist in his suffering, that you’re going to be one of those people who wants the highlight reel instead of the truth. And then he refuses to give you what he just described. He says you’ll “probably want to know” about his childhood, and then he doesn’t tell you. It’s the narrative equivalent of someone saying “I’m fine” in a tone that communicates they are spectacularly not fine.

I’m going to be honest: I think this is the most overrated opening on this list. It’s a perfect opening for a seventeen-year-old narrator because it captures exactly what it feels like to be seventeen, desperate to be heard but terrified of being known, performing indifference as armor. But Salinger wrote it like Holden invented alienation, and a whole generation of boys read it and agreed, and then they grew up and kept agreeing, and now we have a canon full of disaffected male narrators who think their boredom is a personality. Holden Caulfield walked so every mediocre male protagonist could run. I am holding him accountable.

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” — George Orwell, 1984

Read it again. The first half is completely normal: a bright cold day in April, fine, we’re in England, it’s spring, the weather is doing whatever English weather does. And then: “the clocks were striking thirteen.” And something in your brain tilts. You can’t even explain why it’s wrong if you don’t already know. Clocks don’t strike thirteen. Except in this world they do, and Orwell is not going to explain that to you, because in this world no one would.

This is the scariest sentence on this list and it’s not even close. Every other opener here is trying to seduce you or impress you or make you feel something. Orwell is trying to disorient you. He gives you one wrong detail and trusts you to feel the full weight of it, and the weight is this: you have entered a world where even time has been rewritten by the state, where the most basic facts of reality have been altered so quietly that the people living inside them don’t notice anymore. Thirteen. That’s all he needed. I think about this line every time someone says something obviously untrue with absolute confidence and no one in the room corrects them.

“124 was spiteful.” — Toni Morrison, Beloved

Three words. A house number and an emotion. That’s all Morrison gives you, and it shouldn’t work. A house cannot be spiteful. That is not how houses or adjectives operate. But Morrison doesn’t care about how things are supposed to operate, and by the time you’ve finished the sentence you don’t either, because you already believe her. 124 is spiteful. You don’t need to know why yet. You just know.

What she does here is collapse the boundary between the living and the nonliving in three words. The house has an emotional state before you’ve met a single character. Before you know anything about slavery or memory or ghosts, you know that this building holds something, and that something is angry. It’s a haunting before the haunting starts.

I work in house museums. I spend my professional life in buildings that carry the weight of the people who lived and died in them. I have stood in rooms where the air felt different, where the floorboards held something I couldn’t name, where the house itself seemed to have an opinion about my presence. So when Morrison writes “124 was spiteful,” I believe her in a way that is maybe not entirely literary. Some houses are spiteful. I’ve been in them. She just had the nerve to say it out loud.

The Door Is Open

I have now spent an unreasonable number of words on first sentences and I am not going to pick a winner. I know that’s what you want. I know the internet loves a ranking. But the whole point of a first sentence is that it’s doing something specific for a specific book, and comparing them is like comparing pickup lines across entirely different bars. “Sing, O goddess” and “124 was spiteful” are not in competition with each other. They’re not even playing the same sport.

What I will say is this: every first sentence on this list understood the assignment. The assignment is not to be beautiful. It’s not to be clever. It’s not even to be memorable, although the good ones are. The assignment is to make a stranger care. To walk up to someone who owes you nothing, who has a thousand other things they could be doing, and say something that makes them stay. The whole craft is in that moment.

I think about this a lot because I am, professionally, a person who tries to make strangers care about old things. I write labels for objects behind glass. I stand in historic rooms and try to make the dead feel alive to people who came in from the rain because the museum was free. Every time I do it, I am writing a first sentence. Every time, the question is the same: will they stay, or will they walk away?

The best opening lines in literature don’t answer that question. They just make it impossible not to keep reading. And that, more than any craft lesson or narrative technique or MFA workshop, is the thing I am trying to learn.