Book Beginnings

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"I have never begun a novel with more misgivings"

Opening lines from The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

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"Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress"

Opening lines from Middlemarch by George Eliot

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"Ours is essentially a tragic age so we refuse to take it tragically"

Opening lines from "Lady Chatterleys Lover" by D.H. Lawrence.

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"Lost in the shadows of the shelves I almost fell off the ladder"

Opening lines from Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour bookstore by Robin Sloan

I tried mimicking Palatino, because it plays an important part in the story (the font Gerrizone is probably build on it). All my excuses to Herman Zapf for wrecking it a bit.

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"I had called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes upon the second morning after christmas with the intention of wishing him the compliments of the season"

Opening lines from The Blue Carbuncle by Arthur Conan Doyle

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"Christmas won't be christmas without any presents, grumbled Jo, lying on the rug"

Opening lines from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

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"Marley was dead to begin with"

Opening lines from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

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"This is the saddest story I have ever heard"

Opening lines from The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford

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"When shall we three meet again in thunder lightning or in rain?"

Opening lines of Macbeth by William Shakespeare

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"There was no possibility of taking a walk that day"

Opening lines from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

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"Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies with Uncle Henry who was a farmer and Aunt Em who was a farmer's wife"

Opening lines from The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.

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"In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains"

Opening lines from A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway.

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

Opening lines from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoj.

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"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy her flowers herself".

Opening lines from Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.

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"One may as well begin with Helen's letter to her sister"

Opening lines from Howard's End by E.M. Forster.

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"All children, except one, grow up"

Opening lines from J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan.