2. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville (1851)
"Call me Ishmael." A too-obvious choice for the top slot, Melville's three-word opener to his decidedly more dense novel Moby-Dick remains one of the most effective first lines in the history of fiction. Neither a central character nor a simple bystander, Ishmael proceeds to narrate the events aboard the whaling ship Pequod as the captain Ahab hunts a legendary white whale. Like Nick of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Ishmael is a lens through which the reader can view these epic events, and in a way Ishmael is the reader as well. While the rest of his narration becomes increasingly technical, his first line is really as simple as they come. Few quotes have become so inextricably associated with the book itself and the author who created it, and to this day it may be the most recognizable quote from any piece of writing from Melville's era.
1. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens (1859)
"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 had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only." If there's anyone who deserves to make this list twice, it's Dickens. The first part of the opening sentence of A Tale of Two Cities is known to many - "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times€" - but as an entire block of text it seems quite formidable. Dickens, drunk on words perhaps more so than any author before or since, knew how to craft a sentence. Here, the light and the darkness are given equal weight, one balancing the other, the sentence seesawing along until the break. It's hard to pick the best novel out of everything Dickens wrote, as he told so many incredible stories, but A Tale of Two Cities begins and ends with some undeniably powerful stuff. Which opening lines from classic novels are your favorites? Let us know in the comments!