Six of the Best First Lines in Modern Literature

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture.

Sign up for it here.

A novel’s first line is saddled with an extraordinary responsibility: to not only establish a story’s start but also to impart with indelible effect the writer’s voice.

Asking someone to identify the best first line of all time tends to make people skittish, so I asked The Atlantic ’s writers and editors instead: What is one of the best first lines in modern literature? “Sth, I know that woman.” Toni Morrison’s fiction contains a rich seam of great first lines.

This one, from Jazz , is my favorite, for its immediacy and its intimacy.

From the start, the narrator and her words have an arresting physicality, and the reader is put in the position of question asker and gossip hound, wondering whether the speaker is exasperated or disgusted (or if she relishes that disgust).

In Morrison’s own telling, the line emerged out of frustration.

She wanted her novel to express the spirit of metropolitan Black life in the 1920s and for her prose to embody the essence of jazz, with its genius for spontaneous invention.

But her original opener felt too predictable.

Irritated, she flung her pencil aside and sucked her teeth.

When she set that exclamation down on paper— sth , evoking an intake of breath—she found the voice of her story.

Following that voice, Morrison achieved the unity between sound and meaning that she was after: music, made manifest in prose. — Sophia Nguyen, staff writer *** “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 (translated by Gregory Rabassa), is riddled with richly detailed and narratively complex sentences.

This first one seems to encompass the whole life of one character while leaving part of that story untold.

The line pairs the incredible with the mundane, setting the stage for a novel that popularized magical realism and inspired a generation of international writers by blending an imagined Latin American past with actual historical events.