One Line to Rule Them All: The 2024 Close Reads Literary Bracket Is Here!
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that not every great book has a great opening line, but that every great opening line is great in its own way. Our 2024 Close Reads bookish bracket is a chance to explore that certitude. So below you will find 64 of the greatest openings in literary history. Your task, if you choose to accept it, is to help us narrow the list down to one line to rule them all.
You’ll find openers from novels, picture books, plays, and ancient epics. Long openers and short ones. Openers from Great Books and openers from meh books. Openers you know and openers you don't . But in each case, they are notable for some reason. And ultimately, it’s up to you to choose the criteria by which you will vote. The only rule: avoid the epoch of incredulity, the winter of despair.
Have at it. (Below you will see the complete bracket with just book titles, followed by the full quotes with option to vote).
Matchup #1
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
vs.
“Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.”
from Middlemarch by George Eliot
Matchup #2
“Now is the winter of our discontent/ Made glorious summer by this son of York, / And all the clouds that loured upon our house / In the deep bosom of the ocean buried. from Richard III by William Shakespeare
vs.
“If music be the food of love, play on; / Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die.”
from Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
Match up #3
“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”
from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
vs.
“Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women.”
from The Middle Passage by Charles Johnson
Matchup #4
“When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.”
from The Outsiders but S.E. Hinton
vs.
“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”
from Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
Matchup #5
“Here is Edward Bear, coming down the stairs now, bump bump bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin"
from Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne
vs.
"Kidnapping children is never a good idea; all the same, sometimes it has to be done." from Island of the Aunts by Eva Ibbotson
Matchup #6
“Where's Papa going with that axe?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.”
from Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
vs.
“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.”
from I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Matchup #7
“My name is India Opal Buloni, and last summer my daddy, the preacher, sent me to the store for a box of macaroni-and-cheese, some white rice, and two tomatoes and I came back with a dog.”
from Because of Winn Dixie by Kate DiCamillo
vs.
“Most motorcars are conglomerations (this is a long word for bundles) of steel and wire and rubber and plastic, and electricity and oil and gasoline and water, and the toffee papers you pushed down the crack in the back seat last Sunday."
from Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang by Ian Fleming
Matcup #8
“The first time I was stoned to death by an angry mob, I was not even a criminal.”
from The Assassination of Samir the Seller of Dreams by Daniel Nayeri
vs
“Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wilderness, for I had wandered from the straight and true.”
from The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
Matchup #9
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
vs.
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
from Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
Matchup #10
“I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.”
from Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
vs.
“I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.”
from The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
Matchup #11
“Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s secret citadel.”
from The Odyssey, trans. Lattimore
vs.
“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”
from The Bell-Jar by Sylvia Plath
Matchup #12
“Arms and the man I sing . . .”
from the Aeneid
vs.
“In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together.”
from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Matchup #13
”Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.”
from The Luck of the Bodkins by P. G. Wodehouse
vs.
“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.”
from The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Matchup #14
“Sing, goddess, the rage of Peleus’ son, Achilles.”
from the Iliad by Homer
vs.
“Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.”
from The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O’Connor
Matchup #15
“When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.”
from The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
vs
“In an old house in Paris, that was covered with vines, lived 12 little girls, in two straight lines.”
from Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans
Matchup #16
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”
from The Hobbit by J.R.R Tolkien
vs
"Once upon a time there lived... 'A king!' my little readers will say immediately. No, children, you are mistaken. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood."
from Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
Matchup #17
“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.
from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
vs
“I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.”
from Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
Matchup #18
“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, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
from Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
vs
“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”
from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Matchup #19
“The story so far: in the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
vs
“The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.”
from The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton
Matchup #20
"'Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents,' grumbled Jo, lying on the rug." from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
vs
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
from Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Matchup #21
The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door.
from All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
vs
“A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
from The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
Matchup #22
“When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen.”
from The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
vs
“I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me.” from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Stern
Matchup #23
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.”
from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
vs
“All this happened, more or less.”
from Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Matchup #24
“Marley was dead: to begin with.”
from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
vs
“The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.”
from The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Matchup #25
“Call me Ishmael.”
from Moby Dick by Herman Melville
vs
“Elmer Gantry was drunk.”
from Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis
Matchup #26
“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”
from The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley
vs
“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.”
from Portrait of an Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce
Matchup #27
“Who’s there?”
from Hamlet by Shakespeare
vs
“Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde’s Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.”
from Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Matchup #28
“Oh, for a muse of fire that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention!”
from Henry V by William Shakespeare
vs
“It was a pleasure to burn.”
from Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Matchup #29
“Ships at a distance have every man’s hopes aboard.”
from Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
vs
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again”.
from Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier
Matchup #30
“When we marched in, three months before, the place was under snow; now the first leaves of spring were unfolding.”
from Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
vs
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”
from The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Matchup #31
“The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play, so we sat in the house all that cold, cold wet day.”
from The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss
vs.
“The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another his mother called him 'WILD THING!' and Max said 'I'LL EAT YOU UP!' so he was sent to bed without eating anything."
from Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
Matchup #32
“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis
vs
"All children, except one, grow up."
from Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie
Daniel Nayeri against Divine Comedy?! I thought you liked the guy.
I think this is the best bracket yet! For once I feel like I can vote fairly without having read all the books! But really, how is one to pick between a classic, quoted opening like the Inferno and such a perfect (but young) opening line as Nayeri’s?