Thursday 13: 13 Best First Lines from Novels

American Book Review featured "100 Best First Lines from Novels" and among the hundred I chose 13 for this week's Thursday 13.

1. 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(1813)
2. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. — Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
3. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. — Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)
4. It was a pleasure to burn. — Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
5. It was love at first sight. — Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)

6. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. — Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001)

7. "When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing." — Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1983)

8. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women. — Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)

9. Psychics can see the color of time it's blue. — Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away(1986)
10. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. — Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
11. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. — Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988)

12. 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 (1925)

13. You better not never tell nobody but God. — Alice Walker, The Color Purple(1982)

What's your list for this week?