Types of Opening Lines

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An Action

"The stranger came early in February, one winter day, through of biting wind in a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down my walking as it seemed from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand."

H.G. Wells The Invisible Man

A Character

"When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow."

Harper Lee — To Kill A Mockingbird

A Setting

"Far out in the Uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun."

Douglas Adams — The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Dialogue

"'Where's Papa going with that ax?' said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast."

E.B. White — Charlotte's Web

A Thought

"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."

S.E. Hinton — The Outsiders

A Statement

"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

World Building

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms in 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."

J.R.R. Tolkein — The Hobbit 

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