It is interesting to check through the first lines of some of the most successful books. Ten such best first lines are given below.

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 Austin, Pride and Prejudice)

2. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
(George Orwell, 1984)

3. A screaming comes across the sky.
(Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow)

4. I am an Invisible man.
(Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man)

5. 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.
(Charles Dickens, David Copperfield)

6. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
(William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury)

7. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.
(Ha Jin, Waiting)

8. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.
(Anita Brookner, The Debut )

9. 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.
(Ernest Hemingway,The Old Man and the Sea)

10. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
(George Eliot, Middlemarch)