Top 5 Opening Lines That Make You Cancel Your Plans

First sentences so good you sit down on the bookstore floor and just keep going.

1. 1

   One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel García Márquez

   A firing squad, a block of ice and a whole century in one sentence; no other opener promises this much and then actually delivers it.

2. 2

   Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell

   Clocks striking thirteen is the cleanest 'something is very wrong here' signal in literature, and it takes just eleven words.

3. 3

   Neuromancer — William Gibson

   "The color of television, tuned to a dead channel" invented a whole aesthetic before the reader even knew what cyberspace was.

4. 4

   The Gunslinger — Stephen King

   The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed; it's pure momentum, and it pulled people through seven more books.

5. 5

   Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy

   The happy-families line is quoted to death, but it's still the best thesis statement any novel has ever opened with.