Some of the best lines of a book are written at the very start. That's when you know if a book has managed to reel you in, or left you with too little fodder to go on by. And if you were ever to judge a book at all, let it not be by its cover; but, by its opening lines. 

Here are 20 books which happen to have some of the best opening lines you'd ever read. 

1. Cat's Eye 

Author: Margaret Atwood 

“Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.” 

© Mcelland and Stewart

2. A Confederacy of Dunces 

Author: John Kennedy Toole 

“A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head.” 

3. The End Of The Affair 

Author: Graham Greene 

“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.” 

© Barnes & Nobles

4. The Napolean Of Notting Hill 

Author: G. K Chesterton 

“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.” 

5. The Hunger Games 

Author: Suzanne Collins 

“When I wake, the other side of the bed is cold.” 

© Scholastic

6. Catch – 22 

Author: Joseph Heller 

“It was love at first sight.” 

7. Life Of Pi 

Author: Yann Martel 

“My suffering left me sad and gloomy.” 

© Knopf Canada

8. A River Runs Through It 

Author: Norman Maclean 

“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing.” 

9. A Clockwork Orange 

Author: Anthony Burgess 

“That was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodooks what to do with the evening,  flip dark chill inter bastard though dry.” 

© Penguin

10. The Portrait Of A Lady 

Author: Henry James 

“Under certain circumstances here are few hours I life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.” 

11. City Of Glass 

Author: Douglas Coupland 

“It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of the night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.” 

© Coupland & McIntyre

12. The Stranger 

Author: Albert Camus 

“Mother died today.” 

13. Paradise 

Author: Toni Morrisson 

“They shoot the white girl first.” 

© Amazon

14. I Capture The Castle 

Author: Dodie Smith 

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.” 

15. Gone With The Wind 

Author: Margaret Mitchell 

“Scarlet O'Hara was  not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as Tarleton twins were.” 

© Macmillan Publishers

16. Tracks 

Author: Robyn Davidson 

“We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.” 

17. Breakfast Of Champions 

Author: Kurt Vonnegut 

“This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.” 

© Amazon Canada

18. The Trial 

Author: Franz Kafka 

“Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.” 

19. Notes From Underground 

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky 

“I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man.” 

© Vintage

20. Moby Dick 

Author: Herman Melville 

“Call me Ishmael.”