Classics

First And Last Lines of Famous Books In Literature

A Tale of Two Cities First Line: It was the worst of times, it was the best of times. Last Line: It is a far,

A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

First Line: It was the worst of times, it was the best of times.

Last Line: It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

First line: Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Last line: Everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.

Gitanjali – Rabindranath Tagore

First line: Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.

Last line: Like a flock of homesick cranes flying night and day back to their mountain nests let all my life take its voyage to its eternal home in one salutation to thee.

God Of Small Things – Arundhati Roy

First line: May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month.

Last line: She goes to the river, hoping that Velutha will meet her there as they planned.

Metamorphosis – Kranz Kafka

First line: As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

Last line: And it was like a confirmation of their new dreams and good intentions when at the end of the ride their daughter got up first and stretched her young body.

Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

First line: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Last line: [M]y life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!

Julius Caesar – William Shakespeare

First line: Thou art a cobbler, art thou?

Last line: Octavius Caesar: Happy Day.

Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

First line: I was born in the city of Bombay… once upon a time.

Last line: Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million, five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just as, in all good time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who will not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand…

The Anarchy – William Dalrymple

First line: On 24 september 1599, while William Shakespeare was pondering a draft of Hamlet in his house downriver from the Globe in Southwark, a mile to the north, barely twenty minutes’ walk across the Thames, a motley group of Londoners were gathering in a rambling, half-timbered building lit by many-mullioned Tudor windows.

Last line: Four hundred and twenty years after its founding, the story of the East India Company has never been more current.

Tomb of Sand – Geetanjali Shree

First line: A tale tells itself.

Last line: As if it’s no longer a window, but the corner of a canvas that has yet to be filled with colour, a place where a plethora of new stories and characters await the moment they will take shape.