Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. Each week they provide a topic and you are free to use that topic and/or variations of that topic to make your top ten list. You don’t have to do all ten. Instead you can do three, five, fifteen, whatever you want. A full list of the weekly themes can be found here.

This week’s theme is Opening Lines. Pulling a reader into a story quickly come sometimes come down to a gripping opening line. Page one, chapter one, sentence one, your first impression to the reader and if you get that line right you’ve got us hooked. The line can be funny, dramatic, shocking, just anything that can pull a reader in. Here are some of my favorite lines and the books they are from.

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“To say that I met Nicholas Brisbane over my husband’s dead body is not entirely accurate. Edward, it should be noted, was still twitching on the floor.” – Silent in the Grave (Lady Julia Grey #1) by Deanna Raybourn

“Kell wore a very peculiar coat. It had neither one side, which would be conventional, nor two, which would be unexpected, but several, which was, of course, impossible.” – A Darker Shade of Magic (Shades of Magic #1) by V.E. Schwab

“There is blood under my fingernails. I wonder how many of my people I’ve killed this time.” – A Curse so Dark and Lonely (Cursebreakers #1) by Brigid Kemmerer

“The King of the Enchanted Forest was twenty years old and lived in a rambling, scrambling, mixed-up castle somewhere near the center of his domain. He sometimes wished he could say that it was exactly at the center, but this was impossible because the edges and borders and even geography of the Enchanted Forest tended to change frequently and without warning. When you are the tulles of a magical kingdom, however, you must expect some small inconveniences, and the King tried not to worry too much about the location of his castle.” – Searching for Dragons (The Enchanted Forest Chronicles #2) by Patricia C. Wrede

“The circus arrives without warning.” – The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

“The snake haired ladies were starting to annoy Percy. They should have died three days ago when he dropped a crate of bowling balls on them at the Napa Bargain Mart. They should have died two days ago when he ran them over with a police car in Martinez. They definitely should have died this morning when he cut off their heads in Tilden Park.” – The Son of Neptune (Heroes of Olympus #2) by Rick Riordan

“It is with irony now, forty years later, to think that if I had not been called a murderer on the most frightening night of my life, there might not be any perfume in Paris today. And that scent – to which I gave my all and which gave me all the power and riches I could have hoped for – is at the heart of why now it is I who call myself a murderer.” – The Collector of Dying Breaths (Reincarnationist #6) by M.J. Rose

A good first line can make or break a book. What are some of your opening first lines?