"Dear Anyone Who Finds This, do not blame the drugs. It was not the fault of the drugs. I planned this way before the drugs were ever in my life. And do not blame Vicky Talluso. It was my idea to kill myself. All she did was give me a little push. If you are holding this book right now it means that everything came out just the way I wanted it to. I got my happily ever after."- from Cruddy by Lynda Barry.
Just to let you know Sparticus is here also. Late as usual but no less heartfelt meant. (All you wingnuts that cannot take the sight/sound of profanity beware.)
Douglas Adams: "This time there would be no witness."
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
.
.
...I think. Let me check.
"The man in black fled across the desert. The gunslinger followed." From the first novel in Steven Kings Dark Tower Series, "The Gunslinger". Those were the first words of any Steven King novel I ever read. I've been completely hooked ever since.
"When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized wiwth longing. 'Spread your lips, sweeet Lil,' they'd cluck,'and show us your choppers!"
-Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
Closely followed by:
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty ears and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
-The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
I was going to mention that one, too, but I didn't want to steal your thunder. 
"There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name."
Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
oh hell yes, paul. i love the haunting of hill house.
"It was a pleasure to burn."
Fahrenheit 451
I was going to mention that one, too, but I didn't want to steal your thunder.
Heh, you know it's my fave.
Grendel, isn't that a perfect opening? She could have ended the book there, and I would have been satisfied.
Fortunately, she didn't.
I think last time I went for One Hundred Years of Solitude, so this time I'll go for Red Wind (not a novel, more of a novella, but still):
There was a desert winf blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your sking itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
"It was a dark and stormy night ..."
Don't know if it's my favorite but I always remember, "Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were." Having seen the movie before reading the book, I was gobsmacked at "not beautiful." WHHAA? Vivien Leigh: what an inferior example of womanality, huh?
I just realized how many typos I made in that first one. Christ.
Nik E Poo, you have to go with the whole thing:
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
"I have never begun a novel with more misgiving."
Razor's Edge, by Somerset Maugham
BTW, I too am Spartacus.
And I can't resist one more: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
I have many, but these are my favorites.
From Geek Love, By Katherine Dunn
“When your mother was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “She made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing. “Spread your lips, sweet Lil,” they’d cluck, “and show us your choppers!”
Thief’s Journal, Jean Genet English Translation.
“I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger. It can be seen in a look, a walk, a smile, and it is in you that it creates an eddying. It unnerves you. This violence is a calm that disturbs you.”
Good one Paul... Just saw yours!!
It's like poetry, isn't it, petulant?
The whole damn book is... It should be mandatory reading!
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."
-The Catcher in the Rye
i used to do the whole first page as an audition monologue. obsessed, much?
"The magician’s underwear has just been found in a cardboard suitcase floating in a stagnant pond on the outskirts of Miami."
Tom Robbins
Another Roadside Attraction
"There was once a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself--not just sometimes, but always.
When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he'd bothered. Nothing really interested him--least of all the things that should have."
The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster
Yeah, the first lines of 100 Years of Solitude, which I don't have in front of me right now, but I think it goes: "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."
And Tom Hilton cut me off. Curses!
What the hell is haloscan's problem? That is not my URL, jackass. 
"In the country of Westphalia, in the castle of the most noble Baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh, lived a youth whom Nature had endowed with a most sweet disposition. His face was the true index of his mind. He had a solid judgment joined to the most unaffected simplicity; and hence, I presume, he had his name of Candide" Voltaire
Since Geek Love and Cruddy and Pride and Predjudice were already taken.
"Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
-Franz Kafka
The Trial
"Sometimes, when I stand back and take a good look, I think my parents are ambassadors from hell. Two of them, at least, the biological ones, the big ones."
Ok, not exactly from a classic novel, but from a short story--A Brief Moment in the Life of Angus Bethune by Chris Crutcher (who is a HUGE advocate for reading and teaching banned books). I read it years ago and it has always stuck with me.
Enoch rounds the corner just as the executioner raises the noose above the woman's head. The crowd on the Common stoppraying and sobbing for just as long as Jack Ketch stands there, elbows locked, for all the world like a carpenter heaving a ridgebeam into place. The rope clutches a disk of blue New England sky. The Puritans gaze at it and, to all appearences, think. Enoch the Red reins in his borrowed horse as it nears the edge of the crowd, and sees that the exectioners purpose is not to let them inspect his knotwork, bu to give them all a narrow--and, to a Puritan, tantilizing--glimpse of the portal through which they all must pass one day.
Quicksilver, Volume One of the Baroque Cycle
Neal Stephenson
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in
possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
"umber whunnn
yerrnnn umber whunnn
fayunnnn
These sounds; even in the haze."
Misery by Stephen King. Thank you Amazon's "Look Inside" for letting me find that opening! 
"I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination."
-Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. le Guin
Tom Hilton, you stole a lot of people's thunder.
"One evening, after thinking it over for some time, Harold decided to go for a walk in the moonlight."
Harold and the Purple Crayon, Crockett Johnson
'The same week our chooks were stolen, Daphne Moran had her throat cut'
The Scarecrow - Ronald Hugh Morrison
Seems to me we've done this before and every time I say the same thing:
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
- William Gibson, NEUROMANCER.
Also, if you can consider FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS to be a novel:
"We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold."
"This is a true story but I can't believe it's really happening.
It's a murder story, too. I can't believe my luck.
And a love story (I think), of all strange things, so late in the century, so late in the goddamned day."
London Fields by Martin Amis.
"Mary Ann Singleton was twenty-five years old when she saw San Francisco for the first time."
Armistead Maupin, Tales of the City
"In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual "There!"--yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald "The Beautiful and the Damned"
Easy: "If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done."
Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins.
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
-- William Gibson, Neuromancer
I agree with Mr. Shakes, but since that's taken care of, here are two others I really like:
"Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe. I don't know. I got a telegram from the home: 'Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.' That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday." ~The Stranger
"Dr Strauss says I should rite down what I think and remembir and evrey thing that happins to me from now on. I dont no why but he says its importint so they will see if they can use me. I hope they use me becaus Miss Kinnian says mabye they can make me smart. I want to be smart." ~Flowers for Algernon
Oh, shit. How did I forget Still Life with Woodpecker? That's absolutely the right answer. Mine are crap.
Man! You peopl read buks and shit.
What Rob Salkowitz said
"The day war was declared, a rain of telephones fell clattering to the cobblestones from the skies above Novy Petrograd. Some of them had half melted in the heat of re-entry; others pinged and ticked, cooling rapidly in the postdawn chill. An inquisitive pigeon hopped close, head cocked to one side; it pecked at the shiny case of one such device, then fluttered away in alarm when it beeped. A tinny voice spoke: 'Hello? Will you entertain us?'
The Festival had come to Rochard's World."
- _Singularity Sky_, Charles Stross.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
1984 - George Orwell
"So what's it gonna be then, eh?"
--- Anthony Burgess, "A Clockwork Orange"
Seeing as how someone already stole the Necromancer opening from me.
Let's set the existence-of-God issues aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate. After about three billion years of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage, Godfrey Waterhouse IV was born, in Murdo, South Dakota, to Blanche, the wife of a Congregational preacher named Bunyan Waterhouse. Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo-which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.
As nightmarishly lethal, memetically programmed death-machines went, these were the nicest you could ever hope to meet.
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
"As Gregor Samsa awoke from a night of uneasy dreaming, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."
this is actually one of the ways i savor novels. i always take time to read, digest, re-read, think about and then re-read again, the opening line of a novel. i gauge how i think i am going to enjoy a book by how the first line effects me.
you probably have never heard of sarah andrews who writes the em hansen novels; em is a geologist on the front range of the rockies who always winds up in the middle of murders, and has to figure them out for her own survival.
the opening of her second book, "a fall in denver" (and fall is a geological term relating to strata of rock) begins something like this:
"if i had seen the body go past the window, i probably wouldn't have taken the job."
she's very good.
"Venice,California, in the old days had much to recommend it to people who liked to be sad."
Death Is A Lonely Business by Ray Bradbury. Just a great book
"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun."
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
Two personal faves:
"It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Dr. Bickleigh took any active steps in the matter."
- Malice Aforethought, Francis Iles.
"King Merriwig of Euralia sat on his castle wall at breakfast. He lifted the gold cover on the gold platter, selected a trout, and conveyed it carefully to his gold plate. He was a man of simple tastes, but when you have an aunt with the recently acquired gift of turning anything she touches into gold, you must let her practice sometime. In another age it might have been fretwork."
- Once on a Time, A. A. Milne
Forgive me if I've not been precisely accurate on the second one: that was from memory, and I haven't read the book in years.
Karen beat me to it... drat.
Lots of good thoughts here. I'm tempted to go with Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, but I really love this one (and I think it's the one I used last time):
Dortmunder blew his nose. "Warden," he said, "you don't know how much I appreciate the personal attention you been paying me." There wasn't anything for him to do with the Kleenex, so he just held it balled up in his fist.
Warden Outes gave him a brisk smile, got up from behind his desk, walked around to Dortmunder's side, patted him on the arm, and said, "IT's the ones I can save that give me the most pleasure." He was a latter-day Civil Service type—college-trained, athletic, energetic, reformistic, idealistic, and chummy. Dortmunder hated him.
The warden said, "I'll walk you to the gate, Dortmunder."
"You don't have to do that, Warden," Dortmunder said. The Kleenex was cold and gooey against his palm.
---The Hot Rock by Donald Westlake.
By this point in the novel, I've laughed about three times, and I'm not even past the first page.
And fwiw, I, too, am Spartacus.
It's not exactly highbrow, but Stephen King's The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger:
"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."
Okay, here's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues:
It is not a heart: light, heavy, kind or broken; dear, hard, bleeding or transplanted; it is not a heart.
It is not a brain. The brain, that pound and a half of chicken-colored goo so highly regarded (by the brain itself), that slimy organ to which is attributed such intricate and mysterious powers (it is the self-same brain that does the attributing), the brain is so weak that, without its protective casing to support it, it simply collapses of its own weight. So it could not be a brain.
It is neither a kneecap nor a torso. It is neither a whisker nor an eyeball. It is not a tongue.
What a fun thread!
A big fave:
"In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to recall, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing. An olla of rather more beef than mutton, a salad on most nights, scraps on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, and a
pigeon or so extra on Sundays, made away with three-quarters of his income. The rest of it went in a doublet of fine cloth and velvet breeches and shoes to match for holidays, while on week-days he made a brave figure in his best homespun."
(from, of course, Don Quixote. which I just realized I need to read again).
And I love the start of Howard's End:
"One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister."
Only connect, Shakers!
"Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John."
Kurt Vonnegut
Cat's Cradle
Closely followed by
"Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time."
Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse Five
Billy Pilgram had become unstuck in time.
"The ice crystals in the air glistened like a million diamonds in the cold moonlight."
The Patriot Papers
The last time this question was offered Toast of Two Glasses was still commenting regularly. I remember that because I offered the first page of All The King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren, to him as something to check out.
It is still something I highly recommend. You can tell it's written by a poet if you read it aloud to yourself, using your best southern accent.
This time, however, I'm going to offer a different poem, a very small one, which isn't really part of the text (& so maybe is cheating), but nonetheless perfectly sums up the story (in its koan-like way):
Only in silence, the word;
Only in dark, the light;
Only in dying, life:
Bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky!
- Ursula LeGuin, A Wizard of Earthsea
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."
"Rebecca", Daphne du Maurier
I find it very evocative.
Close tag! Bad Lesley!
Tom Hilton stole one of mine: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
My other:
"Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
che la diritta via era smaritta."
NICE, puellasolis! Have you read it all in the original Italian? I don't know Italian, but there are some good translations.
from Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair:
My father had a face that could stop a clock.
And from my all-time favorite book, Watership Down by Richard Adams: The primroses were over.
(which is wonderful for all that comes after, and how it all winds back around full-circle a so beautifully by the end)
Also the oft-cited Pride & Prejudice line is beyond great.
"Dorothy lived in the middle of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Auntie Em, who was the farmer's wife"
--The Wizard of Oz
"To Sherlock Holmes, she was always the, woman."
A Scandal in Bohemia
I love these lines because, while simple, they tell essential plot information with an enviable economy of words.
Oh, and for what it's worth, I, too, am Spartacus. I intend to add to the post at some point, and I very much want to apologize for the completely pitiful state of my blog.
"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, _If on a winter's night a traveler_. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought."
I love the entire first chapter of that book. Well, and the rest of the book, too.
I was going to go with one of puellasolis's, as well, so I think I'll just type it in English for us non-Italian-readers:
"Midway on our life's journey, I found myself in deep woods, the right road lost." - Dante's Inferno
Also:
"May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shinks and black cros gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.
The nights are clear, but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation."
- Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
*that's black crows up there, not cros. Sorry.
Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet! Jurassic stole my thunder, and everyone else took all the Tom Robbins . . .
. . . except "Skinny Legs and All," which happens to be my favorite. Hah! So . . .
"It was a bright, defrosted, pussy-willow day at the onset of spring, and the newlyweds were driving cross-country in a large roast turkey."
Oh, thank you, Tom. And we haven't even gotten to Salome's dance.
And, by the way, if we're busting out our favorites, might as well rock the TC Boyle. The opening lines of my favorite novel, "World's End":
"On the day he lost his right foot, Walter Van Brunt had been haunted, however haphazardly, by ghosts of the past."
Ford Maddox Ford, A Good Soldier:
"This is the saddest story I have ever heard."
"Elmer Gantry was drunk." From "Elmer Gantry" by Sinclair Lewis. The original novel about the religious right.
YES! Excellent novel. And an amazing first line, sums up a lot about the zealots.
Since I was too slow with the opening line of Neuromancer, I'll throw
"It was love at first sight."
from Catch-22 into the ring.
And, for good measure:
"The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door"
-All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
"There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart's Desire."
Stardust, Neil Gaiman
Tom Hilton and Nathan - beat me too it.
But there's always:
"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your HOllywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids--and I might even be said to possess a mind."
- Ellison
(it's not the first sentence, but I also love:
(oops - I didn't mean to press return)
"Then I went into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining." (Molloy)
She was standing on Westminster Bridge. IT was twilight, but the City was no longer dark. The street lamps along the Embankment were still dimmed, but in the buildings and shutters and blinds and curtains had been removed or left undrawn, and the lights were coming out there like the first faint stars above. Those lights were the peace. It was true the formal peace was not yet in being; all that happened was that the fighting had ceased. The enemy, as enemy, no longer existed and one more crisis of agony was done. Labor, intelligence, patience--much need for these; and much certainty of boredom and suffering and misery, but no longer the sick vigils and daily despair.
Lester Furnival stood and looked at the City while the twilight deepened. The devasted areas were hidden; much was to be done but could be. In the distance she could hear an occasional plane. Its sound gave her a greater sense of relief than the silence: it was precisely not dangerous; it promised a truer safety than all the squadrons of fighters and bombers had held. Something was ended and those remote engines told her so."
Charles Williams, All Hallows' Eve
The next several pages detail Lester's dawning realization that she had been killed by that plane crashing into the street where she was walking with an acquaintance.
Or if you want something lighter:
I shall clasp my hands together and bow to the four corners of the world.
Barry Hughart, The Bridge of Birds.
The hils rolled up to the moon on slopes of wind-bent grass, crested, swept down into tangled brier shadows.
P.C. Hodgell, Godstalk
The most nerve-wracking commissions, Madeline thought, were the ones that required going in through the front door. This front door was simply more imposing than most.
Martha Wells, The Death of the Necromancer
Spartacus here, too.
I know the opening line but can;t remember the title of the Steinbeck book. My bad.
"Some days are just born ugly."
"Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time"
--Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five
Damnit!
Call me Ishmael.
"The telephone was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse."
Charles Williams, War in Heaven
"Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York. Especially in the summer of 1912. Somber, as a word, was better. But it did not apply to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Serene was the only word for it; especially on a Saturday afternoon in summer."
Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
It was a dark and stormy night....
"If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done."
- Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins.
USJogger
Nice choice USJogger, but that is actually from the Prologue. Chapter 1 opens with:
"In the last quarter of the twentieth century, at a time when Western civilization was declining too rapidly for comfort and yet too slowly to be very exciting, much of the world sat on the edge of an increasingly expensive theater seat, waiting - with various combinations of dread, hope, and ennui - for something momentous to occur."
*sigh*
"Jack Torrance thought : Officious little prick..."
-The Shining by Stephen King
And for kicks:
"This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it."
-The Princess Bride by William Goldman
The opening ine of Don Quixote is truly wonderful but much, much more so in the original Spanish. And as a BTW it is not well known that Cervantes was a tax collector here where I live and started writing DQ when he was in Prison in the big (In those days.) market town and administrative center for this district, Velez Malaga, for..........Not collecting the taxes.
"In the beginning there was a river. The river became a rad and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry." Ben Okri, The Famished Road
This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying . . . but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice . . . but nobody admitted it. This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks . . . but nobody loved it.
Alfred Bester, "The Stars My Destination"
"I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well."
Orhan Pamuk, "My Name is Red"
"I think I'm going to die."
--- Pat Cadigan, Synners
"Donny Hollenbeck crossed the street at an angle, heading for the Gateway Café. It was a little after six in the morning and it was already getting warm. A slow breeze took a small tumbleweed ahead of him down the street until it lodged under the differential of Larry Webster’s GMC."
Small Town Boys, by me.
.
For a long time, I went to bed early. Sometimes, my candle scarcely out, my eyes would close so quickly that I did not have time to say to myself, "I'm falling asleep." -- Swann's Way, Marcel Proust
"Marley was dead to begin with."
"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany."
John Irving, "A Prayer for Owen Meany"
Nice to see Mr. Robbins getting some props here.
Pedantry alert: Dorothy, "Metamorphosis" can't really be called a novel, can it?
And where are the Pynchon geeks? Take the first sentence on its own, or the first two paragraphs, and this opening f-in' resonates:
"A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
"It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it's night. He's afraid of the way the glass will fall--soon--it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing."
--Gravity's Rainbow
"Sundown painted purple across the great Pyramid while the Emperor enjoyed a steaming whiz against a dumpster in the alley below..."
Bloodsucking Fiends, Christopher Moore.
Funny, funny book.
"In the Beginning, God Created the Heaven and Earth..."
I love good fiction!
"Now read on ...
When does it start?
There are very few starts. Oh, some things SEEM to to be beginnings. The curtain goes up, the first pawn moves, the first shot is fired (probably at the first pawn) - but THAT'S not the start. The play, the game, the war ist just a little window on a ribbon of events that may extend back thousands of years. The point is, there's always something BEFORE. It's ALWAYS a case of Now Read On."
Terry Pratchett: Lords and Ladies
I love the opening couple of pages of Moby
Dick. Of course, Call Me Ishmael is the famous first line, but the whole first chapter is stunning and something I turn to whenever my thughts turn to tipping the hats off stangers' heads.
Actually, my favorite Robbins is Jitterbug Perfume, it's just that Cowgirls is my favorite Robbins first line.
Here's Jitterbug Perfume:
The citadel was dark, and the heroes were sleeping. When they breathed, it sounded as if they were testing the air for dragon smoke.
Most of the suggestions I would have made have already been made.
But here's a pretty good one:
"You exposed your penis on national television, Max."
-Sellevision, Augusten Burroughs
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "as pretty as an airport."
-- Douglas Adams, "The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul"
AHHH! i was going to post the "Haunting of Hill House," but Paul beat me to it. that is very fine, no?
Not a book, but one of my favorite openings to a short story:
"Mrs. Whitaker found the Holy Grail; it was under a fur coat."
--Neil Gaiman, "Chivalry"
"When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow."
Oh, how weird is that!
Susan, I haven't read that line, or even thought about it, since high school, but I immediately knew what work that came from!
My first "big book" was a gift from my grandmother when I was in 4th grade. Still have it ..here is is..
"The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting."
The Red Badge of Courage..S. Crane
After I read that I never played with my little rubber soldiers or Roy Rogers guns again...
A couple of my favorites:
"Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once.
It was my brother Stephen who told me that, when he wore his raveling maroon sweater to study in and spent a lot of time standing on his head so that the blood would run down into his brain and nourish it. I didn't understand what he meant, but maybe he didn't explain it very well. He was already moving away from the imprecision of words."
-Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood
"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen."
-Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."
-Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
"Horselover Fat’s nervous breakdown began the day he got the phonecall from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals."
-VALIS by Philip K. Dick
"I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visted my wife's grave. Then I joined the army."
-Old Man's War, John Scalzi
Scalzi
Dammit! And I have that book right in from of me.
"Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through rings of previous rings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake" - Wallace Stegner "Crossing to Safety"
Tom Hilton: Stick with 100 Years of Solitude:
"Many years later when he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia remembered the distant day when his father had taken him to to see ice."
Awwz, DBK is parroting me!
It is a lovely book.
o come on --
not originally in English, but it HAS to be one of the greatest of all time: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude:
Many years later, when he faced the firing squad, he remembered that long ago day when his father took him to discover, ice.
Since someone's already beaten me to The Catcher in the Rye, how about this:
"Amerigo Bonasera sat in New York Criminal Court Number 3 and waited for justice; vengeance on the men who had so cruelly hurt his daughter, who had tried to dishonor her."
Mario Puzo, The Godfather
but really, moby-dick did not begin with "call me ishmael"
Still has to be Iain Banks, The Crow Road:
"It was the day my grandmother exploded"
"A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with dissaproval and potato chip crumbs. In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius J. Reilly's supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D.H. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress. Several of the outfits, Ignatius noticed, were new enough and expensive enough to be properly considered offenses against taste and decency. Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person's lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one's soul."
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole.
Since I've come late to the party and Catch-22, Moby Dick, and Elmer Gantry have been covered:
"Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo"
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
"You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter." Huck Finn
"One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executer, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary."
The Crying of Lot 49
I can't resist one more, especially since nobody has mentioned Dunsany. The Charwoman's Shadow:
Picture a summer evening sombre and sweet over Spain, the glittering sheen of leaves fading to soberer colours, the sky in the west all soft, and mysterious as low music, and in the east like a frown. Picture the Golden Age past its wonderful zenith, and westering now towards its setting.And Oddjob, All the King's Men does have an amazing opening.
How could I forget
"Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting." The Sound and the Fury.
Lorna Freeman's 'Covenants'
"We were lost."
It's like a call me ishmael kind of opening, only more entertaining.
"It was beginning to end, after what seemed like most of eternity to me..."
Roger Zelazny, "Nine Princes in Amber," first book of the "Amber" series.
I've read other books, but for some reason, whenever I see that question, that's the quote that pops up for me.
I know this Shakes posted this but I just HAVE to post this, just for the sheer pleasure of reading it again. I remember fondly the day when I opened up the book (not knowing what it was about, not knowing what to expect), and was instantly transported to that otherness. I walked away a changed person.. seriously.
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so."
Goes without saying...
"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."
Hunter S Thompson Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
I like the Lolita first line too.
But since some have branched out from novels to short stories, I will revisit my adolescent obsession with Edgar Allen Poe:
"I was sick, sick unto death, with that long agony, and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me."
hey did anybody see the comercial with abe lincoln, the beaver and the astronut- rozera , i think
funny
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
I was wondering when someone would mention "Marley was dead, to begin with..."
Since that is taken, in the same vein I'll offer up:
"Every Who down in Who-ville liked Christmas alot, but the Grinch, who lived just north of Who-ville, did not!"
But my very favorite opening line, which I will never, ever, ever forget, is the simple and sweet:
"In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit."
Doesn't get better than that...
"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water."
H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
"My father, unlike so many of the men he served with, knew just what he wanted to do when the war was over. He wanted to drink and whore and play the horses."
Richard Russo: The Risk Pool
FAUST:
Who then art thou?
MEPHISTOPHELES:
Part of that power which still Produceth good, whilst ever scheming ill.
****
At the hour of the hot spring sunset two citizens appeared at the Patriarch's Ponds. One of them, approximately forty years old, dressed in a grey summer suit, was short, dark-haired, plump, bald, and carried his respectable fedora hat in his hand. His neatly shaven face was adorned with black horn-rimmed glasses of a supernatural size. The other, a broad-shouldered young man with tousled reddish hair, his checkered cap cocked back on his head, was wearing a cowboy shirt, wrinkled white trousers and black sneakers.
Included epigraph from Goethe's "Faust" and English translation from the Russian, Part one, Chapter One: Don't Talk to Strangers, 1st paragraph of "The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov
In the three years since we had first met, I had never seen Wheezer smile. There was no mistaking who that sardonic grin belonged to, however. Kneeling in the middle of the road, the reflection from my one good headlight lit him up. Donald "Wheezer" Guthrie held the body of Roger Barkhurst in his arms, but dropped him lifelessly to the roadway as I approached. His head bounced once on the asphalt and then lolled to the side. Barkhurst stared at me with eyes half open, almost as he did when alive, but perhaps now with a look of greater understanding. He had been the sole Indian enrolled in the Chimacum Cowboys' 1965 High School class.
from "65 Cowboy Stories", John N. Knoph
"I Wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing;--that not only the production of a rational Being was concern'd in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;--and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:--Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,--I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me."
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
"To be born is to be lucky."
from Ride on Stranger by Kyle Tennant. It is a book I never finished because only the first line really grabbed me, but it is more vivid in my mind than so many books I did complete.
I noticed another Geoduck commenting up there, so I'm not him or her..
I'd cast additional votes for The Gunslinger and The Phantom Tollbooth. A couple more I've always liked:
"It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton."
-The Eye In The Pyramid, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
"Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'"
-Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
Don't any of you find it odd that not one of those infernal but oh-so-literate trolls that have been all over the patch this past week have not turned up here? Perhaps we could have discovered what the opening line of Mein Kampf was.
Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
- Zora Neale Hurston,
Their Eyes Were Watching God [1937]
1. "A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over: "Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi!"
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
2. “I FIRST MET HIM in Piraeus.”
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
Two of my personal favourites:
"For many, many, weary months the Pilgrim journeyed in the wide and pathless Desert of Facts."
-Harold Bell Wright, The Uncrowned King
"When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too."
-Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
And agreed about the opening line of The Hobbit.
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