Current Events > Favorite opening lines in books?

(+) Yeah! (+)

It was the best of times.

"The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault."

Well shit I have nothing to add now

Other than that Harry Potter isn't even the best 2000s fantasy novel series about a wizard named Harry but you clearly know that already

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

Last night, I dreamt of Glocca Morra... again.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. [2] And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

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 years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met nearly, 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 man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose...

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose...

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are of the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death cup mushroom. Everyone in my family is dead.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping arch, each one half way over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way'.

Ludwig had the meat sweats again.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, " just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
-The Great Gatsby

Timelessand perfect just like the rest of the book.

Then there's the classic Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quote.

'The story so far: in the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.'