Little Bird waits for her appology.
Aww! They’re my favourites, too!
“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that comes down through the mountain passes and curls your hair and makes your skin 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 husband’s necks.”
Okay, more than one line, from Red Wind by Raymond Chandler
“They killed the white girl first.”
Paradise Toni Morrison
Not a favorite of mine, but:
Sybil Davison has a genius I.Q. and has been laid by at least six different guys.
—Judy Blume, Forever
Not a great book either, but if there ever was an opening line that grabbed the readers attention and let you know that this ain’t your mama’s boy-meets-girl story, that is it.
Okay, on to a real favorite:
Scorpio is metaphysics, putrefaction and death, regeneration, passion, lust and violence, insight and profundity; inheritance, loss, occultism, astrology, borrowing and lending, other’s possessions. Scorpians are magicians, astrologers, alchemists, surgeons, bondsmen, and undertakers. The gem for Scorpio is the snakestone, the plant the cactus; eagles and wolves and scorpions are its creatures, its body part is the genitals, its weapon the Obligatory Pain, and its card in the Tarot is Death.
—Ruth Rendell, The Lake of Darkness Another one where I just had to read on. I started it in the right environment, too: late evening in November, in a house empty except for my babysitting charges. They never knew how many times I dashed upstairs to check on them just in case.
“If this typewriter can’t do it, then fuck it, it can’t be done.”
– Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker.
“We are at rest five miles behind the front.”
– Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet On The Western Front.
Something about the conversational tone does it for me, as if the author’s sitting you down and telling you a story, in whatever words spring to mind.
I third Owen Meany!
The part always that wrecks me, though, is the last line. I always cry.
Lurker/Newbie
My favorite, Marquez’s masterpiece, has already been mentioned, so I’ll mention my 2nd favorite:
“He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.”
– Don Delillo - Underworld
Underworld wins hands down for the greatest opening chapter in history (even warranting its repacking into a standalone book Pafko at the Wall).
Tom Clancy may have flattened a national forest for too little purpose, but his opener to Patriot Games:
“Ryan was nearly killed twice in half an hour.”
is a winner.
Oh God, thats the freakiest Rendell I’ve read. I picked that book up one day in my last year of High School, in the midst of studying for an Ancient History exam on the Julio-Claudians. The book fell open to the quote on the first page: “Nero is an angler in the Lake of Darkness.” That sucked me right in. I was a bit of a Goth in HS. 
Two of my favorites:
“The magic in that country was so thick and tenacious that it settled over the land like chalk-dust and over floors and shelves like slightly sticky plaster-dust.”–Spindle’s End by Robin McKinley. Magic dust! I bet I’d be allergic.
“I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him.”–The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie R. King. As a die-hard fan of the Holmes canon, I suppose I should hate this book and its sequels but I just can’t.
"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, “No! I don’t want to watch TV!”
From If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino.
My other favorites have already been mentioned: Cien Años de Soledad by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny.
No one surpasses Joyce for grabbing the reader from the get-go. I can’t choose between the big two: "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. " …or the incomparable “riverrun, past Eve’s and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando begins memorably, too: “He – for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it – was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.”
There’s also a special place in my heart for the first line of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility: “The family of Dashwood had been long settled in the Sussex.” Mundane enough, but the aliteration is beautiful.
And of course Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451: “It was a pleasure to burn.”
And… and… oh crap, that’s probably too many already.
My all-time favourite is from Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes:
“First of all it was October, a good month for boys.”
That is pure genius.
First of all - OK, sit down, grab a cup of whatever, you’re going to hear a story now. Ready?
it was October - Yellow and brown leaves on the trees, cool winds, graying clouds, life in neutral.
a good month - Why is it good? What’s so good about October? What are the bad months?
for boys - This is a story about boys. Get into the boy mindset immediately, 'cause now we’re going tripping through a world of running home from school and climbing trees.
And, of course, Bradbury goes on to explain exactly why October is such a good month for boys, and what the bad months are, and why they’re bad, and what the other good months are and why they’re good. By then, you’re stuck.
Another favourite is Selma Lagerlöfs from Gösta Berlings Saga: “Äntligen stod prästen i predikstolen”, or, to put it in a language the majority of you will understand: “Finally, the priest stood in the pulpet”.
That is a truly amazing opener. In five words she conveys where we are, what’s going on, and that something weird is going on. Why was the priest late? Where has he been? What is he about to say? Just from reading that sentence, you want to stay and hear what the priest has to say for himself.
If comics count, I’d like to add the opener from the Preacher one-shot Tall in the Saddle:
“They were young and carefree and stupid and utterly in love in those days, and everything was going fine until you-know-who dug in his big Texan heels and opened his big Texan mouth and said – I ain’t stealing no horses.”
From memory, but I think it;s accurate:
“The sky was the colour of a dead television set.”
William Gibson’s Neuromancer, of course. I’m surprised that one hasn’t come up already.
“It was a dark and stormy night;” is the beginning of Paul Clifford by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton. The 1830 novel’s beginning sentence has become the de facto trumpet call for bad writing, and it is never even quoted in full.
The full quote, just so you get the idea why it is derided so, is:
“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.”
More like:
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel”
-pity tech has caught up and now the colour of a dead channel is blue, talk about inversion of meaning.
Mine is :
“When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton”
You read it and then you go “Eleventy-what?”.
“On the fifteenth of May, in the jungle of Nool, In the heat of the day, in
the cool of the pool” - Horton Hears A Who. Just beautiful.
mm
“Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.”
Albert Camus, The Outsider {L’Etranger}
“Hughes got it wrong, in one important detail. You will have read, in Tom Brown, how I was expelled from Rugby school for drunkenness, which is true enough, but when Hughes alleges that this was the result of my deliberately pouring beer on top of gin-punch, he is in error. I knew better than to to mix my drinks, even at seventeen.”
George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman
And, because someone has to:
“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 is anyone really reading this and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel lke going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
Oh, go on, guess.
My favourite is the opening line to Brighton Rock by Graham Greene.
“Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to kill him”.
It’s such an amazing hook because it poses five questions in the space of 16 words that the reader is compelled to find the answer to. Who is Hale? Who are “they”? Why do they want to kill him? How did he know? What happened in those three hours?
Thanks MrDibble, you can probably tell my copy of Neuromancer is out at the moment.
Dune, however, is right here:
“In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.”
And so much by Ballard is addictive from the first sentence. Here’s one of my favourites, The Voices of Time, although pretty much anything else by him will yield interesting beginnings:
“Later Powers often thought of Whitby, and the strange grooves the biologist had cut, apparently at random, all over the floor of the empty swimming pool.”
Ukulele Ike, unfortunately, I’ve only gotten a chance to read O’Connell’s The Skin Palace (my favorite of his), Box Nine, and Word Made Flesh. I will, however, be picking up Wireless sooner instead of later, seeing as you’ve given it a high compliment. It’s too bad you can’t find any of O’Connell’s works in a bookstore; he deserves a better following than two guys on a message board
Not to detract from how excellent Stuart Gilbert’s translation of The Stranger is, but I prefer the Matthew Ward translation which renders the first two sentences to: “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.”
In the translator’s note, Ward states the following: