Okay; top this one:
“Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Four bullets ripped into my groin and I was off on the greatest adventure of my life…but first, let me tell you a little about myself.”
It’s from Max Shulman’s Sleep 'Til Noon, in which the main character is an unsuccessful author, searching for a gripping opening line for his novel. The fact that the line has nothing to do with the plot is unimportant. What is important is that the opening line grab the reader’s attention.
You beat me to it!
Three or four of the short, simple ones already mentioned (Moby Dick, Tale of Two Cities, Atlas Shrugged) and most of Catcher’s first line, with the allusion to David Copperfield.
And this one: “Behavioral sciences, the FBI section dealing with serial murder, is located on the bottom floor of the academy building at Quantico, half buried in the earth”.The Silence of the Lambs
Then you had it exactly reversed. 
Here’s mine:
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.
“Tom!”
–It’s the only one short enough for me to remember.
(I believe the next paragraph is “No answer.”)
None, which is why I have never realy played the game “ExLibris” Ex Libris | Board Game | BoardGameGeek which someone gave me for Christmas this year.
In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.
Seriously? No takers at all?
Actually, it’s already been mentioned. 
Of man’s first disobediance, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe …
Paradise Lost - I had an English “professor” in college who offered up an “A” to anyone who produced the first two sentences (26 lines) letter perfect, as opposed to completing the two medium length essay answers on the poem. :rolleyes:
My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the third of five sons.
A truly Brobdinagian sentence. 
“GALLIA est omnis divisa in partes tres, quarum unam incolunt Belgae, aliam Aquitani, tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae, nostra Galli appellantur.”
That was the first one I thought of. Nitpick: it’s “Last night I dreamed I went to Manderly again.” The “again” is kind of important.
Never read the book but I always thought this a great first sentence:
“We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody dropped the girl off the bridge.”
–John D. MacDonald, the first Travis McGee novel (I had to look up the title; it’s Darker than Amber)
How about a first paragraph? From Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House:
“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 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.”