First and last lines are easy.
This one is from Vanity Fair. Its from the end of chapter 32, which deals with the battle of Waterloo.
No more firing was heard at Brussels—the pursuit rolled miles away. Darkness came down on the field and city: and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart
The night was. . .
I always liked the opener to Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Yes.
“Where’s Papa going with that axe?”
(I win, right?)
“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.”
"It was love at first sight.
“The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.”
– Catch-22
“It was a pleasure to burn.”
– Fahrenheit 451
“At meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, fellow drinksters will get angry with you if you won’t puke for the audience. By that, I mean spill your guts – really dredge up those rotted baskets of fermented kittens and murder implements that lie at the bottoms of all our personal lakes. AA members want to hear the horror stories of how far you’ve sunk in life, and no low is low enough. Tales of spouse abuse, embezzlement, and public incontinence are both appreciated and expected. I know this for a fact because I’ve been to these meetings (lurid details of my own life will follow at a later date), and I’ve seen the process of onedownmanship in action – and been angry at not having sordid enough tales of debauchery of my own to share. ‘Never be afraid to cough up a bit of diseased lung for the spectators,’ said a man who sat next to me at a meeting once, a man with a skin like a half-cooked pie crust and who had five grown children who would no longer return his phone calls: ‘How are people ever going to help themselves if they can’t grab onto a fragment of your own horror? People want that little fragment, they need it. That little piece of lung makes their own fragments less scary.’ I’m still looking for a description of storytelling as vital as this.”
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
“I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles.”
**Inverted World **by Christopher Priest (about a society in the future dragging a city along a railway line by moving the tracks from behind to front as they move. and a bunch of other weird wonderful stuff)
One of those things Tolstoy famously got backasswards. There is a short menu of the problems of unhappy families and they are utterly and depressingly familiar from one to the next, any social worker will tell you; but happiness comes in innumerable forms.
“Jeff Winston was on the phone with his wife when he died.”
Replay, by Ken Grimwood
I’ve always considered having your main character die in the first sentence was quite an accomplishment.
“The winter of my twenty-first birthday, I went out alone on horseback to kill a pack of woves.”
The Vampire LeStat (Ch. 1). Anne Rice writes a lot of crap but that scene was awesome.
“In five years the penis will be obsolete,” said the salesman.
“When I was a young boy, if I was sick or in trouble, or had been beaten at school, I used to remember that on the day I was born my father had wanted to kill me.”
– The Last of the Wine, Mary Renault
“If I had cared to live, I would have died.” Silverlock, John Myers Myers.
And the classic:
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”
“Ryan was nearly killed twice in half an hour.” - Tom Clancy - “Patriot Games” (Clancy is pretty much all downhill from there)
“Sometimes Sonny felt like he was the only human creature in the town.” - Larry McMurtry - “The Last Picture Show”
“He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eyes that’s halfway hopeful.” - Don DeLillo - “Underworld”
“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.” - Gabriel García Márquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude