“As soon as he was born, Mr. and Mrs. Canker knew that their baby was not like other people’s children.”
Which Witch? by Eva Ibbotson
“Caption contests are not new.”
Your Caption Has Been Selected: More Than Anyone Could Possibly Want to Know About The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest, by Lawrence Wood.
“I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751, when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father’s house.”
— Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson
O, to give its full name:
Kidnapped: Being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751: How he was Kidnapped and Cast away; his Sufferings in a Desert Isle; His Journey in the Wild Highlands; his acquaintance with Alan Breck Stewart and other notorious Highland Jacobites; with all that he suffered at the hands of his Uncle, Ebenezer Balfour of Shaws, falsely so-called: Written by Himself and now set forth by Robert Louis Stevenson.
“They’d sip their shadows and the darkness stained them.”
Sip, by Brian Allen Carr
Paid by the word, was he? 
“For the final time in a foreign country as president of the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama eased into his seat as a Secret Service agent shut the heavy door. ‘Let’s go home,’ he said.”
The World as It Is by Ben Rhodes
Sherlock Holmes and the Lady in Black by June Thomson
Ooops, sorry. Took too long getting the exact wording.
“Those of you who are familiar with the events that occurred during the latter part of Sherlock Holmes’ life, after he had left our old lodgings at 221B Baker Street, will know that after giving up his career as a private consulting agent, he moved to Sussex where he took up beekeeping as a part-time livelihood.”
Sherlock Holmes and the Lady in Black by June Thomson
"It was a bright cold day in April, the clocks were striking thirteen…
1984…Orwell
In the 18th century, books didn’t have slipcovers or paper back covers for the blurb, so the title served the role of getting the potential reader’s interest.
Davy wrote it in that style, and Stevenson, like Bilbo, simply repeated it for the modern reader.
“The summer day was drawing to a close and dusk had fallen on Blandings Castle, shrouding from view the ancient battlements, dulling the silver surface of the lake and causing Lord Emsworth’s supreme Berkshire sow Empress of Blandings to leave the open air portion of her sty and withdraw into the covered shed where she did her sleeping.”
Pelican at Blandings, by P.G. Wodehouse
Back in June 1994, Major Lindley Johnson had a thought: Wouldn’t it be nice to try to save the world?
How to Kill an Asteroid: The Real Science of Planetary Defence, by Robin George Andrews
Ramage felt dazed and grabbed at the thoughts rushing through his head: he guessed it was a nightmare, so he would soon wake up safely in his cabin; but for the moment his mind was apparently separated from his body, floating along free like a puff of smoke in the wind.
Ramage, by Dudley Pope
“She first spotted him at Bobbie’s Coffee Shop on Twenty-Second street.”
Every Vow You Break by Peter Swanson
“The creaking plank of a fog-soaked wharf, the shadow of a ghost ship slipping silently out of harbor, legends of tentacles that can pull down a merchant vessel–the ocean is as vast as stories and legends as it is in size.”
Beyond Bizarre: Frightening Facts and Blood-Curdling True Tales, by Varla Ventura
“Blackmail speaks its own peculiar dialect, but it has this advantage over other forms of expression: It is the universal language, understood by all.”
Queen’s Bureau of Investigation, by Ellery Queen (This is a story collection, and the above sentence is from “Money Talks”.)
“Are those dogs happy?”
Dogland: Passion, Glory, and Lots of Slobber at the Westminster Dog Show, by Tommy Tomlinson
“Abbott Coburn had spent much of his twenty-six years dreading the wrong things, in the wrong amounts, for the wrong reasons.”
I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, by Jason Pargin
“She came here with nothing.”
The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum by Margalit Fox
“The Breeze blew into San Junipero in the shotgun seat of Billy Winston’s Pinto wagon.”
Practical Demonkeeping, by Christopher Moore
Margaret de Beauchamp, eldest surviving child of Baronet Sir Timothy de Beauchamp, baronet of Churnet and Trent, waited patiently on a bench in the outer court of the Palace of Whitehall, nervous to see the king or the Earl of Cork.
1635: The Weaver’s Code, by Eric Flint and Jody Lynn Nye
“Dr. Alexander Hoffman sat by the fire in his study in Geneva, a half-smoked cigar lying cold in the ashtray beside him, an angle-poise lamp pulled low over his shoulder, turning the pages of a first edition of The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin.”
The Fear Index by Robert Harris
“Lord, what a menagerie!”
Prayers from the Ark & The Creatures’ Choir by Carmen Bernos de Gasztold, translated by Rumer Godden. (This is a double volume of verse, and the above is the opening sentence to the first poem, “Noah’s Prayer”.)
“The word has come that he is dead, now, and the girls.”
Learwife, by JR Thorp