“Architecture is many things to many people.”
30-Second Architecture: The 50 Most Significant Principles and Styles in Architecture, Each Explained in Half a Minute, edited by Edward Denison (who wrote the above sentence).
“Critics are no more clairvoyant than their fellow mortals.”
On Architecture - Collected Reflections on a Century of Change
by Ada Louis Huxtable
“Just outside the expanding light cone of the present a star died, iron-bombed.”
Iron Sunrise , by Charles Stross
“Elikem married me in absentia; he did not come to our wedding.”
His Only Wife by Peace Adzo Medie
“Abandoned in a barren corner of nowhere, the old man’s body was found on a blacktop road next to his oxygen bottle.”
The Brickeaters, by the Residents
“I remember exactly where I was when I read that the Makah were going whaling, when I suddenly felt compelled to go to my map and point to Cape Flattery, when I felt the place calling me.”
A Whale Hunt by Robert Sullivan
“There are only a few weeks each year when the tides and sea temperature allow an attempt at swimming the Channel.”
The Book of Seconds: The Incredible Stories of the Ones that Didn’t (Quite) Win, by Mark Mason.
“The night sky was sodden with low-hanging clouds.”
The Case of the One-Eyed Witness, by Erle Stanley Gardner
“For the dedicated prospector, the main source of book-length, quality-challenged, bang-bang Westerns is the lending library publishers of the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s.”
Six-Gun in Cheek: An Affectionate Guide to the “Worst” in Western Fiction, by Bill Pronzini.
“The village was silent in the damp June morning.”
The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan
“If monsters had descended upon Japan the effect could not have been more terrifying.”
Commodore Perry in the Land of the Shogun by Rhoda Blumberg
“Damn! He’s actually doing it.”
Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963)
(Note that this is an anthology, and the first sentence comes from “Unhuman Sacrifice” by Katherine MacLean.)
“There was a dead girl in my aunt’s bakery.”
The Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, by T. Kingfisher
“In a sense, surgeon Jonathan Letterman’s Civil War began when the enemy’s guns fell silent.”
Surgeon in Blue: Jonathan Letterman, the Civil War Doctor Who Pioneered Battlefield Care, by Scott McGaugh
Seen from a plane, the car would have looked like a slow beetle creeping across an endless beach, the sun glinting off its polished black armor.
Never - Ken Follett
Gilvaethwy the son of Dôn was in a bad way.
-The Island of the Mighty, Evangeline Walton
One winter shortly before the Six Weeks War, my tomcat, Petronius the Arbiter, and I lived in an old farmhouse in Connecticut.
The Door into Summer, Robert A Heinlein
Picked it up again for some light reading in troubled times, had forgotten it starts with a reference to a nuclear exchange 
“I pray you all give your audience,
And hear this matter with reverence,
By figure a moral play,
The Summoning of Everyman called it is,
That of our lives and ending shows
How transitory we be all day.”
Everyman, translated by E. Talbot Donaldson.
Not the first sentence, but an oddly appropriate passage from Bill Pronzini’s Betrayers:
"Melikian screwed up his face until it resembled a mournful hound’s. “A doper,” he said. “You can’t trust dopers, they’re the dregs, they’re gene-pool scum.”
“In the ghostly subatomic world, an electron flickers in its orbit around an atomic nucleus.”
Electrified Sheep: Glass-eating Scientists, Nuking the Moon, and More Bizarre Experiments, by Alex Boese.
“‘Dad, I want to learn how to play the drums.’”
The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music by Dave Grohl.