Your favourite opening sentence?

[Pet_Sounds]

My personal favourite:

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."
- George Orwell, 1984

Honourable mention to:

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit"
- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

And who can forget:

"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times."
- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Apologies to the mods if this has been created before. If it exists, I couldn't find it.

[Chula Vista]

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
- William Gibson, Neuromancer

"Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die."
- Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

"The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm."
- Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

[EPOCH6]

Mass kudos on the opening line of Neuromancer. So many memorable quotes.

My personal favorite opening line & book:

"The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be.”
- Carl Sagan, COSMOS

[Exo]

"Maman died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure."
-The Stranger by Albert Camus

[Frownland]

"In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work. And in fact my hope was realized, up to a point; for I have seldom felt so carefree as I did then, walking for hours in the day through the thinly populated countryside, which stretches inland from the coast."
W. G. Sebald - The Rings of Saturn

[grindy]

“I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train…"
-Naked Lunch (W.S. Burroughs)


One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.
-Metamorphosis (F. Kafka)


In accordance with the law the death sentence was announced to Cincinnatus C. in a whisper.
-Invitation To A Beheading (V. Nabokov)


Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
-Lolita (V. Nabokov)


The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings.
-The Library Of Babel (J.L. Borges)


May it please heaven that the reader, emboldened and having for the time being become as fierce as what he is reading, should, without being led astray, find his rugged and treacherous way across the desolate swamps of these sombre and poison-filled pages; for, unless he brings to his reading a rigorous logic and a tautness of mind equal at least to his wariness, the deadly emanations of this book will dissolve his soul as water does sugar.
-Les Chants de Maldoror (Lautreamont)

[Isbjørn]

From John Dies at the End by "David Wong":

"Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt. If you already happen to know the awful secret behind the universe, feel free to skip ahead."

...and from the second book in the series, This Book is Full of Spiders:

"You know how sometimes when you're drifting off to sleep you feel that jolt, like you were falling and caught yourself at the last second? It's nothing to be concerned about, it's usually just the parasite adjusting its grip."