"Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." - Slaughterhouse Five

"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." -- One Hundred Years of Solitude

Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.

--Opening of The Luck of the Bodkins, by P.G. Wodehouse

Middlesex by Jeffry Eugenides

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan in August of 1974.

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."

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

- Neuromancer, by William Gibson

I can't believe I'm the first in with "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed."

Or

"Riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."

Or

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins."

Or

"I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of it all."

"The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed."

Stephen King, "The Gunslinger"

I've read a lot of really snappy first lines, but when you get right down to it, I'm a sucker for David Copperfield: "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show."

(Worst first line goes to Douglas Coupland's Jpod: "Oh God. I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel.")

"A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head."

-A Confederacy of Dunces

Mainly because it's such a strident image of Ignatius and it sticks with me every time I picture him.

On the far edge of town, where the Grickle-grass grows, and the wind smells slow-and-sour when it blows, and no birds ever sing, excepting old crows... is the Street of the Lifted Lorax.

"The beet is the most intense of vegetables."

"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board" --Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston.

"IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." -Pride & Prejudice

"Mama died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know. I had a telegram from the home: 'Mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Yours sincerely.' That doesn't mean anything. It may have been yesterday."

Albert Camus, "The Stranger"

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins."

"I am a sick man... I am a wicked man."

"Harry locked his mother in the closet."

"Sing to me, Muse, and through tell me the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer, harried for years on end, after he plundered the stronghold on the proud height of Troy."

"In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and John Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known has Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini."

"Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem."

- the LOLCat Bible, Genesis 1:1

http://www.lolcatbible.com/index.php?title=Genesis_1

"When Augustus came out on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake - not a very big one."

Lonesome Dove

Back in high school, one of my English teachers assigned us to find a sentence from literature that stuck with us and take it apart, study it, find what made it a great sentence. I chose this:

"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."

Those first three words -- "I am doomed" -- you couldn't ask for anything stronger. Then the parallel construction -- not this, or this, or this, but THAT -- is very powerful.

I think I read somewhere some time ago that John Irving tried to tell the whole story of the novel in this one sentence, and I think he succeeded.

Either: 'It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.' (Love in the Time of Cholera)

or

'Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.' (Their Eyes Were Watching God)

Kon-Tiki, by Thor Heyerdahl (this one is best in context -- you begin the book knowing that it was written on a wooden raft in the middle of the Pacific on which were residing five or six scandinavian scientists and a parrot):

"Once in a while you find yourself in an odd situation."

"A screaming came across the sky." -Gravity's Rainbow

So, Lady Chatterley's Lover is a surprisingly bad book (DH Lawrence needed an editor and didn't get one because his book was smutty), but I LOVE the opening lines:

"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen."

This is not the anticipated opening of a smutty/proto-feminist book from the 1920's, but I'll take it.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina

"At one time, according to Sir George H. Darwin, the Moon was very close to the Earth." -Italo Calvino in The Distance of the Moon from Cosmicomics

I've always sorta liked the tone Miller sets with the opening of "Tropic of Cancer"

"I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead."

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." - The Great Gatsby

unfortunately abandoned weblog on this topic: http://first-lines.tumblr.com/

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

"It is not easy to cut through a human head with a hacksaw." -Travels, Michael Crichton.

"It was a pleasure to burn." -Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury.

Incredible nervous state, trepidation beyond words: to be this much in love is to be sick (and I love to be sick).

"It was the day my grandmother exploded."

Iain Banks, "The Crow Road."

I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased.

Dostoevsky's Notes From the Underground

"In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing."

-A River Runs Through It

"Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting." From Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.

"In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Tomb

my personal favorite is from barely a book, and it's very hard to tell where the true first line is (with three forewords and a CV):

My earliest memory is of imagining I was someone else—
imagining that I was, in fact, the Ringling Brothers Circus
Strongboy. This was at my Aunt Ethelyn and Uncle Oren’s
house in Durham, Maine. My aunt remembers this quite
clearly, and says I was two and a half or maybe three years old.
I had found a cement cinderblock in a corner of the garage
and had managed to pick it up. I carried it slowly across the
garage’s smooth cement floor, except in my mind I was
dressed in an animal skin singlet (probably a leopard skin) and
carrying the cinderblock across the center ring. The vast
crowd was silent. A brilliant blue-white spotlight marked
my remarkable progress. Their wondering faces told the story:
never had they seen such an incredibly strong kid. “And he’s
only two!” someone muttered in disbelief.
Unknown to me, wasps had constructed a small nest in the
lower half of the cinderblock. One of them, perhaps pissed off
at being relocated, flew out and stung me on the ear. The pain
was brilliant, like a poisonous inspiration. It was the worst
pain I had ever suffered in my short life, but it only held the
top spot for a few seconds. When I dropped the cinderblock
on one bare foot, mashing all five toes, I forgot all about the
wasp.

-stephen king, ON WRITING

Both of Flann O'Brien's main novels have good opening lines:

The Third Policeman:
"Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar."

At Swim-Two-Birds:
"Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression."

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee...

John Donne, in poem form, opens for Hemingway in For Whom The Bell Tolls.

This one feels so powerful, it makes me stop thinking about just me.

"Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,
Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles. . . ."

Illiad, Homer
Translated by Robert Fagles (1990)

"First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey."

The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien

"IF THIS TYPEWRITER CANT'T DO IT, then fuck it, it can't be done." Still Life with Woodpecker

"Vietnam, me love you long time. All day, all night, me love you long time." - The Beach by Alex Garland

"In the beginning was the wall."

The Steel Bonnets: the story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reveivers by George MacDonald Fraser

"Noon talk on Millionth Street: 'Sorry, these are the West millions. You want 9775335th East.'"

I'm not sure if short stories count, but I always loved this opening line from J.G. Ballard's story 'Concentration City'.

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." - one hundred years of solitude by gabriel garcia marquez

You better not never tell nobody but God. (Alice Walker, The Color Purple)

"It has been reported that Tanuki fell from the sky using his scrotum as a parachute."

-Villa Incognito: Tom Robbins

Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades, of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at that critical moment it presumes itself as reality. But the procession up the foreign hill, bounded by cypress trees, impelled by the monotone chanting of the priest and retarded by hesitations at the 14 stations of the Cross (not to speak of the funereal carriage in which she was riding, a white horse-drawn vehicle which resembled a baroque confectionary stand), might have ruffled the shy countenance of her soul, if it had been discernible.

"The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault."

From Blood Rites, by Jim Butcher. Great literature? No. But awesome.

I don't really remember the book very well, but the opening line of "Quest for a Maid" has stuck with me:

"When I was nine years old, I hid under a table and heard my sister kill a king."

"I write this sitting in the kitchen sink." from I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.

"Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a landowner in our district who became a celebrity (and is remembered to this day) because of the tragic and mysterious end he met exactly thirteen years ago, which will be described in its proper place."

Dostoyevsky, "The Brothers Karamazov", although I have to throw down votes also for "100 Years of Solitude", "Lolita" and "Ulysses". So many great, wonderful choices.

"Ginger Rogers loved feathers and wore sobs of them."--Selah Saterstrom

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."

I'm kind of surprised no one has mentioned this. You don't have to be religious to love it. There we are, forever sundered from the very beginning. It's beautiful.

Maryanne Singleton was 25-years old when she saw San Francisco for the first time....Tales of the City, Armistead Maupin

"When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence,there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton."
When I first read those words in the summer of 1966, I could hardly have guessed that that story would be wonderfully haunting me (and so much of the rest of the world) for the rest of my life.

"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If On A Winter's Night A Traveler." -- Italo Calvino, "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler"

Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.

“It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.”

— Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

"I am an American, Chicago born -- Chicago, that somber city -- and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first to be admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent."

Saul Bellow, "The Adventures of Augie March"

"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."

-- "The Last Good Kiss" by James Crumley

"At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the water-side in the city of St. Louis."--The Confidence Man, by Herman Melville.

"Who is John Galt?" No, just kidding; though it is a pretty good line, things go downhill from there.

How about this one, from Firebreak, by Richard Stark (Donald Westlake): "When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man."