What's your favourite 'starting line' from a book?

Question

haha, it's a strange question, I agree but here's mine. One of the best ever...few words that started its way towards becoming one of the best books in the history of literature.

"Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm..."

I don't know why, I can never forget that.

Answer 1

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


I know you just wanted the first line, but that whole opening is just brilliant:
"My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
"She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita."

Answer 2

The second worst poets in the universe are the Asgoths of Krea. During his recital to the Arts Nobbling Council of his poem, Oad to a Lump of Green Putty I found Beneath My Armpit One Midsummer Morning, by their poet master Grunthos the Flatulent, most of the audience died from internal hemorrhaging. One member only survived by gnoring off his own leg. Grunthos was reported to have been disappointed by the response and was about to embark on his twelve book epic, Zen and the Art of Going to The Lavatory, when his own major intestine, in a desperate bid to save all life kind, jumped up through his throat and throttled his brain. Douglas Adams. Luck

Answer 3

"The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as on Christmas Eve in an old house a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to note it as the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child." - Henry James, "The Turn of the Screw"

IMHO, The perfect opening line to the perfect ghost story.

Answer 4

I have a few opening lines that are my favourite. the opening line from Gone With The Wind and Pride and Predjuice, would have to be two of most favouritist!!! :)

But heres another...........
"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else......." David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Answer 5

It's : A lovely rising thermal current caught Shayla's wing as she glidedone last time from the mountains to the Great Bay.

Answer 6

Mine is the same as yours just love the opening line of Gone with the Wind, it really does stick in your mind.

Answer 7

"We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold."
--Hunter S Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Answer 8

IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.~~

Pride and Prejudice ... Jane Austen

Answer 9

"A screaming comes across the sky." Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.

Answer 10

"Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself"
Virginia Woolfe,
actually the whole first paragraph seems to stick in my head at all times. Fantastic book