Your Favourite Opening Line(s)

[JMack]

I don't know if this is a favorite, but I like it:

Twenty minutes after the war ends, I'm watching stumpers pour up out of a frozen hole in the ground like ants from hell and praying that I keep my natural legs for another day.

Daniel Wilson: "Robopocalypse"
It just does a lot of things really well.

And, of course, I have to go with the obvious (for me):

In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit."

Which isn't that great of a line, really, except for what comes after.

[Nora]

Not exactly my favourite but found this memorably black first sentence today. Why does this make me think of @Nora?

Night had come to the city of Skalandarharia, the sort of night with such a quality of black to it that it was as if black coal had been wrapped in blackest velvet, bathed in the purple-black ink of the demon squid Drindel and flung down a black well that descended toward the deepest, blackest crevasses of Drindelthengen, the netherworld ruled by Drindel, in which the sinful were punished, the black of which was so legendarily black that when the dreaded Drindelthengenflagen, the ravenous blind black badger trolls of Drindelthengen, would feast upon the uselessly dilated eyes of damned, the abandoned would cry out in joy as the Drindelthengenflagenmorden, the feared Black Spoons of the Drindelthengenflagen, pressed against their optic nerves, giving them one last sensation of light before the most absolute blackness fell upon them, made yet even blacker by the injury sustained from a falling lump of ink-bathed, velvet-wrapped coal.

The Shadow War of the Night Dragons - John Scalzi

While I am extremely flattered to be compared to John Scalzi, I somewhat don't recognise my own writing in there, which shows just how subjective appreciation in writing is!!

What a compliment though!

[ClintACK]

Another classic: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Bonus points for the semicolon.

“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”
- Harry Potter and the Philopher's Stone

Oh, how I love that 'thank you very much' at the end!

Wow, that's a great line.  I'm always impressed when people can get recognizable voice and character into indirect quotes.


One more, even though it's two sentences:

On one otherwise normal Tuesday evening I had the chance to live the American dream.  I was able to throw my incompetent jackass of a boss from a fourteenth-story window.

[Yora]

One nighr, as Elric sat moodily drinking alone in a tavern, a wingless woman of Myyrrhn came gliding out of the storm and rested her lithe body against him.

While the Gods Laugh

[Rostum]

It is still

"It was the day my grandmother exploded" The Crow Road Iain Banks

and probably will remain so.

[Lanko]

"Ravens! Always the ravens!" - Prince of Thorns

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” - Neuromancer

“Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.” - Harry Potter

[Ryan Mueller]

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” - Neuromancer

I liked that opening line. Then the rest of the book happened.

“Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.” - Harry Potter

While I find that line memorable, I don't actually care for it that much. I actually found the writing style very uneven in the first book, as if Rowling couldn't decide what age group she was writing it for. Of course, that's still my favorite series overall, so I'm just nitpicking here.