Best opening lines of a book.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has, or rather had, a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything. Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.

This is not her story.

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

from Neuromancer by William Gibson

"Halfway along the road we have to go, I found myself obscured in a great forest, bewildered, and I knew I had lost the way."

Not my favorite book, but it's hard to beat the beginning of Inferno for opening lines...

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

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

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.

Joyce

I love Finnegan's Wake.

'Barabas came to us by sea.'

This is the only opening line that has stuck in my head, though I remember lots of the ones I'm reading here. The opening of Catcher in the Rye just blew me away when I first read it.

It makes me happy to see so much Hitchhiker's and Discworld, and I feel very old thinking that some of you read Holes at school. I helped TEACH Holes at a Pupil Referral Unit (where kids who are expelled are sent while they look for a new school) and the kids loved reading about other kids who were in trouble.

"The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam, but rather the color of falling snow on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea."

The Last Unicorn, Peter S Beagle

YESSS!

"I do not want ten million dollars. I do not want to visit Ireland. I do not want to end a Tobin family feud. And, above all, I do not want to court my eighth cousin, once removed."

Angel Light by Andrew Greely

Read it when I was 12 or 13 but this line never went away just so much WTH lol

How do people get To this clandestine Archipelago? Hour by hour planes fly there, ships steer their course there and trains thunder off to it-but nary a mark on them to tell of their destination.

Gulag Archipelago
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

k

“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.” -- Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport." Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only exception of this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.

-The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Douglas Adams

Excellent! Best Adams book---if you can, get the book on audio read by the author. His own rendition of the book is superb.

Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called True Stories from Nature, about the primeval forest. It was a picture of a boa constrictor in the act of swallowing an animal.

Le petit prince.

this.

Saint Exupery, my favorite too. When I looked at the picture for the first time, I thought it was a black hat

Once upon a time...

Beat me to it :~)

"The shell is a command interpreter. More than just the insulating layer between the operating system kernel and the user, it's also a fairly powerful programming language." ~The Advanced Bash Scripting Guide