[DataDaoDe]

I'd be interested to know what everyone's favorite opening lines of all time are. (bonus - to see how much of it you can quote without looking :)

For me, its: Whann that aprill with hir shoures soote, The drought of march hath perced to the roote, And zepherus eek with his sweete breath, inspired hath in every holt and heth, the tendre cropes, and the sonne hath in the ram, hir halve cours ironne, Than preketh hem natur in hir courages, and longon folk to gon on pilgrimages.

Somehow that has always stuck with me, I'm sure I'm missing parts, but from the first time I ever heard these lines the just imprinted themselves like a song to me.

[jammaloo]

"The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason." - Seveneves

"All this happened, more or less." - Slaughterhouse-Five

[DataDaoDe]

Vonnegut is great.

[drc500free]

"The war tried to kill us in the spring" from The Yellow Birds always stuck with me, for its complete decoupling of the war from the men who had come thousands of miles to fight it.

** ETA the full opening:

“The war tried to kill us in the spring. As grass greened the plains of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer.

[NetMageSCW]

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”

Though for me it’s the second line that nails it: “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

[gabriel666smith]

I was taught to use the term "action sentence" for an opening line that actually does something to a reader, and to aspire to that. I think it's a Gordon Lish-coined term, but it might not be.

Hard to pick an absolute favourite, but one would be:

"There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls."

From Cortazar's short story Axolotl.

I don't know for certain why I find it so evocative, but it certainly draws me in, and makes me want to know more.

Quoting without looking attempt:

"I went to see them in the aquarium in the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now, I am an axolotl."

[gib444]

"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 speak French."

― P.G. Wodehouse, The Luck of the Bodkins

Being English, from the south, where learning French to only a poor standard is a common pastime, you can just picture it instantly.

[macintux]

Curiously, it seems difficult to find John Donne's Meditations XVII with the original language. The spelling has been modernized everywhere I can find it online.

(I suppose this technically isn't the opening line, but it's the first line used when most people quote the passage.)

No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine

[croisillon]

last night i dreamt i went to Manderley again

[adrianN]

From memory: The sky was the color of a TV tuned to a bad channel

[CharlesW]

Close! (I had to look it up.) "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." (Neuromancer, William Gibson)

[bookofjoe]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvNCSw_gXXI

[NetMageSCW]

There’s also: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

[zem]

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" -- Leo Tolstoy, "Anna Karenina"

[pcmaffey]

My mom died today.

—The Stranger, Camus