What’s your favorite opening line?

[Guest]

ME: It was a dark and stormy night.

[Reece]

“I always get the shakes before a drop.”—Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein

[Will]

From the short "Fleur" by Louise Erdritch: "The first time she drowned in the cold and glassy waters of Lake Turcot, Fleur Pillager was just a girl."

[Amy]

Will you look at us by the river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean, sweet day in a good world in the midst of our living. Yachts run before an unfelt gust with bagnecked pelicans riding above them, the city their twitching backdrop, all blocks and points of mirror light down to the water's edge.
- Tim Winton, Cloudstreet.

[William]

Of my own design? "It's an interesting oddity that almost every bad habit I managed to acquire in my lifetime could be connected to my time in the Navy."

[Ryan]

When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house I had two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.

[Niamh]

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

[Kasey]

It might be a bit pretentious, but I honestly love the opening line in my first novel: "Kendall often thought she was born as a joke, destined to live and unfulfilling life of unhappiness, until the day she finally expired."

[John]

“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice”
-John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany.

[Marcia]

"I'll never forget the day my father took me to see the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time,: - Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Zafon Ruiz. Hooked me right in!

[Dave]

I worked hard on an opening line for my book. It’s a true story about the power of forgiveness. What do you think of it?
There’s nothing worse than a small casket.

[Christina]

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. -- Stephen King
(I also really like the opening lines for Anna Karenina and Pride and Prejudice)

[Natasha]

I like Stephen King's opening in one of his books where he says, "You've been here before..."

[Jason]

“It was the best of times it was the worst of times.”

[Ehsan]

Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

[Ashutosh]

Many years later, facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant evening when his father took him to discover ice- One Hundred Years of Solitude