Favorite opening paragraph in fiction

[FutureFootball]

What is your favorite opening paragraph in a fiction book?

Legend of Drizzt has to be mine. The author pulls you in straight away and I think it is the best fiction opening I have come across.


Never does a star grace this land with a poet's light of twinkling mysteries, nor does the sun send to here its rays of warmth and life. This is the Underdark, the secret world beneath the bustling surface of the Forgotten Realms, whose sky is a ceiling of heartless stone and whose walls show the gray blandness of death in the torchlight of the foolish surface dwellers that stumble here. This is not their world, not the world of light. Most who come here uninvited do not return.

[Alecc0]

“The man in Black fled across the Desert, and the Gunslinger followed.”
The Gunslinger, book One of Stephen Kings Dark Tower epic series

Short, but a simple and effective opening line. I love it.

[Checker]

"No, no, Henri. Hands off the wheel. Please. It is too late. After all, at one hundred and forty-nine kilometers per hour on a country road in the darkest quarter of the night, surely it is obvious that your slightest effort to wrench away the wheel will pitch us into the toneless world of highway tragedy even more quickly than I have planned. And you will not believe it, but we are still accelerating."

-Travesty, by John Hawkes

[fpak]

A farewell to arms - Ernest Hemingway

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house
in a village that looked across the river and the plain to
the mountains. In the bed of the river there were peb-
bles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the
water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the
channels. Troops went by the house and down the road
and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the
trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the
leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops march-
ing along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred
by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and
afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.


Also
One hundred years of solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice

[Non Serviam]

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

[brianpatrick]

It began as a mistake. - Post Office, Charles Bukowski.

[Prodigalson]

"When I was born, I was a baby."

Oh, wait. That was non-fiction.

[brianpatrick]

Originally Posted by Prodigalson

"When I was born, I was a baby."

Oh, wait. That was non-fiction.

When is that book coming out? And... When will you send me my copy?

I want it signed: with love, to my good friend Brian.😀

[Prodigalson]

It's being line-edited as we speak (well, maybe not as we speak -- she may be in bed already). If this step goes as smoothly as the rest it'll be done soon.

The delay so far has been my thinking that it couldn't be ready yet but I finally had to send it on and so far it all looks good.

There will definitely be a signed copy coming your way.

[Mohican]

Best opening paragraph.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

[Kristijan]

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. -The Trial, Franz Kafka

[left_and_write]

A farewell to Arms, indeed

[jessica patel]

library is the best education place to read.

[JesseK1213]

Originally Posted by jessica patel

library is the best education place to read.

No kidding?