Favourite opening line/chapter to a book?

[Tanya]

Introductions can sometimes say a lot about a book, we have to admit that they can be quite influential.

What's your favourite opening line/opening chapter to a book?

[TheZombie]

Not an opening line but the whole chapter (well the whole book) it belongs to is hilarious:

"Yellow," he thought. The word yellow wandered through his mind in search of something to connect with.

[Fedora.Pirate]

HHG2TG FTW! DFTBA! :)

[Amy]

I'm reading that book right now... but I like the line where Douglass Adams referrs to the brick-like items in the sky floating in such a way that is the antithesis of how bricks should float.

[Robert Sherron]

"In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit"
Maybe not my favorite, but the line that springs most readily to my mind when I think of opening lines.

[Simon Ørberg]

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else these pages must show" - amazing :D

[Chris]

"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."

~Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "One Hundred Years of Solitude"

One of the most gripping openers I've read. One more, too!

"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed."

~James Joyce, "Ulysses"

This one always gets me because I love the "stately, plump" description.

[sabelmouse]

barnabas came to us by sea from the house of spirits by isabel allende. in german that first line is twice as long and half as good.

[Jenn...]

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
- Pride and Prejudice

"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 Philosopher's Stone

"The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one age,called the Third Age by some, an age yet to come, an Age long past,a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist.The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning."
- Wheel of Time series

"Harry Potter was a highly unusual boy in many ways. For one thing, he hated the summer holidays more than any other time of the year. For another, he really wanted to do his homework, but was forced to do it in secret, in the dead of night. And he also happened to be a wizard."
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

[Startled Panda]

The first one would have been mine

[Hanna]

Hahahaha 1, 2 and 4 are my faves too lol and I'm hoping to read Wheel of Time over the summer :D

[Mollie Cornell]

that third harry potter one always amuses me cause I like to think of someone sitting there reading and and the going: "NO FRICKING WAY! HE'S A WIZARD! That explains so much..."

[Danno]

the thing to remember about this...and the opening of every third book of a series, is that not everyone picking up the book has read the first two, or (hard as it is to imagine now) even knows the first thing about it.