Great opening lines in literature

The quote in my profile is one my favorite opening lines.. though I'm not sure it qualifies as literature.

 

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"Amerigo Bonasera sat in New York Criminal Court Number 3 and waited for justice; vengeance on the men who had so cruelly hurt his daughter, who had tried to dishonor her." — The Godfather

"A green hunting cap squeezed the top of his fleshy balloon of a head." — A Confederacy of Dunces

"My father saw him years later playing in a tenth-rate commercial league in a textile town in Carolina, wearing shoes and an assumed name." — Shoeless Joe

 

My apologies

 

Maybe the best opening line in one of the best American novels of the last fifty years:

"A screaming comes across the sky"

Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon.

The novel as Hard Work.

 

JR just beat me to Pynchon, so I'll offer yin and yang.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.

 

As if I wouldn't have gone for the LCD. And the ending, even!

 

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."
The Hobbit, JRR Tolkein

"My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973."
The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold

 

Speaking of brilliant works that aren't the easiest to read, here's another:

"Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting." --Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

 

I will echo that.

Just after it was published, a friend of mine took the Canadian (the train) from Toronto to Vancouver--it's about a four day trip.

Read the whole damn book non-stop. Said it was like being on drugs.

 

There were times I wanted to dismiss that one as being written by an idiot, but by the end I was glad I kept on reading.