Favorite opening lines?

[Corran Orreaux]

Hello!


I was just wondering what some of y'all's favorite opening lines in books are and why you like them?


Some of mine:


"It was a pleasure to burn." - Fahrenheit 451


I love this opener because of how great it was at grabbing me, all good opening lines are meant to draw the reader in of course, but this line conjured images even without reading what comes after. First it tells you a bit about the characters before we even see them. That Guy taking pleasure out of his job as a fireman can suggest multiple things: His trust in that what he is doing is okay, even good, that he enjoys burning books and the house they were kept in suggests he sees it as a type of justice, that he is doing right by his country and people by destroying what his government as deemed bad and set him out to destroy.




"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


This line sets up the world rather well, it tells us the general and cultural view of at least this one part of society. A man man with a good fortune must undoubtedly want a wife, to differ from that expectation is at the very least strange. A wife to provide him with pleasure and children that he could pass this good fortune onto.




“The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years – if it ever did end – began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.”


What is this terror? How and why has it been going on for 28 years and possibly still active? How did something as weak and innocent as a newspaper boat start this terror?




"Run Maric!" - Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne


Immediately puts you in the action and informs you that our hero is in some type of danger.


 
"One day it occurred to me that the warm, smelly, squeaky, things squirming around me were my brothers and sister. I was very disappointed." - A Dog's Purpose

[Brisky]

I hope you won't get angry at me for this technically not being a book, but.

Noone would have believed, in the last year of the nineteenth scentury, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space.
Noone could have dreamed that we were being scrutanized as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets.
And, yet. Across the gulfs of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this world with envious eyes.
And slowly, and shurely, they drew their plans against us.

The reporter - War of the Worlds

[John Red Beard]

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."


It's a memorable classic and it was the beginning of my lifelong love of fantasy.

[George]

" At the dawn of the 21st Century, mankind makes a startling discovery."

Not because it's particularly astounding on its own, but because it put me on course for a life-changing experience.