Greatest opening lines in literature

[slim jenkins]

Love 'Tropic of Cancer' (used to read loads of Miller) - but it's more than one sentence!

Here's one that takes some beating in my book(s):

'May it please heaven that the reader, emboldened and having for the time being become as fierce as what he is reading, should, without being lead astray, find his rugged and treacherous way across the desolate swamps of these sombre and poison-filled pages; for, unless he brings to his reading a rigorous logic and a tautness of mind equal at least to his wariness, the deadly eminations of this book will dissolve his soul as water does sugar.'
'Maldoror', Lautreamont

 

[rewch]

'And so they've killed our Ferdinand,' (1) said the charwoman to Mr Svejk who had left military service years before, after having been finally certified by an army medical board as an imbecile, and now lived by selling dogs - ugly, mongrel monstrosities whose pedigrees he forged.

(1) The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew of the Austrian Emperor, Franz Joseph, was assassinated at Sarajevo by the Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, in 1914.'

Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Svejk.

 

[mistersloane]

but there's no way of knowing if he intended this meaning to apply to Gregor Samsa

wow, can we start a 'doh' thread? Doh, the guy only wrote the book with the word in it, 'but of course, we have no way of knowing whether he intended that word to be in the first sentence of the book or whether it was an accident.' Dohdohodoh.
Translations make me so fucking angry, I never knew it was vermin until now, it completely changes the impact of that sentence, makes it even huger than it was.

 

[Mr. Tea]

"What's it going to be then, eh?"
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.