"On St. Valentine's Day, 1989, the last day of her life, the legendary popular singer Vina Apsara woke sobbing from a dream of human sacrifice in which she had been the intended victim."

The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie.

 

I really enjoy Mark Lawrence's Red Sister opening line.

“It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size."

 

"The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest, Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books."

-- opening paragraph of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

 

Okay, that one actually slaps. Nice.

Here's a good one by Marquez. (I think we had 100Y of Solitude somewhere above already).

"Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur." (The Autumn of the Patriarch)

 

This one always makes me grin.

 

“In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.”

 

"In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the scurrying about had reached a near unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul."

 

It's five lines, not one, but the opening to Lord of Light is for my money the best ever written:

"His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha - and the - atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god, but then he never claimed not to be a god. Circumstances being what they were, neither admission could be of any benefit. Silence, though, could."

 

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson.

 

While it's kind of the opposite of an opening line, what this one really reminded me of was the closing lines to Caitlin R. Kiernan's Cthulhu Mythos short story "Andromeda Among the Stones":

"His daughter spoke to him only in his dreams, or hers, no way to ever be sure which was which, and her voice grew stronger and more terrible as the years rushed past. In the end, she was a maelstrom to swallow his withered soul, to rock him to sleep one last time, to show him the way across.

And the house by the sea, weathered and weary and insane, kept its secrets."

 

"In the myriadic year o our Lord – the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death! – Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth."

From Gideon the Ninth.

It really highlights the style of the book with this juxtaposition of a dark, grimy and serious world which the protagonist and her sorta punk-rock attitude could not give less of a fuck about.

 

'Fatman shivered' - Deceived, Paul S. Kemp.

 

For me, it's always been The Call of Cthulu:

That rhythm, scribed in the coruscatingly ultraviolet of purple prose, nails the tone all too perfectly. You can tell Howard P could afford an entire sandwich off that sentence. The rest of the opening is pretty okay too.

 

I'm quite partial to the first two lines of Lampedusa's The Leopard

It does a fantastic job presaging the entire book in two sentences on top of possessing a certain musicality that the rest of the opening takes up as well. Definitely one of the best books I read last year and would recommend.

 

I'm kind of surprised I haven't seen...

The Story so far:
In the beginning the universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
--The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams​

If one wanted to get technical, while the above passage was the beginning of chapter 1, it is preceded by a brief passage which is also a strong contender.

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another which states that this has already happened.
--The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams​

 

This opening line is absolutely killer:

Prince Raoden of Arelon awoke early that morning, completely unaware that be had been damned for all eternity.

Elantris by Sanderson

 

I read another really good first paragraph tonight:

Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore

 

"I am an invisible man." - Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Here's the full quote:

 

My mom recently got me The Book That Wouldn't Burn by Mark Lawrence. The entire prologue hits hard, and I've transcribed it below.

 

This is the one I came here to post. I love how it immediately (in my opinion, at least) transports you into a sort of Magical Realism Old World Fairytale-type of mindset.

Since it's already been posted I'll contribute this instead. It's the opening line from "Pale Fire" by Vladimir Nabokov: