Favorite first sentence of a novel

[Samuel Beckett, "Murphy"]

"Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me."

The primroses were over.
Watership Down

"I turned the Chrysler onto the Florida Turnpike with Rollo Kramer's headless body in the trunk, and all the time I'm thinking I should've put some plastic down." Gun Monkeys, Victor Gischler

The first sentence of Nick Tosches's In the Hand of Dante is arguably the best thing about it as well.

'The New Life' - Orhan Pamuk

From memory, so it might be the other way around.

"Our story is only as sad as others allow it to be, our rights to sympathy circumscribed by the class to which we belonged and the way in which our lives together were to end."

This new creature with the long hair is a good deal in the way.

(Diaries of Adam and Eve--Mark Twain)

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
The Hobbit
J.R.R. Tolkien

It's that "slotted".

William Gaddis, JR

"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since." - The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies' eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde's Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde's door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof." - Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

"Evenings she sat on the porch hidden from the street by honeysuckle and morning-glory vines, through their tangled foliage she watched the sun go down and grey light change to a black screen on which the vine-leaves gleamed in a silvery frosted pattern." - Come Back to Sorrento by Dawn Powell

I know Michael Connelly is not exactly what would usually be referred to as, well, good, but the first line from The Poet is pretty good. The book goes sharply downhill form thereon.

And the line from P&P is 'It is a truth universally acknowledged that a gentleman in possession of a large fortune must in want of a wife'.

fitzgerald - the beautiful and damned

G.G.Marquez - 100 years of solitude

And that Marquez quote was totally an ID on the lit. GRE and I totally got it right by guessing. I rule.

"It was the day that my grandmother exploded." (The Crow Road - Iain Banks).

"Take that fucking walkman off, get your arse in here and show me how to do an all-staff e-mail. Every time I click OK on the address it copies it to the Helsinki office" (E, Matt Beaumont).

A Child Across the Sky by Jonathan Carroll

James, Portrait of a Lady

--Armadillo, by William Boyd

"The full moon stood high in the night sky above Blackstone, bathing the stones of the old Asylum atop North Hill in a silvery glow, even penetrating the thick layers of grime that covered its windows so that its dusty rooms were suffused with a dim light. Though the dark figure who moved silently through these rooms needed no light to guide him, the luminescence allowed him to pause now and then to savor the memories this place held for him: vivid memories."

--Ashes to Ashes: The Locket, by John Saul

from Gibson's Neuromancer.

from Irvine Welsh's 'Trainspotting'