Here’s mine:
1. “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” – Neuromancer, William Gibson
2. “One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.” – The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
3. “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” – 1984, George Orwell
So … what about yours?
Please no Twilight or Harry Potter garbage in here, though. You can all do better than that. 
What Are Your Three Favorite Opening Lines?
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June 25th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
“It was a pleasure to burn” Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
“My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born. Instead, they returned to Ireland when I was four, my brother, Malachy, three, the twins, Oliver and Eugene, barely one, and my sister, Margaret, dead and gone.
When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.” Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt
June 26th, 2009 at 12:18 am
1] “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” – “Lolita”/Vladimir Nabakov
2] “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” – “The Go-Between/JB Hartley
3] “When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.” – “Lord of the Rings”/JRR Tolkien
June 26th, 2009 at 7:02 am
” People want to know why I, who come from India, am so interested in wizards. My answer is this: in India we still believe that wizards exist. What is a wizard? Not someone who can simply perform magic but someone who can cause transformation” Deepak Chopra The Way of the Wizard
June 26th, 2009 at 11:51 am
It was a dark and stormy night.
June 26th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
Once upon a time
Long ago and far away
It was a dark and stormy night
June 26th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
“In nineteen minutes, you can mow the front lawn; color your
hair; watch a third of a hockey game. In nineteen minutes,
you can bake scones or get a tooth filled by a dentist; you
can fold laundry for a family of five.
Nineteen minutes is how long it took the Tennessee
Titans to sell out of tickets to the playoffs. It’s
the amount of time it takes to listen to the Yes song Close
to the Edge. It’s the length of a sitcom, minus the
commercials. It’s the driving distance from the
Vermont border to the town of Sterling, NH.
In nineteen minutes, you can order a pizza and get
it delivered. You can read a story to a child or have
your oil changed. You can walk two miles. You can sew
a hem.
In nineteen minutes, you can stop the world; or you
can just jump off it.
In nineteen minutes, you can get revenge.”
-Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes.
It’s a bit like an opening page but you cannot turn to me and say this didn’t pull you in. That in someway this page did not make you realize that this book is darker than it appears
I would post two more but right now Jodi Picoult Tops my list. I promise to post them when I get a chance.
June 26th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
1:I like big buts and i cannot lie(the song)
2:on a bit more of a serious note the opening paragraph of robert Jordons wheel of Time which im 2 lazy 2 write out
3:I remember in the ps1 game Chrono Cross(GREAT GAME almost as good as Chrono trigger) the opening word were cool there even if they were just translated japenese words.
Btw I hate LOTR opening chapter.Its self indulgent boring crap.Also thank god some ppl dont like Harry potter he is a moody git and eventhough im no great writer jk rowlings style of writing is headwreckingly simplistic and not that exciting!A 5 year old can write every sentence with a big ! at the end of every sentence in order to make everything damtic!