Your favorite opening line of a book.

Are there any inaugural lines from a novel, or memoir, that stand out to you?

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all doing direct the other way."

I'll have to give it a think for some others.

“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 basard though dry.”

"Call me Ishmael."

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

"All this happened, more or less."

"You better not never tell nobody but God."

"Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash."

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."

"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