researching famous first lines of novels....

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendiawas to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)

All this happened, more or less. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)

You better not never tell nobody but God. Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)

-from Pantagraph.com