Best first lines...

...from Novels.
Found an article while trialing a database and had to share some of these best first lines.

1. Call me Ishmael. -- Herman Melville, Moby Dick
2. 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
3. A screaming comes across the sky. -- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. -- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. -- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. -- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. -- George Orwell, 1984
9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was thea ge of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of beliefe, 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... -- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
10. I am an invisible man. -- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

90 more of these beauties can be found in the following: "100 Best First Lines from Novels." American Book Review. February 2006, v. 27 no. 2