Favourite opening lines of a novel?

[AB Editor]

I can't think of mine.

Maybe "This is not for you" printed on a blank page at the beginning of Mark Z Danielewski's "House of Leaves"?

Or maybe any of McCarthy's run-on lines, like in Child of God:

"They came like a caravan of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and across the hill in the morning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and the musicians on chairs in the truckbed teetering and tuning their instruments, the fat man with guitar grinning and gesturing to others in a car behind and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with a wrinkled face"

I know Lolita is suggested a lot.

What's yours?

[MarkRae]

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

[yogasun]

One that has always stuck in my mind is from 'A Tale of Two Cities' Dickens.

'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...'.etc

[Clanad]

The old classic... "It was a dark and stormy night;... the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.” — Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)".

Especially the contests the first part of the line propigate; except if it's Friday and one has to empty the garbage before the pick-up men come, which isn't always the same day if a holiday falls during the week, in which case, it could be missed or perhaps exchanged for Thursday (well... you get the idea).

[ludwig]

Just answer the question Mark. We're not interested in your problems.

I'm going to say 'In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit'.

[Flyhalf]

"Everyone called him Pop-Eye" from Mr Pip by Lloyd Jones.
Intriguing when the title of the book suggests otherwise, and reminiscent of the opening lines of Dickens' Great Expectatons, which features prominently in the story.

[Mamyalynne]

Mark, a book I never finished.

[MarkRae]

Unfortunately, my namesake Mr Chapman couldn't say the same... :-(

[Frank97]

I quite like this one from Count Zero by William Gibson

THEY sent A SLAMHOUND on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted
it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up
with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scram-
bling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs
and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized
hexogene and flaked TNT.
He didn't see it coming. The last he saw of India was the
pink stucco facade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel.
Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract.
Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour
after the explosion. Most of him, anyway The Dutch surgeon
liked to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of
Turner hadn't made it out of Palam International on that first
flight and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support
vat

[rowanwitch]

It was the day my grandmother exploded.
The Crow Road (1992), Iain M. Banks

[The Builder]

From one of my favourite writers ........... John Steinbeck"

"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream."

[AB Editor]

Good answers here.

[joggerjayne]

I think there can only be one, and that is the opening of the Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake.

The novel could have slowly and ponderously sewn doubts in your mind about the actual nature of Gormenghast. Instead, it hits you with it in the first line. But, cleverly, it's only when you're into the book and you look back that you think ... "So is Gormenghast something different from the actual stone from which it is built?"

The opening is ...

'Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls.'

[AB Editor]

If you like things about a sense of place, and haven't read "House of Leaves", then you certainly should JJ.

[MarkRae]

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "as pretty as an airport".

[sandyRoe]

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came up from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: Introibo ad altare Dei.

[chaptazbru]

My Mother took me by the hand ....... Terry Waite.
To me, those few words send me rushing back to my childhood, very evocative.

[jake-the-peg]

Can't believe nobody's mentioned 1984

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

[chelle7272]

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.

[chelle7272]

oops sorry

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S Thompson

Would have gone with the Crow Road like Rowan, big fan of Iain Banks, with or without the M

[jno]

'Take my camel, dear', said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. - The Towers of Trebizond

Also 1984