What is your favorite first line from a book?

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”
“The Call of Cthulhu” by Lovecraft

“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.” – The Catcher in the Rye

“Call me Ishmael.”

“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 going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.” A Tale of Two Cities Dickens

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Anna Karenina.

And a close second, third and fourth;

“It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.” Catch-22

‘Arma virumque cano.’ (I sing of arms and the man. Virgil’s Aeneid.

“Dr. Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients had died or got any worse.”Corelli’s Mandolin.

“So I came down through the wood to the bank of Yann and found, as had been prophesied, the ship Bird of the River about to loose her cable.”
Idle Days on the Yann by Lord Dunsany.

“The boy with the fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock & began to pick his way towards the lagoon.”
Lord of the Flies.

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed”- The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger

A close second would be: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold”- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

“Running away from home, I slammed the front door on my cloak and had to ring the bell to be released.”

@gailcalled Bless you for using the proper title of Corelli’s Mandolin.

What, no Harry Potter references, yet?!

“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”
– Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

In the country of Westphalia, in the castle of the most noble baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh, lived a youth whom nature had endowed with a most sweet disposition.

- Candide, by Voltaire
——
This might be cheating a bit, because it’s not, technically speaking, just “the first sentence” of the book, but it’s a punctuated single utterance by the main character, so I’m waiving it:

“Camelot—Camelot,” said I to myself. “I don’t seem to remember hearing of it before. Name of the asylum, likely.”

- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, by Mark Twain
——
And now I’m going to break another rule, because this is from a short story. This is my favorite first line of all, I think (and it also breaks the rule I broke above, because it’s an utterance, followed by a very short characterization of the spoken words):

“We’re going through!” The Commander’s voice was like thin ice breaking.

- The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, by James Thurber

I’m fond of several of those mentioned above, along with the memorable “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again” (Rebecca, du Maurier). But when it comes to favorites, I think I would have to choose this great opener:

“Marley was dead: to begin with.”
—A Christmas Carol, Dickens

It was a pleasure to burn.

—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

@Pachyderm_In_The_Room Took my first choice, but right behind that comes: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” —George Orwell, 1984.

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.
—Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Lightning sought our mother out, when she was a young girl in Brown County, Indiana.” Winner of the National Book Award by Jincy Willett

“A screaming comes across the sky.” Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

‘It was a dark and stormy night.’

I like Snoopy’s version (in the Peanuts strips) though I know it is from another book. Snoopy is my role model as an author . . . . get the first line right! Never mind that it doesn’t get much further.

@SomeoneElse That’s also the first line in A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle