The American Book Review has a list of the 100 best first lines from novels. While I haven’t read many of the novels on the list, the lines are fascinating. Some of them are such truisms for life:
6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)
15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett,Murphy (1938)
35. It was like so, but wasn’t. —Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)
44. Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. —Zora Neale Hurston,Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
54. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. —Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)
62. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. —Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
63. The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. —G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)
78. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. —L. P. Hartley,The Go-Between (1953)