What other great opening lines do you know?.

Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on his work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.

Best non-fiction opening that sounds like a threat.
Wait, I read this! Can't remember the name of the book right now though.
Edit: Ok, I remember it from a screenshot in a thread about cheeky textbooks
- Yeah, it's an oldie.
  Fun fact, Boltzmann hung himself while Ehrenfest shot his 15 year old son and then himself.
This one tops my list, probably followed by the opening to hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy.
Came looking for this, thanks

it hits differently these days, but: "The sky above the port was the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel" -William Gibson, Neuromancer

Neil Gaiman makes a reference to that in Neverwhere, using 'TV tuned to a dead channel' to describe a cloudless blue sky.
- Lovely books, horrible human being, apparently. Such a shame
I need to read that one of these days
- It is a great book and the other two in the trilogy are just as good. I'm going through all of Gibson's works right now. Currently in Agency and loving it.
- I read it ages ago and enjoyed it immensely. Its influence on everything cyberpunk is clear.

I think the hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy opener is my favorite, but a close second is Albert Camus'

Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: “Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.” That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.

I should really read that book again.
- Didn't enjoy it myself

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

1984

The clocks striking 13 times immediately makes something feel off

It reads like poetry to me

The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault.

Blood Rites, book 6 of The Dresden Files

Creepy weirdo that writes copaganda but damned if that sequence doesn't slap.
- Doesn't Dresden frequently have problems with the cops?
Damn, I really don't have an original thought in my head
- The more we communicate in memes and pop culture references, the closer we get to going full Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

My favorite opening lines that I didn't see yet are:

Kafka's "Metamorphosis"

“When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed”

Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina"

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

And, Gibson's "Neuromancer"

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

I especially like that line in Neuromancer because at the time he wrote it, his audience would've understood he meant TV snow. Meaning the sky was overcast, giving a gloomy mood. But younger people now will think of that featureless blue that modern TVs use, which indicates a beautiful cloudless day. Totally different mood!
- Young people today will be puzzled by the TV scenes in Poltergeist as well. Time and tech marches on...

And, Gibson’s “Neuromancer”

        “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

absolute classic, came here to post it.

Went into this comment section with Kafkas "Metamorphosis" in mind, I love the opening, the whole story is genius and to this day perfectly describes large parts of German society.
All three quotes are great, how you can captivate a reader just with one sentence, all three do this perfectly.

Here's an obscure one from See you next Pluterday:

Sam was scratching desperately at the crumbling edge of the abyss. With fear he felt the cramp slowly, but surely, reaching his fingertips. He fell... And...To be quite honest, Sam was not hanging at all above an abyss. And there was no cramp at all in his fingertips. For miles around there wasn’t even a trace of an abyss at whose edge one could scratch in despair. But recently I met with a publisher who confided to me that in judging a manuscript he only glanced at the first sentence. He mustbe on tenterhooks by now.

Speaking of Iain m banks, the paragraph about an outside context problem is one of my favourite openings he's done. "An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop"

Some beautiful turns of phrase throughout. Maybe I should revisit these now that I'm less worried about missing out on something, so I can just browse and skip around.
He was a big fan of the power of the first line. You can really see it in a lot of his books.
His last ever book started with
"The two craft met within the blast-shadow of the planetary fragment called Ablate, a narrow twisted scrue of rock three thousand kilometres long and shaped like the hole in a tornado."
Or maybe it's the second para. I haven't got my copy on me. But I memorised the last bit on the spot.
- Yeah I haven't read that one in a while

If Zoey Ashe had known she was being stalked by a man who intended to kill her and then slowly eat her bones, she would have worried more about that and less about getting her cat off the roof.

– Jason Pargin, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits

Can't believe no one has yet proferred the classic:

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.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Why'd you stop halfway through?
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.
- Why’d you stop halfway through?
  Poor googling.
Is this sarcasm? I think if it stopped at the first dichotomy, or the second it would be fine. But it goes on for fucking ever.
- If that wore you out, probably should stay away from Dickens.
- Kinda the point. It's supposed to drill into your head how everything in that period was taken to the extremes by taking the prose itself to the extremes.
- Well I like it.
- not all prose has to be prosaic
Pretty good book that doesn't feel imo as old as it is

I was going to post Neuromancer too, but everyone posted that.

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

Fear and loathing in las vegas

This is my favorite opening line:

The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.

Neal Stephenson, Seveneves

He may know how to start a book but he can't end one to save his life.
- His older books ended pretty well IMO. It was only the later books where they sometimes make a major turn near the end and get nuts. I sometimes enjoy the craziness of it, but Seveneves was particularly jarring.
- That book was a slog. Took forever to get to the inevitable you knew was going to happen, glossed over the worldbuilding, and ended it just as things got interesting.
Maybe it's an adaptation of a Hotblack Desiato song.
- Disaster Area's songs are on the whole very simple and mostly follow the familiar theme of boy-being meets girl-being beneath silvery moon, which then explodes for no adequately explored reason.
Thanks for the reminder to get back on the waiting list at my library. I’ve been trying on and off for years to read this
- I really do recommend it. Just know that the end is basically a separate novella, that is completely different in tone. I would suggest giving it some time at the least before you read the last of it at the least.

The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.

All too many have forgotten the face of their fathers...
This is my favorite opening hook of all time.
- Tells you everything you need to know about what you're about to read. Uhh, kinda.

The building was on fire, and this time it was not my fault.

Thank you someone had to post this one.
Sounds like the start to Fahrenheit 451
Title?
- One of the Dresden File books, I forget which one it was sadly.

The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years - if it ever did end - began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.

It, by Stephen King.

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
The Gunslinger
- Came here to post this. Just re-reading the books, finished Drawing yesterday. I'm already so in love with the characters again. Will, once more, be heartbroken by Wizard & Glass. Despite all the shortcomings of the final books, this is just the best King ever wrote. (And I would really love to read the versions of 5, 6 and 7 from the parallel reality where King didn't have the accident. But who knows, maybe he'd never finished the story without it.)
Other than the very shocking gang bang scene it's a great novel.
- Wait, what? Missed that one, should probably re-read.

I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. First, I visited my wife's grave. Then, I joined the army.

John Scalzi, Old Man's War

"Dirk Moeller didn’t know if he could fart his way into a major diplomatic incident. But he was ready to find out."
-John Scalzi, The Android's Dream
Ah damn how did I forget this one?! One of my absolute favorite books!
I ugly laughed a lot when I read it the first time.

I absolutely love the opening of The Martian by Andy Weir

I’m pretty much fucked. That’s my considered opinion. Fucked. Six days into what should be one of the greatest two months of my life, and it’s turned into a nightmare. I don’t even know who’ll read this. I guess someone will find it eventually. Maybe a hundred years from now. For the record…I didn’t die on Sol 6. Certainly the rest of the crew thought I did, and I can’t blame them. Maybe there’ll be a day of national mourning for me, and my Wikipedia page will say, “Mark Watney is the only human being to have died on Mars.”

I can't get into his writing. I like his stories, but his prose is always bubbling with this unearned enthusiasm that doesn't let the reader actually feel what they want to feel about a situation ("this is so cool!" okay, I guess I should feel happy this...). Plus his characters are all essentially interchangeable with maybe one or two tacked on characteristics that desperately scream "look at me, I'm quirky!" You always have the impression that he's just using his characters as props to accelerate the plot, and once they're off the page they're essentially waiting in stasis to be called back into action.
Contrast this style of writing to Ann Leckie's SciFi writing, where characters are defined largely by their actions and spoken word is a luxury used to deliver cutting statements that give insights into the rich tapestry of culture, where you're not even aware of their physical characteristics such as gender or number of limbs, because they ultimately do not matter and they let you the reader form your own idea and own opinion of the scene taking place in front of you.
He doesn't hint at a wider world, he just outright states exactly what's happening in any given scene, and I guess I just find that somewhat lazy/insulting
I just reread that and Project Hail Mary, because I finally read Artemis and needed more Andy Weir. That man tickles exactly the right part of my brain.
Now I’m onto the Bobiverse series and loving it.
- I did that on a slightly different order, yes. But those are other books I'd recommend after reading the Martian.
  It's a bit different, but do you know the short story "The Egg" of Andy Weir?

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." Stephen King

One of the most perfect shortest stories ever written, shame there were no sequels
- Personally I think the first three novels are very strong and the fourth a good prequel too. It goes off the rails after that one though, like a crazy chu chu train so to speak.

"It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size. For Sister Thorn of the Sweet Mercy convent Lano Tacsis brought two hundred men."

Red Sister, Mark Lawrence.

Good book if you want something a bit like Harry Potter but aimed at a more mature audience and not funding the stripping away of human rights.

Well, not the first line per se, but the first chapter of Snowcrash is easily one of my favorites ever.

If I had to pick an opening like though, it would be:

"In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit."

If it's not already trivia you know, apparently Tolkien just wrote that line on a piece of paper one day and just built the story around it.
Hopefully it's not apocryphal.
- That's cool, I hope it's true 😆 I heard he basically told the story to his kids and formalized it later, but either way that's a great origin.
Snow Crash really has fallen off the radar. Really ignited my interest in cyberpunk when I read it 30+ years ago.
- It's terrifying how familiar a lot of his world feels nowadays.

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.

Every single book (all fifteen of them!) in the WoT series starts the same exact way, and I respect the dedication to consistency.

"This is not the beginning. But it is a beginning".
Absolutely love these!
If everything is transient, does that apply to transience itself as well?

Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.

David Goodstein, in the opening of his Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics textbook “States of Matter.”

“In a hole in a ground there lived a hobbit.” JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit

I know it gets shit on but I legitimately like, "it was a dark and stormy night." There's a reason it became cliche. It's very evocative.

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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulwer-Lytton_Fiction_Contest

I don’t think it’s technically the very first line in the book, but The Way of Kings’ “Szeth-son-son-Vallano, Truthless of Shinovar, wore white on the day he was to kill a king.” still gives me chills.

Other than the epigraph for the prologue, it is sort of the first line of the book. Because the part about Kalak is the “Prelude to the Stormlight Archive,” and after that the book says “Book One n The Way of Kings” and then goes on to the prologue.
- Yeah and I'll admit the Kalak bit didn't pull me in super well, in a way very reminiscent of the plantation scene of mistborn
Oh yeah that was an excellent opener! Absolutely glues your nose to the book.
I love how it slowly changes in emotional tone the further you get in the series but it hits hard enough you remember the line.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

I also really like the Bridget Jones' Diary homage to this by Helen Fielding
It is a truth universally acknowledged that when one part of your life starts going okay, another falls spectacularly to pieces.
I don't care about the book, it's contents nor its attitude, but in terms of summing up the tone of a book, it does a hell of a good job.

Late to the party, but:

A vessel may be defined as an object that keeps the water either in or out; it is the latter sort that concerns us.

The Elements of Seamanship by Roger C Taylor

I went looking for it and found only a book of the same name written by William Harwar Parker, in 1864.
https://archive.org/details/elementsofseaman00park/mode/1up
It's less entertaining...
- https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-elements-of-seamanship-seamanship-series_roger-c-taylor/592502/#edition=701339&idiq=5483159
I guess I now know what my Dad is getting for his birthday...

Damn, this post honestly reminded me why I love reading. Thanks for that.

I knew I loved reading but it made me want to read even more. You're welcome!

Let's go with something more somber.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

-Lolita by Nabokov

It's not strictly the opening, because it comes after a fake foreword presenting this, the main text, as a true crime story, written by the criminal himself. It sets the mood quite effectively. These sentences are the equivalent of drawing hearts around the name of your crush. And while the writer is shown to obsess over Lolita, he is only concerned with his own person. His victim is only presented as something within him (poignantly his loins and mouth) and not as a person separate from and outside of him.

And mind: AI could not come up with something like that: No tongue or lips.

Wow does that ever make me shiver, and not in a good way. Imagine saying that about a CHILD.

"The small boys came early to the hanging."

Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth

On hold at the library now, wow.

I just started reading "The giant squid" by Fabio Genovesi and I really loved the opening. I couldn't find the official English translation, so here's the original and my rough translation:

Del mare non sappiamo nulla. Nulla di nulla, eppure il mare è quasi tutto. All'inizio c'era solo lui, poi ha concesso un po' di spazio secco e polveroso alla terraferma, e noi subito superbi a dire che il centro del mondo è New York o Pechino, come una volta Babilonia, Atene, Roma, Parigi... invece il centro del mondo è il mare.

We know nothing about the ocean. Nothing at all, and yet the ocean is almost everything. In the beginning there was only the ocean, then it gave a little space - dry and dusty - to the lands, and we immediately haughtily proclaimed that the center of the world is New York or Beijing, like we once did with Babylonia, Athens, Rome or Paris. But instead the center of the world is the ocean.

This is really beautiful. Is the book available in translation?
- Yes, there seems to be an English translation. Maybe if someone has it they can post the odficial English translation.

The second cataclysm began in my eleventh life, in 1996. I was dying my usual death, slipping away in a warm morphine haze, which she interrupted like an ice cube down my spine.

— the first fifteen lives of Harry August, by Claire North

A, abbrev., amperes

words to live by

Dictionary?
Certainly a line with current behind it.
- It does lend itself to a power of sorts

Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt. If you already happen to know the awful secret behind the universe, feel free to skip ahead.

-John Dies at the End

And my personal favorite...

I met my guardian angel today. She shot me in the face.

-The Unnoticeables

“So… You’ll cut my head off.” I raised an eyebrow at the salescritter. I was baiting him. I knew it, he knew it, I knew he knew it.

We are Legion (We are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor

Honestly it doesn't do the series justice, but it's still a standout.

The first line of Shirley Jackson's Haunting Of Hill House is a banger, the complete first paragraph is incredible.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met nearly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone

Spooky, I'm gonna add this to my list for this month. I like to make sure I get some spook in Oct.

“Today he would become a god. His mother had told him so.” -- Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse

Really, that whole first chapter is incredible. One of those rare books where the first chapter is so compelling that you just have to keep on reading.

Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen and I was three.

From Lady sings the blues, Billie Holiday's autobiography.

I saw my first goblin the same day I saw my first shipwreck.

I was under sail, on my way to war. On my way to fall in love with death, and with a queen.

On my way to lose all of my friends, and two of my brothers.

I would see a great city fall in blood and fire, betrayed by a false god.

Later, I would be commanded to die on a high stone bridge, but I would fail in this.

The rest of the First Lanza of His Majesty’s Corvid Knights would not fail.

This is not a happy story, but it is a true one.

I have no time for lies, or for liars.

The Daughters War

And yes, Corvid Knights are as badass as you think. Maybe more.

I'm getting so many good recommendations and I'm so happy I posted this.
- I went scrabbling through my lending library to find good stuff when I saw this.
  I love these posts.
  If you want recommendations, let me know a few things you loved and I'll send more your way!
  I'm a massive quality snob so you'll get no low-grade prose in anything I send you.
- Before you read The Daughters War check out The Blacktongue Thief. And if you like that, I'd also recommend Between Two Fires. Christopher Buehlman is fantastic.
The Daughters War
Holy shit, what a great way to find out there's a prequel to the Blacktongue Thief. Which also fits in this thread.
I was about to die.
Worse, I was about to die with bastards.
Buehlman has an incredible way with words and with giving characters an absolutely unique narrative voice.
- If you can do the audiobook version of Daughters War, I'd highly recommend it.
  The reader is super charismatic and is a woman with some kind of latin accent that fits the tone and mood of the viewpoint characters so well.
  It's like being at a poetry reading in postwar Spain.

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

Oh I keep meaning to read this one!

An evocative one which has stayed with me: “I had barely regained the ability to walk. I could not chase women, but could slowly make my way up the stairs to the whorehouse.”

I can’t remember where it’s from. Perhaps Bukowski or one of his contemporaries?

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

Beautiful. Have you read Steven Millhouse? If you like GGM I think you'll like him.
- No I haven't - is there a particular book you'd recommend?
One of the most beautifully written novels I've ever read.

His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god. But then, he never claimed not to be a god. Circumstances being what they were, neither admission could be of any benefit.

Lord of Light Roger Zelazny

The first concussion cut the rocket up the side with a giant can opener. The men were thrown into space like a dozen wriggling silverfish. They were scattered into a dark sea; and the ship, in a million pieces, went on, a meteor swarm seeking a lost sun.

-Bradbury, Kaleidoscope

From The Broken Earth Trilogy by N. K. Jemison

LET’S START WITH THE END of the world, why don’t we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.

The Fifth Season

HMM. NO. I’M TELLING THIS WRONG.

The Obelisk Gate

TIME GROWS SHORT, MY LOVE. Let’s end with the beginning of the world, shall we? Yes. We shall.

The Stone Sky

The dedications are good too. As are the entire books, go read them. The dedications in respective order:

For all those who have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question

To those who have no choice but to prepare their children for the battlefield

To those who’ve survived: Breathe. That’s it. Once more. Good. You’re good. Even if you’re not, you’re alive. That is a victory.

He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.

Scaramouche, by Rafael Sabatini

Scaramouche, by Rafael Sabatini
But will he do the Fandango?
- Thunderbolts and lightning

Bill never realized that sex was the cause of it all. If the sun that morning had not been burning so warmly in the brassy sky of Phigerinadon II, and if he had not glimpsed the sugar-white and winebarrel-wide backside of Inga-Maria Calyphigia, while she bathed in the stream, he might have paid more attention to his plowing than to the burning pressures of heterosexuality and would have driven his furrow to the far side of the hill before the seductive music sounded along the road. He might never have heard it, and his life would have been very, very different.

caliphigia
Was her family literally named after her ass?

"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 first line of James Ellroy's LA Confidential is what immediately moved me from solely reading fantasy and sci-fi as a young man and opened the door a world of hard-boiled crime that would go on to include the classics like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

There's something about Ellroy's clipped, staccatto writing rhythm (he calls it "shotgun prose") that grabbed me from the very first moment.

An abandoned auto court in the San Berdoo foothills; Buzz Meeks checked in with ninetyfour thousand dollars, eighteen pounds of high-grade heroin, a 10-gauge pump, a .38 special, a .45 automatic and a switchblade he'd bought off a pachuco at the border--right before he spotted the car parked across the line: Mickey Cohen goons in an LAPD unmarked, Tijuana cops standing by to bootjack a piece of his goodies, dump his body in the San Ysidro River.

I AM DOOMED to remember a boy with a wrecked voice-not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.

A Prayer For Owen Meany
-- John Irving

Irving could really put a sentence together holy shit.

Ive long found something amusing about Seveneves's opening line being "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason".

"A screaming comes across the sky." -Gravity's Rainbow

A great opening, but it has hands down one of the best endings I have ever read.
I'm kinda partial to this.
New Pynchon novel tomorrow!

"Call me Ishmael" has always been my favorite

…Fone Bone?
- That voice... It just droned on and on... and on! It was horrible.
- Moby Dick

"West of House. You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door."

One that always stayed with me is from a coming-of-age story:

If truth was a crayon and it was up to me to put a wrapper around it and name its color, I know just what I would call it—dinosaur skin.

Sarah Weeks - So B. It

If you're curious, here's the rest of the first chapter which really ties the first sentence together nicely:

I used to think, without really thinking about it, that I knew what color that was. But that was a long time ago, before I knew what I know now about both dinosaur skin and the truth.

The fact is, you can’t tell squat about the color of an animal just from looking at its bones, so nobody knows for sure what color dinosaurs really were. For years I looked at pictures of them, trusting that whoever was in charge of coloring them in was doing it based on scientific fact, but the truth is they were only guessing. I realized that one afternoon, sitting in the front seat of Sheriff Roy Franklin’s squad car, the fall before I turned thirteen.

Another thing I found out right around that same time is that not knowing something doesn’t mean you’re stupid. All it means is that there’s still room left to wonder. For instance about dinosaurs—were they the same color as the sky the morning I set off for Liberty? Or were they maybe the same shade of brown as the dust my shoes kicked up on the driveway at Hilltop Home?

I’d be lying if I said that given a choice, I wouldn’t rather know than not know. But there are some things you can just know for no good reason other than that you do, and then there are other things that no matter how badly you want to know them, you just can’t.

The truth is, whether you know something or not doesn’t change what was. If dinosaurs were blue, they were blue; if they were brown, they were brown whether anybody ever knows it for a fact or not.

But there are some things you can just know for no good reason other than that you do, and then there are other things that no matter how badly you want to know them, you just can’t.
Huh, actually a rather good summary of Godel's Theorom. Cool.
Jeez that's good.

The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.

One I've recently re-read. Not quite as catchy as some of the others here, but manages to capture the world and mood of the setting remarkably well in just one sentence.

“Ba-room, ba-room, ba-room, baripity, baripity, baripity, baripity - good.”

Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia

(The context turns out to be the protagonist listening to his dad start the truck and drive away.)

"Beneath the floor of a very old forest, nestled in among some nice, rich topsoil, lived a family of worms. Earthworms, to be exact." Gary Larson ~ 'There's A Hair In My Dirt!'

This is the story of a bloodstained boy. There he stands, swaying as utterly as any windblown sapling. He is quite, quite red. - Railsea, China Mieville.

"When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there."

From The Dinosaur by Augusto Monterroso.

It's the opening like, the closing line and everything in between.

In Germany, "Ilsebill salzte nach." ("Ilsebill added more salt.") from the novel The Flounder, written by author Günter Grass, has been voted the best opening line of all time.

yum

"Somebody warned them that we were coming. The sympathisers left nothing behind but an empty apartment and a few volumes of illegal verse."

Blackwing, by Ed McDonald

The following lines are even better in terms of raw world building but it's an excellent open.

See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.

Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy.

“I, Daniel Quinn, neither the first nor the last of a line of such Quinns, set eyes on Maud the wondrous on a late December day in 1849 on the banks of the river of aristocrats and paupers, just as the great courtesan, Magdalena Colon, also known as La Ultima, a woman whose presence turned men into spittling, masturbating pigs, boarded a skiff to carry her across the river’s icy water from Albany to Greenbush, her first stop en route to the city of Troy, a community of iron, where later that evening she was scheduled to enact, yet again, her role as the lascivious Lais, that fabled prostitute who spurned Demosthenes’ gold and yielded without fee to Diogenes the virtuous, impecunious tub-dweller.”

Quinn's Book by William Kennedy

Haha someone named him Eustace!

I managed to finish that series with my son but daaaang is it weirdly religious.

Well it's meant to be. I like it regardless.
- I did not. It was better in the beginning, a subtle allegory, but got weirder and more in your face with each book.
  The only redeeming factor for me was Reepicheep.

"A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism"

It still gives nightmares to the people who deserve it :)

That's me, you may wonder how I got there...

On second thought, it may not work so well in books, unless they're illustrated novels (or comics, as we used to call them, even though they weren't all that funny).

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. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one halfway over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.

-- "Titus Groan" by Mervin Peake

It's a mood.

riverrun

"His name was Remo..."