Best Opening Lines

I recently posted a question on facebook asking my friends for their entries into the best opening lines in a movie or novel. I got some great feedback, which is included below. Also, I wanted to throw a few more more suggestions in, because I enjoy these kinds of lists. So without further ado, some great opening lines:

Suggestions from Tim Lappala:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... And the whole paragraph that follows it. (I'm sad if it's gotten overexposed or out-of-fashion. If so I'll just have to accept that. I still love it.)

Five friends I had, and two of them snakes." - Godric, by Frederick Buechner.

"Thou aged unreluctant earth who dost
with quivering continual thighs invite
the thrilling rain the slender paramour
to toy with thy extraordinary lust,"
-Tulips & Chimneys, E.E. Cummings (not anovel but it is a book I love.

"Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo"
-Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."
-Mrs. Dalloway, o' course, by Virgina Woolf. For some reason I really like that sentence.

From Sarah Davies:

"Jack Torrance thought : Officious little prick." The Shining, Stephen King

"When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton." The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

"He was tall, about fifty, with darkly handsome, almost sinister features:" Midnight in the Garden of good and Evil, John Berendt

"if you are a dreamer, come in,
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer...
If you're a pretender, cone sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!" Where the Sidewalk Ends Shel Silverstein

"True!-nervous-very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am, but why will you say that I am mad?" The Tell-Tale Heart, Poe

From Matt Fifer:

It was a dark, and stormy night... :D

From Katherine Dempster:

I am Sam.

From Kevin Speare:

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

My Suggestions:

From Nabokov: 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. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.
- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains will be in want of more brains.” - Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

"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 Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling

"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." -One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez