Your favourite beginnings of books

[Lisnaholic]

Either paragraphs or sentences, what are some of your favourite beginnings to books ? And of course a favourite beginning doesn't have to mean it's a favourite book, but most often there'll be a strong correlation I expect.
This is a thread inspired by Marie's recent comment that Anna Karenina has her favourite opening paragraph, so (with hopefully her permission) here it is for others to judge:-

CHAPTER ONE

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

Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys' house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the house felt that there was so sense in their living together, and that the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in common with one another than they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room, the husband had not been at home for three days. The children ran wild all over the house; the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper, and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for her; the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time; the kitchen-maid, and the coachman had given warning.

And here's an opening paragraph, which really drew me in to the memoir, Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs:-

SOMETHING ISN'T RIGHT

My mother is standing in front of the bathroom mirror smelling polished and ready; like Jean Naté, Dippity Do and the waxy sweetness of lipstick. Her white, handgun-shaped blow-dryer is lying on top of the wicker clothes hamper, ticking as it cools. She stands back and smoothes her hands down the front of her swirling, psychedelic Pucci dress, biting the inside of her cheek.
"Damn it," she says, "something isn't right." 

[Marie Monday]

nice. I like the beginning of Anna Karenina mainly because of the first two sentences: it jumps in a really cool way from a punchy general statement to a specific example. And the way it then goes on to quickly set the scene is both vivid and fun

[SGR]

The first few paragraphs of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, which to Lisna's point, is one of my favorite novels. Henry Miller's caustic and sardonic writing style was massively influential on my own creative writing style during my college years:

I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor
a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.
Last night Boris discovered that he was lousy. I had to shave his armpits and
even then the itching did not stop. How can one get lousy in a beautiful
place like this? But no matter. We might never have known each other so
intimately, Boris and I, had it not been for the lice.

Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather prophet.
The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more
death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The
cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are
killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must
get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The
weather will not change.

It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I
have not yet been able to fathom. I have no money, no resources, no hopes.
I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was
an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has
fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.

This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character.
This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged
insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man,
Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a
little off key perhaps but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance
over your dirty corpse....

[Trollheart]

I don't know about opening paragraphs, but I do remember this one:

"Josef K woke up and found he had NOT turned into a gigantic insect, and immediately set about finding this Kafka fellow who had been going around spreading rumours about him." 

[innerspaceboy]

I never shut up about James Joyce, and Finnegans Wake is a fine example of a great opening.

To those few who aren't aware, the entire work forms a cycle, the book ending with the sentence-fragment "a way a lone a last a loved a long the" and beginning by finishing that sentence: "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."

[Lisnaholic]

The first few paragraphs of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, which to Lisna's point, is one of my favorite novels. Henry Miller's caustic and sardonic writing style was massively influential on my own creative writing style during my college years:

I've never read any Henry Miller but I like the way that opening section gets better, more combative as it goes along. Nice edition too, with its "Not To Be Imported..." badge of honour. Never read Henry Miller, but I learnt a fair bit about the guy and his romances, through the eyes of Anaïs Nin, in :-



^ Sadly, a strap-line of "Now A Sensuous Film" does not look so good on my shelves as "Not To Be Imported..." would have.

I didn't know you did any creative writing, SGR; have you ever posted anything here or on MB ?

I never shut up about James Joyce, and Finnegans Wake is a fine example of a great opening.

To those few who aren't aware, the entire work forms a cycle, the book ending with the sentence-fragment "a way a lone a last a loved a long the" and beginning by finishing that sentence: "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."

^ HaHa ! This is James Joyce living up to his reputation a bit more: making his readers think, not just read.