Catchy Lines

JD Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" is supposed to have spoilt a generation of writers by making writing look too easy. I love the book's style, words tripping together to build Holden Caulfield's character and life. There is something very real and honest about the novel as captured by its first line:

"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."

That got me thinking about other memorable first lines or "hooks" from other books. Here's another favorite from Gabriel Garcia Marquez' "One Hundred Years of Solitude":

"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."

Another brilliant book is "Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides, with one of the most creative storylines I've come across. The novel's first line by its protagonist Calliope Stephanides sums up the story succintly:

"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974."

Here are a couple of quotes from one of my favorite novels "The Incredible Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera. Although they did not open the novel, they are particularly striking:

"We can never know what we want because, living only one life, we can neither compare it to our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come."

We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.

Any more first lines, or memorable quotes from books anyone?