Famous First Words

This is a negative way to begin, I know. Let me stress that my main impulse is not to poke fun (the sentence, by the way, is a pastiche […]).

A pair of examples might make my point more obvious. The first is a portion of the opening passage of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady:

Now here is the opening paragraph of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier:

I would like to explore this transition by looking at the opening passage of Saul Bellow's novel Humboldt's Gift:

Consider the squared-off diction of the opening sentence of Wilson's 1925 review of a work by Mencken:

Pynchon's opening sentence is, it's true, arrestingly declarative:

Breathing Lessons opens as follows:

He announced his new prose in On the Road's first lines:

Boris Pasternak chose to begin his memoir, Safe Conduct, with a curious description of an incident:

With the opening sentence Mr. McFarland not only situates us, but also plants the subliminal conviction that Francis is wrong, that there will be some other metamorphosis and that the 'slow, affable decline' will be anything but.

Here is a fairly random sampling of some opening lines:

I could go on, but the point is made.

(Sven Birkerts)