Further in light of long compounded first sentences, I figured I ought to “put up”, so here is my first from the current WIP:
A yellow wind pushed thin clouds back into the sky revealing pockets of city dusk, and coughed the debris of an ordinary Saturday against the cusp of a Sunday, a Sunday which would be one day remembered as punch to the final, and some might say only, great jest.
I rather fancy this’n:
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago–never mind how long precisely–having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.
I quite fancy that’n too.
Here’s another:
“it was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”
But — scouring the shelves from Dickens to Dick, from Chandler to Child, I found it interesting how few first sentences were actually candidates for the All-Time-Great Kick-Off Hall of Fame. If you leave aside the few obvious high-scoring lines about Ishmael (of course), clocks striking thirteen, the best of/worst of times and “9st 3 (but post-Christmas), alcohol units 14 (but effectively covers 2 days as 4 hours of party was on New Year’s Day…”, you find quite a lot of good books with bland or even weak beginnings. Even some that I thought do launch strongly turned out not to. One I believed was a First Sentence — “Nothing much was left of her but charred smithereens” — turned out to be the Fifth.
That’s not to deny that it’s fun to see other people’s and speculate where they might be going. But maybe it really is much more the first page that counts, as Matt says, or even “The First Five Pages”…
H
One of our favourite activities at Christmas is a Victorian parlour game, although we bought it packaged as a game called “Ex Libris” produced by the British Library and the Bodleian Library. The basic premise is that everyone has to write the first (or last) line of a named book, then everyone has to guess which is the original. It is riotously entertaining, although it doesn’t sound as though it is going to be.
One person has a card with the real line written on it (in the original Victorian version, no doubt this would be taken from an actual book), along with some basic bibliographical and biographical information about the book and its author. That person reads out the background information, then everyone writes what they think will pass for the first line of the book. The one with the card collects all the lines, reads them out, and then people vote for the one they think is real. You get a point if someone votes for your line, or if you guess the correct line. The person holding the card gets a point if no one guesses correctly. Obviously, no one can vote for their own entry. The box of cards then passes to the next person, and it all starts over again. The winner is the one with the most points at whatever stage someone decides that they really have to stop and serve dinner, or go home, or retire for the night (according to circumstances).
The funny thing about this game is that everyone enjoys it, whether or not they are avid readers. In our family, it is quite common for children or for those who only read under duress to win. We’ve even played it with friends whose literary interests are limited to technical tomes and celebrity magazines, and after initial scepticism they loved it, too (perhaps the wine helped). The game might sound a bit pretentious, but is actually just silly and fun, and once you get started it is bound to make everyone laugh. It’s great fun trying to guess who has written each line, and the more literarily-inclined often cause wild hilarity with their purple prose. Sometimes the “real” first lines might be completely unbelievable, or the fake lines might be stunning.
Highly recommended. I don’t know if “Ex Libris” is still available, but if it is, it is well worth seeking out. First lines will never seem the same again. 
Siren, hold on to your copy; it’s a collector’s item.
Amazon.uk is selling one for £150.
Someone else “invented” an online version:
thames2thayer.com/exlibris.html
Sounds like a lot of fun! --D
He sits at the second story window of a rundown duplex, overlooking the main drag of the city’s bohemian neighborhood. Night after night he sits. Year after year. He never sleeps. Ever.
She was alone.
My current favourite of the opening line candidates for my WIP, but still uncertain of the narrative structure that beginning with it will entail (I suspect the section will work better in a middle chapter). But then, there’s so much to write, and edit, it’s all academic at this stage. At least it’s not a compound sentence.
I guess I had better put up too, so here is mine for current WIP:
That’s actually the first line of the first chapter, but there is an introduction and another passage that have to go in front of it, which I find a little disappointing, because I like that line and wish it could be up front.
From the sublime to the ridiculous. Here’s mine at last, everyone let our your collective breaths. (Breath?) I too was a copyeditor in my previous life, so bring on the nitpicking, I can take it. 
(Wish I could figure out tabs, though. You’ll just have to pretend the first lines are indented 5 spaces)
She knew the fence was electric when she put her hand through it.
She was careful. There were three strands, of white braided plastic, and room to slip her palm between them, towards the mare whose history she did not know. A horse she had seen on countless drives between the oncology clinic and her townhouse. Unkempt, her shoulder thick with muscle, bristling with dull fur like a dog with the mange.Like it, Zoe, “… bristling with dull fur…” especially.
BTW, where’s Greg’s needle-in-a-haystack post?
H
Thanks, Hugh.
No idea about Greg; maybe he can help us out. I have enough trouble finding much larger things in a haystack. 
Greg had cannily mated “Ex Libris” with Scrivenings, by listing twenty or thirty famous first sentences amongst which his own was buried.
I was just failing to resist the lure of trying to work out which was his when the post disappeared. Ah well.
H
Here is a kind of reverse Ex Libris – i.e., my opening line(s) cast anonymously among a mix of published opening lines by more or less widely-known authors. To keep the hunt sporting, I leave open the possibility that none of the following is, in fact, mine. 
Once upon a time when the world was young there was a Martian named Smith.
The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed sub-category. He’s got esprit up to here.
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age. I had no other work more than to drink palm-wine in my life.
“Nothing to be done.” “I’m beginning to come around to the same opinion…”
I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
“I’d like a bloody castle,” the fat diner had said.
At a certain village in La Mancha, which I shall not name, there lived not long ago one of those old-fashioned gentlemen who are never without a lance upon a rack, an old target, a lean horse, and a greyhound.
Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one. Vast enough for search to be in vain. Narrow enough for flight to be in vain.
She enters, deliberately, gravely, without affectation, circumspect in her motions (as she’s been taught), not stamping too loud, not dragging her legs after her, but advancing sedately, discreetly, glancing briefly at the empty rumpled bed, the cast-off nightclothes. She hesitates.
Incredible the first animal that dreamed of another animal.
Would I find La Maga? Most of the time it was just a case of my putting in an appearance, going along the Rue de Seine to the arch leading into the Quai de Conti, and I would see her slender form against the olive-ashen light which floats along the river as she crossed back and forth on the Pont des Arts, or leaned over the iron rail looking at the water.
This is how it begins. How the beginning of it begins. And she tells the beginning of it, but that is not the beginning. Not the way she tells it.
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.
In this dark adored adorned gehenna say your farewells my very beautiful one my very strong one my very indomitable one my very learned one my very ferocious one my very gentle one my best beloved to what they, the women, call affection tenderness or gracious abandon.
In a sense, I am Jacob Horner.
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax.
The doctor with whom I discussed the question told me to begin my work with a historical analysis of my smoking habit.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called True Stories from Nature, about the primeval forest. It was a picture of a boa constrictor in the act of swallowing an animal.
Nancy Drew rose from the sofa where she had been sitting. The book she had found so engaging yesterday could not keep her interest today.
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down the road and this moocow that was coming down the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo…
When Mrs. Frederick C. Little’s second son arrived, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Tattered as the others this one was done in a fine close hand. “TL Rooke – Purveyor of Secrets.” She did not press the bell.
“I declare, I don’t know what makes me so nervous this afternoon! I have the strangest feeling – just as though something were about to happen.”
Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last. “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.”
“What’s it going to be then, eh?”
Greg,
I really thought you could do better than writing a Nancy Drew novel.
Ha! Yeah, but I really made up for that when I wrote Beowulf.
This is opening to a little thing I am working on for … well, you will get the idea.
Asbestos shorts installed.
Hmm. I am doubtful that even one multitude could fit in a square.* A double dose of sarcastic exaggeration? (There is, I take it, already more than a hint of sarcasm in the term ‘the Deceiver’).
–Greg
These are not the first lines of my current project (way too superstitious to post that), but the first lines of the last screenplay I finished:
BLACK SCREEN
A thrumming sound. The obdurate pulse of mechanized evil. Or:
A SLURPEE MACHINE.
Now that I know the literati cannot discern my own opening lines from the opening lines of great authors, I am dangerously emboldened to make comment:
If the souls are pulling straws, they are in a lottery, not choosing among fathers. So, ‘short straw’ and ‘picking their fathers’ seem in tension here, likewise ‘assumes you had a choice’.
Hewing too closely to the when-God-was-handing-out-the-brains saying takes more words than it pays. Find the shortest path to link ‘short straw’ and ‘father’ and that will do it (and will make that ‘short straw’ do its sly double-duty, to boot).
–Greg
P.S. If you want my advice, I think no one here should take my advice on anything.
Tension is … good?
The lottery feel was intentional. If you are “choosing” then you might choose badly. Hence the short straw.
Point taken. I figure I can probably sum it up adequately with
Actually I kind of like that.