First lines

What an interesting article! I don't think I ever thought about first lines, really.

Here are a few of my favorite books' first lines...

"Where's Papa going with that axe?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast. --E B White, Charlotte's Web

Sophie couldn't sleep.
--Roald Dahl, The BFG

The morning sun shone brightly on the canvas of the covered wagon, promising an unseasonably warm day for mid-October. --Janette Oke, Love Comes Softly

Alex Stafford was just like Mama said. --Francine Rivers, Redeeming Love

It was a dark and stormy night. --Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother”s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
--John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.
--John Green, The Fault in Our Stars


Here's another website dedicated to first and last lines.