Good Opening Lines

The Atlantic recently published an interview with Stephen King, in which he discusses what constitutes a good opening line. In a later article, entitled "This Did Something Powerful to Me", the same magazine invited other writers to provide their favorite opening lines, with brief explanations on why those lines moved them.

A memorable opening line encapsulates an essential characteristic about the plot, a character, or a theme of the work. More importantly, it pulls you into the story, almost beyond your will. It is the 'hook' that lands you, the big fish, the reader. You must read on.

Since reading both articles, opening lines of great stories have been running through my mind. I thought I'd share some of those with you. These are primarily short fiction, to contrast with the articles mentioned above.

Short Fiction

Mark Helprin, “The Schreuderspitze,” The New Yorker, January 10, 1977, p. 26, collected in Ellis Island and Other Stories:

In Munich are many men who look like weasels.

Ernest Hemingway, The Short Happy life of Francis Macomber:

It was now lunch time and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had happened.

Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find:

The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida.

Saul Bellow, A Silver Dish:

What do you do about death--in this case, the death of an old father?

Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl:

Stella, cold, cold, the coldness of hell.

Luigi Pirandello, The Cat, A Goldfinch, and the Stars
(Technically this opening is more than one sentence, but since it struck me deeply when I first read it, I had to include it here.)

A stone. Another stone. Man passes and sees the two lying side by side. But what does this stone know of the one beside it?

Long Form Fiction 

 Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway:

Mrs. Dalloway said that she would buy the flowers herself.

Do you remember opening lines that play upon your mind, like the opening chords of songs, from time to time?