Earthly Powers is pretty hard to beat on that front, I tried to read that novel as an adolescent due simply to that first line, sadly I completely bounced off the rest of the book and never finished it. I have no idea now whether that was because the book didn't live up to the line, or I was simply too young to take a go at it.
As a curio piece, the opening sentence of Neuromancer by William Gibson is the only one I know where changes in technology have changed the meaning of the sentence, so that it still makes sense to a modern reader but now means something wholly other than intended.
Quote:
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The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
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When written, that meant the sky was a kind of churning grayish-white. To anyone who grew up in the last 20 years or so though, it would mean bright blue, as the colours of dead channels changed a few years after the novel was written.
My personal favourite is a paragraph, and so inadmissible, but I'll post it anyway:
Quote:
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It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.
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The first sentence there is pretty good in it's own right though anyway. That said, the best sentence in that para isn't the first, for me it's "I was clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it" which captures the essence of hardboiled in a nutshell.