Quote:
Originally Posted by nnyhav
...great minds think alike, eh? What's our excuse?
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I would answer but, since we're great minds, you should already know.
It was the first opening sentence that came to me. Most of the most memorable openers I can think of belong to books I haven't read. Elsewhere you posted the opening line to L.P. Hartley's
The Go-Between ("The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."), which is also fantastic. Likewise that of
Anna Karenina ("Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.")
There's definitely more
memorable openers than there are
great openers. I still remember the line to John Wyndham's
The Day Of The Triffids, which we read in school. Or the similar ones to Melville's
Moby Dick and Vonnegut's
Cat's Cradle, ("Call me Ishmael.") and ("Call me Jonah.") respectively.