Some great incipits

In 2007, American book review editors published their own listing of 100 incipts (http://americanbookreview.org/), i came through Information Please databases (http://www.infoplease.com/ipea/A0934311.html).

Here are my favorites from the list:

• “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” (Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice)
• “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía, was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to, discover ice.” ( Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years Of Solitude)
• ” Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” (Lev Tolstoy, Anna Karenina)
• ” You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ; but that ain’t no matter. (Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)
• “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” (Samuel Beckett, Murphy)
• “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” (Charles Dickens, David Copperfield)
• “Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.” (Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote)
• “It was like so, but wasn’t.” (Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2)
• “All this happened, more or less.” (Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five)
• “I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story” (Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome)
• “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” (Ernest Hemingway, The old man and the sea)
• “A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” (Graham Greene, The end of the affair)
• “To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.” (Salman Rushdie, The Satanic verses)

And my personal best:

“The man that had only 10 minutes to live, was laughing” (Frederick Forsyth, The fist of god)