10 Great First Lines...

So?  What's the best first line of a novel?  Here are 10 of my favorites:

• "My wound is geography."  Pat Conroy- The Prince of Tides

• "At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks in my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin."  Sue Monk Kidd – The Secret Life of Bees 

• "The evening his master died he worked again well after he ended the day for the other adults, his own wife among them, and sent them back with hunger and tiredness to their cabins."  Edward Jones – The Known World

• "In our family there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing."  Norman Maclean – A River Runs Through It

• "I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning."  Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

• "In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini."  Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

• "‘To be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die.’"  Salman Rushdie – The Satanic Verses

• "It is not a heart: light, heavy, kind or broken; dear, hard, bleeding or transparent; it is not a heart."  Tom Robbins – Even Cowgirls Get The Blues

• "This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it."  William Goldman – The Princess Bride 

• "When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton." JRR Tolkien – The Lord of the Rings

American Book Review published their list of the best 100 first lines here.

And here are Schmoop's top 25.