First lines

Here's a link to the list of the 100 best first lines in the history of a novel. Some are good, some are not, but I don't think the idea was to gather up lines that hook a reader. A good opening line may be something entirely else. It can also alienate the reader.

But I especially like the evocative noir of Paul Auster's City of Glass:

It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.

One of my favourites (not in the list) is the long sentence in the beginning of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, even though it's not very tight:

The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child.

My best opening line comes from an unpublished novel called Blood Orgy of the Void God:

Satan woke up in a cold sweat.

I also like - who doesn't - the Call Me Ishmael of Moby Dick, but it just makes me think of the perhaps apocryphal opening line "Call me, Ishmael". (Which in turn reminds me of the Finnish Aino Räsänen's legendary novel Call Me, Helena. (And its sequel And Helena Called... (Although it's actually about playing a violin...)))