Great first lines of a novel

"I was dreaming about Las Vegas again when the ferret woke me." - Strictly Analog, Richard Levesque

That's a very strange opening line. Then again, maybe not so unusual. Thomas Jefferson was said to sleep with ferrets, and some have said his death was caused by infection from a ferret bite.

I prefer to stick with the classics:
"It was a dark and stormy night." -- Snoopy

All this happened, more or less.
I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women. Charles Johnson, Middle Passage

That sounds about right.

"I didn’t suspect the day Grandfather came out and got me and my sister, Lula, and hauled us off toward the ferry, that I’d soon end up with worse things happening than had already come upon us, or that I’d take up with a gun-shooting dwarf, the son of a slave and a big angry hog, let alone find true love and kill someone, but that’s exactly how it was."
-The Thicket, Joe Lansdale

This may be in the running for the Bulwer-Lytton contest.

_Howard wrote:

This may be in the running for the Bulwer-Lytton contest.

The 'rules' say these first lines have to be previously unpublished.
This is awesome.
I can make it up?