Great opening lines

“Call me Ishmael.”
(Moby Dick by Herman Melville)

“It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
(1984 by George Orwell)

“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.”
(Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain)

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”
(Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson)

I’ve got a new one to add:

“It all began, as usual, with the Greeks.”
(An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought by Murray N. Rothbard)