10 Great Opening Paragraphs: The Haunting of Hill House, A Farewell to Arms, Notes From Underground

in the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains in the bed of the river there were Pebbles and boulders dry and white in the Sun and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels

you don't know about me without you've read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer but that ain't no matter that book was made by Mr Mark Twain and he told the truth mainly

call me Ishmael some years ago never mind how long precisely having little or no money in my purse and nothing particular to interest me on shore I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world

I am a sick man I am a spiteful man I am an unattractive man I believe my liver is diseased

no live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality even Larks and Katydids are supposed by some to dream Hill House not sane stood by itself against the hills holding Darkness Within it had stood so for 80 years and might stand for 80 more

he was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone 84 days now without taking a fish

through the fence between the curling flower spaces I could see them hitting they were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree

dark Spruce Forest frowned on either side of the Frozen Waterway the trees had been Stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of Frost and they seemed to lean toward each other black and ominous in the fading light