the first cut is the deepest

I often find myself excited by the first sentence of a book, each word a stolen glance , an invitation even. When I came upon this site, my inner bookworm got kind of worked up. The American Book Review has created a list of some of the best one-liners of all time. The following are my favorites. Feel free to peruse the whole thing here.

5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. � Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. � Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

10. I am an invisible man. � Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

16. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. � J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

20. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. � Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)

37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. � Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

38. All this happened, more or less. � Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. � Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)

50. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. � Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)

92. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. � Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921)