Say I am an idiot and say I am a member of Congress, but I repeat myself.

It was a dark and stormy night.

"Say I am an idiot and say I am a member of Congress, but I repeat myself.

Mark Twain? It should be engraved on every desk in the Congress.

One of the most famous;
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,...

"WHEN by my solitary hearth I sit,...." - Keats (To Hope)

"Now is the winter of our discontent"

Richard The Third Act 1, scene 1

Even the sound of this line creates a visual image.

Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt. Franz Kafka



Summer Greer

"For sale: baby shoes, never worn." Hemingway

A novel within itself.

Randy

Whah...are you sure you have the right thread here?

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."

"It began as a mistake."

First line from Bukowski's novel, Post Office.

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
100 Years of Solitude--Gabriel García Márquez

Ohhhh...."Rebecca" (Hitchcock's interpretation of Daphne du Maurier). Beautiful.

This is an offer I made in WTT forum. Why are you publising it here? If is a mistake, correct it, please. (Can this be reported to the Admins?).

Man, said Terl, is an endangered species.

Larry

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

"The captain never drank. Yet, toward nightfall in that smoke-colored season between Indian summer and December's first true snow, he would sometimes feel half drunken. He would hang his coat neatly over the back of his chair in the leaden station-house twilight, say he was beat from lack of sleep and lay his head across his arms upon the query-room desk."
I cheated.

"Call me Ishmale. "

Moby Dick.

Here's an easy one:

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

"Someone must have traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning"

"It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking 13."

I like using "traduced."

skyp

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. "

Neuromancer, by William Gibson. That's a great start.

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

one of the greatest books ever! i can't imagine what modern media (especially movies) would be like without writers like william gibson and arthur c. clarke.

i'll have a go at this:

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,"

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoi

My offering:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Good one. Allen Ginsberg's Howl.

It was my thirtieth year to heaven