5 BEST Opening lines

Bright Lights, Big City by Jay Mcinerney. The opening lines have a certain slickness to them, and introduce us to the book's second-person perspective that will spice things up. The line, despite its vagueness (What place? What time?) is strongly evocative:  

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.

Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault. To show us the evolution of the penal system and surveillance in Europe, he describes a public execution in gristly and surprising detail. (He then talks about prison conditions eighty years later, but that's not nearly as exciting): 

On 1 March 1757 Damiens the regicide was condemned "to make the amende honorable before the main door of the Church of Paris", where he was to be "taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds"; then, "in the said cart, to the Place de Grève, where, on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and claves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds" (Pièces originales..., 372-4).

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. In the absurd/surrealist quality--you could put The Stranger's opening here perhaps--I think this takes the cake.  What happens when your anxious dreams are actually better than what you will wake up to?

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.

Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Just pure misery:

I am a sick man ... I am a spiteful man.

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. A great primer on Coetzee's writing style: he, for some reason, uses the present tense and commas, everywhere, commas. The phrase "problem of sex" also is an interesting phrase: 

For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.

- Josh Mitrani