First Lines - There's Probably an App for This

So does a great novel need a killer opening line? Are some great openings wasted on terrible novels? I collected the four opening sentences below at random over the past few months, just to see how they stack up - to each other, to the books they begin, and on their own. Of the four, the one that struck me the most forcefully was The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, the title short story in a collection by the 20th-century English writer Alan Sillitoe. In one smooth, uncluttered sentence, Sillitoe sets the scene and at the same instant gets the story off and running - a model of grace and economy. Hemingway nearly does the same thing, but he's really jamming stuff into the sentence. Orwell's can't help but grab the reader. I considered including Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, but its first sentence is a fragment. No dice. Good book, though.

• "He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish." The Old Man and the Sea


• 'It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” 1984


• “As soon as I got to Borstal they made me a long-distance cross-country runner.” The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner


• “Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.” Don Quixote

So send me your favorite first lines - best and worst. But no Dickens ("It was the best of times...") or Edward Bulwer-Lytton ("It was a dark and stormy night.")