First paragraphs are so important--and so often so bad. Here's a fantastic one:

In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.

I don't judge books by their covers, but I do often judge them by their first paragraphs. So far, the novel is bearing out the promise of its opening.

Readers are more then welcome to post first paragraphs that have especially charmed them--or that have caused them not to read any further.

Is there any question that the first paragraph of Lolita is among the greatest ever?

I always liked Holden Caulfield's opening in Catcher in the Rye.

The road that led to Treegap had been trod out long before by a herd of cows who were, to say the least, relaxed. It wandered along in curves and easy angles, swayed off and up in a pleasant tangent to the top of a small hill, ambled down again between fringes of bee-hung clover, and then cut sidewise across a meadow. Here its edges blurred. It widened and seemed to pause, suggesting tranquil bovine picnics: slow chewing and thoughtful contemplation of the infinite. And then it went on and on again and came at last to the wood. But on reaching the shadows of the first trees, it veered sharply, swung out in a wide arc as if, for the first time, it had reason to think where it was going.

(Does anyone recognize this?)

Here's another:

On the Ides of March, in his forty-fifth year, the neutral if not cooperative world turned on Mr. Raleigh W. Hayes as sharply as if it had stabbed him with a knife. Like Caesar, Mr. Hayes was surprised by the blow, and responded sarcastically. Within a week his eyes were saying narrowly to everything they saw, Et tu, Brute? The world looked right back at the life insurance salesman; either blinked or winked, and spun backward on an antipodean whim, flinging him off with a shrug. This outrage happened first in his little hometown, which was Thermopylae, North Carolina, and soon thereafter, all over the South, where Mr. Hayes was forced to wander to save his inheritance from a father who'd, again, run ostentatiously berserk.

One more:

No live organism can continue for long to exist under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itelf against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.

Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked along.

(Okay, two paragraphs. I cheated.)

walked ALONE. Good grief.

the last one's easy--_The Haunting of Hill House_ by shirley jackson.

i'll have to diagree with Erin about that first paragraph--i see it as an ugly mouthful.

You wanna turn your stomach? Check out the average entry in Wikipedia. Of course, you have the option of editing it yourself, but you could make a life's work out of the attempt and hardly make a dent.

Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice's Lenten fast in the desert.

Never before had Brother Francis actually seen a pilgrim with girded loins, but that this one was the bona fide article he was convinced as soon as he had recovered from the spine-chilling effect of the pilgtim's advent on the far horizon, as a wiggling black iota caught in a shimmering haze of heat.

--A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller