There was a poll that stated—Rowling’s opening line in the HP series is one of best in the world. Someone posted about how there are a bunch of other opening statements that are better.
Here’s one of my personal favorites, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez (English translated):
“It is inevitable. The scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”
There had been something loose about the station dock all morning, skulking in amongst the gantries and the lines and the canisters which were waiting to be moved, lurking wherever shadows fell among the rampway accesses of the many ships at dock at Meetpoint.
-CJ Cherryh, Pride of Chanur
'I take pride withal in my humiliation, and as I am to this privilege condemned, almost I find joy in an abhorrent salvation; I am, I believe, alone of all our race, the only man in human memory to have been shipwrecked and cast up upon a deserted ship'
Long time since I first read this book, but it sits there on the shelf, remembered for this opening line that grabbed me and compelled me to dive in 😊 #openinglines
@DocCarms@bookstodon “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” — One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. 👌
@mikebaarda@DocCarms@bookstodon I think you have a point, but it's kind of context-dependent. Personally, when I read that line, sure my interest is piqued a little, but I'm also immediately primed to be looking for an explanation of the things you mentioned, and I'm not likely to have a good time reading the story until I start getting that explanation (or at least some justification for why I need to wait for it, like if the POV character is trying to find out). So it's kind of a high-risk high-reward maneuver: an opening line that introduces mysterious terms for story elements (such as, but not limited to, characters) can backfire badly if the rest of the story doesn't deliver details at the right pace.
It's also definitely possible to overdo it by throwing so many unfamiliar terms at the reader so fast that they get turned off. Not the case here, of course, but other books definitely do it.