best opening sentence

Mom died today.

Simple, precise, to the point.
L'etranger by Camus.

 

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"
A Tale of Two Cities. Charles Dickens.

"I was sick--sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt my senses leaving me."
The Pit and the Pendelum. Edgar Allen Poe

 

"Marley was dead to begin with...This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. "

- Dickens, A Christmas Carrol

many more, but this is what i'm reading right now so...

 

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligencies far greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

H.G. Wells 'War of the Worlds'

 

"Howard Roark laughed."

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand...don't give me arguments against her style because i'll agree probably agree and like it anyway.