Great opening lines - book, song or speech

[geocycle]

Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French

Had to google to refresh my memory!

 

[Ming the Merciless]

“They say it takes just three alcoholics to keep a small bar running in a country town and while myself and the cousin, Thomas, were doing what we could, we were a man shy, and these were difficult days for Mr Kelliher, licensee of the North Star, Pearse Street.”

 

[Ming the Merciless]

“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door...”

 

[geocycle]

The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home

 

[tyred]

To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind.

A Scandal in Bohemia by ACD.