Great Opening Lines

In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and the fools of the London coffee houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cook, more ambitions 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 Junipers, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taught with similes stretched to the snapping-point. --The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth