Shortly after Amazon introduced the Kindle, they put up a page with a ranked list of the most frequently highlighted passages across all the books. It's not there anymore, but when I first looked at the list in 2013, the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice was in third place. That was all the more impressive because eight of the other top 10 finishers were passages from the Hunger Games series, which was the hit of the season that year, as Austen's novel had been exactly 200
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
We can argue about whether that's the most famous first line in English literature or whether the honor belongs to the opening sentence of Moby Dick or A Tale of Two Cities or 1984. But there's no other opening sentence that lends itself so well to sampling, mash-ups and adaptation.
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