Not So Famous Opening Lines

The opening lines of a novel are Important.  It is that moment when a potential reader flips through your novel and either decides to buy in and read on, or puts it back on the shelf.  The opening lines of so many classics have become quite famous and I am not going to repeat them here. 

But here are a few opening lines from some very big bestsellers that are also some of my favorite novels.  Can you guess the novel?  

Send in your guesses via the comments.  No prizes, no bells or whistles, no standing ovation, no ribbons - just bragging rights if you guess all or any of them -- okay, okay, here's a little confetti .

 

Not So Famous Opening Lines

1.    The doctor woke up afraid.  He had been dreaming of the old house in New Orleans again.  He had seen the woman in the rocker.  He’d seen the man with the brown eyes.

2.     For the first fifteen years of our lives, Danny and I lived within five blocks of each other and neither of us knew of the other’s existence.

3.      The small boys came early to the hanging.  It was still dark when the first three or four of them sidled out of the hovels, quiet as cats in their felt boots.  A thin layer of fresh snow covered the little town like a coat of new paint, and theirs were the first footprints to blemish its perfect surface.

4.     A man with binoculars.  That is how it began: with a man standing by the side of the road, on a crest overlooking a small Arizona town, on a winter night.

5.      Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.  First, picture the forest.  I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees.  The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason.  

6.      Almost everyone thought the man and the boy were father and son.  They crossed the country on a rambling southwest line in an old Citroen sedan, keeping mostly to secondary roads, traveling in fits and starts. 

7.      Once upon a cold and luminous Saturday morning, in an urban hamlet of tenements, factories, and trolley cars on the western slopes of the borough of Brooklyn, a boy named Michael Devlin woke in the dark.

Answers will be posted soon.