You asked, so here's my list, organized by why I like them:
Contradiction in words, often indirect : e,g., hot/cold; west/east; woman/man; pleasure/pain; happy/sad; nurture/destroy; life/death; pride/shame)
*It's hot as hell in Martirio, but the papers on the porch are icy with the news.
Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre.
*The sun sets in the west (just about everyone knows that), but Sunset Towers faced east.
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
*The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard.
Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West
*It was a pleasure to burn.
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.
*You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Immediate conflict ahead:
(Violence/ injustice)
*Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner
*There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
*Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
*Amergo Bonasera sat in New York Criminal Court Number 3 and waited for justice; vengeance on the men who had so cruelly hurt his daughter, who had tried to dishonor her.
The Godfather by Mario Puzo
*The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger by Stephen King
*I heard the mailman approach my office door, half an hour earlier than usual. He didn't sound right. His footsteps fell more heavily, jauntily, and he whistled. A new guy. He whistled his way to my office door, then fell silent for a moment. Then he laughed.
Storm Front by Jim Butcher
Makes you ask 'why?' Or 'what happens next?'
(Unexpected, unusual, unconventional):
*First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
*Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
The Trial by Franz Kafka.
*I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army.
Old Man's War by John Scalzi
*Kidnapping children is never a good idea; all the same, sometimes it has to be done.
Island of the Aunts by Eva Ibbotson
*We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
*The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault.
Blood Rites by Jim Butcher
Bizarre:
*In my earliest memory, my grandfather is as bald as a stone and he takes me to see the tigers.
The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht.
*'Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.
The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay.
*Jasper Maskelyne was drinking a glass of razor blades when the war began.
The War Magician by David Fisher
*It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.
Promises a great story:
*Not every 13-year-old girl is accused of murder, brought to trial, and found guilty.
The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi
*1801 – I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.
Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë
*Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.
*The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years - if it ever did end - began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.
IT by Stephen King
*This time there would be no witnesses.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, by Douglas Adams
*It was a diamond all right, shining in the grass half a dozen feet from the blue brick wall.
The Dain Curse, by Dashiell Hammett
Unexpected truism:
*It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
*Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
*Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.
*The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
A Bend in the River, by V.S. Naipaul
*Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
*The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
The Call of Cthulhu, by H. P. Lovecraft
*All children, except one, grow up.
Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie
Unique attitude or voice:
*I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased.
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
*If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me thought Moses Herzog.
Herzog by Saul Bellow
*That's good thinking there, Cool Breeze.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
*You better not never tell nobody but God.
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
*If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger.
*The story so far: In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
*Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure.
The Stranger by Albert Camus
