The Odyssey
Homer

"Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who traveled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy."

The Iliad
Homer

"Sing, O Goddess, the anger of achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans."

In Search Of Lost Time, Vol. 1, Swann's Way
by Marcel Proust

"For a long time I would go to bed early."
(For various reasons, this is one of my favorites. For one thing, it's so simple and short it belies the incredibly long endurance test that follows. Ten words, followed by 1,6 million or so. It took me two years to read all six books (with breaks to read other books of course). But also it's intriguing -- it hints at his neurosis and ill health; it tells us that he is writing this from a distance which gives us a present day to look forward to. And for such a simple statement, it gives away no sense that you're going to be exploring human emotions -- especially jealousy -- to the very end points of their effect. No one has come close to Proust in reaching deeper and deeper into human emotion (and I would add, folly).

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen
by Laurence Sterne

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing; -- that not only the production of a rational Being was concern'd in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind; -- and for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost: -- Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly, -- I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.