"It was a dark and stormy night"

Edward Bulwer-Lytton was the guy who began his 1830 novel, Paul Clifford, with that. The whole sentence is:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

The Bulwer-Lytton award is given annually for the worst first sentence of a novel. Contestants write deliberately bad opening lines. This year Molly Ringle of Seattle won first prize with this:

For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss — a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil

Maybe I'll have a go at it next year.