'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.'

This line begins the 1938 novel Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier: "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." It's one of the best-known opening lines from all literature, even if it owes its fame at least in part to the 1940 Hitchcock movie.

It's an example of a truly writerly opening line. It's simple, beautiful, haunting. An amateur would have written a sentence double or triple the length and cluttered it with adverbs, adjectives and flowery details. Maybe Du Maurier did write something more complex, but what she ended up were nine words that worked: "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."