How to start a book

Whenever I pick up a book for the first time and read the first paragraph or two, I always wonder to myself how long the author took to create that particular opening. Starts have usually been difficult for me, and, usually, I write one that I know I will throw out in favor of a revised version, generally made after the completion of the work. I really like Nabokov's opening paragraphs to his story. I had never really thought about the world without me in it. Egocentric, perhaps, but unlike the chronophobiac in his first paragraph, I know nothing of a world before I was here, and so it has little impact on my personal consciousness. I do, however, like the idea of looking at our lives as "a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness." (p. 1) I can relate to this, since we cannot truly know what happened before our birth and we will never know what will happen after our death. To us, then, is left only a single span of time wrapped between a pair of eternities that we can know nothing about. I would like to end on the final sentence from the second paragraph: "In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much." (p. 2) To me this means that life might get boring if we lived forever. In order to properly appreciate the time that we are given, we must have an expiration date.