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All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Not every book starts off with an opening line so memorable that it stays with you until the last of the nine-hundred-odd pages of Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina".
Other memorable lines, such as "A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else", reveal themselves only on page three of Richard Flanagan's "The Narrow Road to the Deep North", by which time the reader is so drawn in by the miraculous writing that he cannot stop.
"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us" wrote Kafka. Both those lines fit this description and I have often wondered how writers come up with such verbal gems. Were they sudden discoveries, or did they have to be cut and polished before they broke open that "frozen sea within us"? Perhaps they collected them like lesser beings collect postage stamps or beer mats, to be shown off when the time us right.
A favourite writer of mine, W. Somerset Maugham, kept "A Writer's Notebook" in which, on rifling through, I found passages I had already been familiar with from reading his many novels and short stories.
As for "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" and "A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else", there's no need to write them down. I can relate to them and they will stay with me until I may one day write my autobiography.
