In Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin, the story begins with Franz Biberkopf being released from prison. This extract, in a translation from the German by Eugene Jolas, is from the beginning of the book, the chapter called Tram 41 Into Town,
where Biberkopf leaves prison.

His punishment was only beginning.
He shook himself and gulped. He trod on his own feet. Then, with a run, took a seat in the car. Right among the people. Off they went. At first it was like being at the dentist’s, when he has grabbed a root with a pair of forceps and pulls; the pain grows, your head threatens to burst. He turned his head back towards the red wall, but the tram went racing on, and only his head was left looking towards the prison. The tram took a bend; trees and houses intervened. Busy streets emerged, Seestrasse, people got on and off. Something inside him screamed in terror: Look out, look out, it’s going to start now. The tip of his nose turned to ice; something was whirring over his cheek. … ‘Any more fares, please?’ The coppers have blue uniforms now. He got off the tram, without being noticed, and was back among people again. What happened? Nothing. Head up, you measly object, you, pull yourself together, or I’ll give you a crack in the jaw! Crowds, what a swarm of people! How they hustle and bustle! My brain needs oiling, it’s probably dried up. What was all this? Shoe-shops, hat-shops, incandescent lamps, pubs. People had to have shoes to run around so much; didn’t we have a cobbler’s shop out there? let’s bear that in mind! Hundreds of polished window panes, let ’em blaze away, are they going to make you afraid or something, why, you can smash ’em up, can’t you, what’s the matter with ’em? They’re polished clean, that’s all. The pavement on Rosenthaler Platz was being torn up; he walked on the wooden planks along with the others. Just go ahead and mix with people, then everything's going to clear up, and you won’t notice anything, you fool. Wax figures stood in the show-windows, in suits, overcoats, with skirts, with shoes and stockings. Outside everything was moving, but - behind it - there was nothing! It - did not - live! It had happy faces, it laughed, waited in twos and threes on the traffic islands opposite Aschinger’s, smoked cigarettes, turned the pages of newspapers. Thus it stood in the street like the street-lamps - and - became more and more rigid. The people were like houses, everything white, everything wooden.

Don DeLillo’s Underworld begins with a description of a famous baseball match in 1950s USA. A local boy, Cotter, has no ticket and prepares to jump the turnstiles.

Cotter thinks he sees a path to the turnstile on the right. He drains himself of everything he does not need to make the jump. Some are still jumping, some are thinking about it, some need a haircut, some have girlfriends in woolly sweaters and the rest have landed in the ruck and are trying to get up and scatter. A couple of stadium cops are rumbling down the ramp. Cotter sheds these elements as they appear, sheds a thousand waves of information hitting on his skin. His gaze is trained on the iron bars projected from the post. He picks up speed and seems to lose his gangliness, the slouchy funk of hormones and unbelonging and all the stammering things that seal his adolescence. He is just a running boy, a half-seen figure from the streets, but the way running reveals some clue to being, the way a runner bares himself to consciousness, this is how the dark-skinned kid seems to open to the world, how the bloodrush of a dozen strides brings him into eloquence.
Then he leaves his feet and is in the air, feeling sleek and unmussed and sort of businesslike, flying in from Kansas City with a briefcase full of bank drafts. His head is tucked, his left leg is clearing the bars. And in one prolonged and aloof and discontinuous instant he sees precisely where he’ll land and which way he’ll run and even though he knows they will be after him the second he touches ground, even though he’ll be in danger for the next several hours - watching left and right - there is less fear in him now.
He comes down lightly and goes easy-gaiting past the ticket taker groping for his fallen cap and he knows absolutely - knows it all the way, deep as knowing goes, he feels the knowledge start to hammer in his runner’s heart - that he is uncatchable.
Here comes a cop in municipal bulk with a gun and cuffs and a flash-light and a billy club all jigging on his belt and a summons pad wadded in his pocket. Cotter gives him a juke step that sends him nearly to his knees and the hot dog eaters bend from the waist to watch the kid veer away in soft acceleration, showing the cop a little finger-wag bye-bye.
He surprises himself this way every so often, doing some gaudy thing that whistles up out of unsuspected whim.
He runs up a shadowed ramp and into a crossweave of girders and pillars and spilling light. He hears the crescendoing last chords of the national anthem and sees the great open horseshoe of the grandstand and that unfolding vision of the grass that always seems to mean he has stepped out from his life - the rubbed shine that sweeps and bends from the raked dirt of the infield out to the high green fences. It is the excitement of a revealed thing. He runs at quarter speed craning to see the rows of seats, looking for an inconspicuous wedge behind a pillar. He cuts into an aisle in section 35 and walks down into the heat and smell of the massed fans, he walks into the smoke that hangs from the underside of the second deck, he hears the talk, he enters the deep buzz, he hears the warm-up pitches crack into the catcher’s mitt, a series of reports that carry a comet’s tail of secondary sound.
Then you lose him in the crowd.

This is the opening of George Eliot’s novel The Mill on the Floss (1860).

A wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea, and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace. On this mighty tide the great ships - laden with fresh-scented fir-planks, with rounded sacks of oil-bearing seed, or with the dark glitter of coal - are borne along to the town of St Ogg’s, which shows its aged, fluted roofs and the broad gables of its wharves between the low wooded hill and the river bank, tinging the water with a soft purple hue under the transient glance of this February sun. Far away on each hand stretch the rich pastures, and the patches of dark earth, made ready for the seed of broad-leaved green crops, or touched already with the tint of the tender-bladed autumn-sown corn. There is a remnant still of the last year’s golden clusters of beehive ricks rising at intervals beyond the hedgerows; and everywhere the hedgerows are studded with trees: the distant ships seem to be lifting their masts and stretching their red-brown sails close among the branches of the spreading ash. Just by the red-roofed town the tributary Ripple flows with a lively current into the Floss. How lovely the little river is, with its dark, changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank and listen to its low placid voice, as to the voice of one who is deaf and loving. I remember those large dipping willows. I remember the stone bridge.
And this is Dorlcote Mill.