Crooked Timber has a post gathering the best opening or close lines of academic texts. Here is one submission, from the opening lines of Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques:

Travel and travellers are two things I loathe—and yet, here I am, all set to tell the story of my expeditions. But at least I’ve taken a long while to make up my mind to it: fifteen years have passed since I left Brazil for the last time and often, during those years, I’ve planned to write this book, but I’ve always been held back by a sort of shame and disgust. So much would have to be said that has no possible interest: insipid details, incidents of no significance. Anthropology is a profession in which adventure plays no part; merely one of its bondages, it represents no more than a dead weight of weeks or months wasted en route; hours spent in idleness when one’s informant has given one the slip; hunger, exhaustion, illness as like as not; and those thousand and one routine duties which eat up most of our days to no purpose and reduce our “perilous existence” in the virgin forest to a simulacrum of military service…

The best ending section I have written is still probably from Nostalgic Angels, my first book; it is a little over-wraught, but at the ending, you get like that:

Imperfect angels, nostalgic for a past that never was, we might instead learn to live as cyborgs. In mapping hypertext use we do not create a new world from nothing, but we do create discourses in which old worlds might be transformed.

Or there is this text I cribbed from Jeff Noon’s Falling Out of Cars, which ends the last chapter of Datacloud (a chapter completely comprised of quotations from other texts):

Tupelo sleeps on the other bed, breathing gently, and sometimes sighing. I have covered the lamp with an old shirt from my bag; now the light barely touches the girl, but falls steadily on the notebook as I write. I have taken advantage of the needle’s sweetness, to hold the day in words; and the pages I have just written, and the pages already written, they seem to make a kind of sense now. I have knowledge of the story once more, my own story, my place in the story.

[via metafilter.com]