is this example plagiarism?

I believe you are over-thinking it. Do some more research. If you copied the opening paragraph of a "famous" novel, it would quite probably be. One innocuous line? I don't think so.

No. Almost everything ever written has some sentences that are similar to something else. That's just part of language. It's very difficult to have a completely unique sentence.

Plagiarism occurs when the copying couldn't have reasonably happened coincidentally. A single common phrase doesn't count.

One of the nice things about plagiarism is that it's so very, very easy to avoid. The only way to plagiarize is to intentionally copy another work. To do so unintentionally is nigh impossible.* As long as you're writing your own stories in your own words, it's an issue that you can comfortably ignore.

Now that doesn't mean you can't be accused of plagiarism (i.e. that woman who's trying to claim that Frozen ripped off her autobiography despite the fact that said autobiography made no mention of supernatural ice powers or roly-poly-trolls), but the accusations will be meaningless.

*The only exception I've heard to this (depending on which account you believe) is the incident of "The Frost King," a story that Helen Keller wrote when she was 11 and which proved to be a retelling of a story that had been read to her previously. There's still a debate as to whether the copying was intentional or, as Keller claims, she forgot that she had heard it and genuinely believed at the time of writing that it was her own original story. Additionally, the plagiarized piece was paraphrased, not the word-for-word copying the OP discussed.

Tazlima said:

Now that doesn't mean you can't be accused of plagiarism (i.e. that woman who's trying to claim that Frozen ripped off her autobiography despite the fact that said autobiography made no mention of supernatural ice powers or roly-poly-trolls), but the accusations will be meaningless.

*The only exception I've heard to this (depending on which account you believe) is the incident of "The Frost King," a story that Helen Keller wrote when she was 11 and which proved to be a retelling of a story that had been read to her previously. There's still a debate as to whether the copying was intentional or, as Keller claims, she forgot that she had heard it and genuinely believed at the time of writing that it was her own original story. Additionally, the plagiarized piece was paraphrased, not the word-for-word copying the OP discussed.

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Also, when it comes to stuff like copying plots, the similarities usually have to be pretty specific and major for it to be considered plagiarism or copyright infringement.

Again, like you say, plagiarism is really hard to do by accident.

enkidu007 said:

I was reading a couple of threads on plagiarizing here, and some people were saying that if you take a sentence from another person that is plagiarism. If that is the case then almost everyone plagiarizes.

Example.
I write have this sentence in my book.

“She could not understand what was happening to her”

When I googled it, a bunch of other books have the exact phrase. So am I plagiarizing them? Will people who use that exact sentence be plagiarizing me if they write that after I publish my book?

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No. Plagiarism would be copying a UNIQUE sentence, one that would not appear anywhere but one novel.

Your above sentence looks to be quite general and, as you determined, would likely appear several places. Similarly, the sentence "she loved him" would not be unique and surely appears many places, because people have said and written it and variations on it so many times.

But this sentence:

"He loved Big Brother."

even though it is quite short, is unique. It's from a specific novel, and is RECOGNIZABLE as being from that novel.

"Call me Ishmael."

No one will ever find me out.

Nope

Not plagiarism at all. For something to be plagiarized, legally, you have to have the presumption of copying a unique thought (or series of connected thoughts) in a non transformative manner.

If someone writes: "He had a pen." You can copy it because it can hardly be considered a unique thought.

If someone writes: "Mr. Oglethorpe lifted the dinky little pen. He had received it as a child. From his mother--a tiny thing coated in grimy fingerprints from years of use."

You've actually got a number of unique things there. Independently, you could go ahead and copy the thoughts--provided they aren't used in an identical manner. You can have a Mr. Oglethorpe who also lifts a pen, who also got it from his mother. But at that point, you'd need to switch the language, the plot, and your transformed language's purpose in the story structure. (Doing this will almost certainly piss off other authors though, if they ever get word )

So, if something is an obvious turn of phrase--feel free to use it. But as one of the other commenters pointed out, there's a good chance it might by cliche. If you lift something unique to another author's work... Then it should act more like a starting point to add new work inspired by it, rather than just trying to rip language wholesale.