The accepted answer is out of date. It is now possible to read only the first few lines of a parquet file into pandas, though it is a bit messy and backend dependent.
To read using PyArrow as the backend, follow below:
from pyarrow.parquet import ParquetFile
import pyarrow as pa
pf = ParquetFile('file_name.pq')
first_ten_rows = next(pf.iter_batches(batch_size = 10))
df = pa.Table.from_batches([first_ten_rows]).to_pandas()
Change the line batch_size = 10
to match however many rows you want to read in.