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'First Lines' of Books Quizzes and Answers

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We give the first lines, can you name the books?

Quiz I

  1. You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.
  2. To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.
  3. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.




  4. 'Now what I want is, Facts.'
  5. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
  6. On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.
  7. A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hill-side bank and runs deep and green.
  8. The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.
  9. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
  10. One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister.
  11. When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.
  12. Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes.

Answers:

  1. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
  2. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
  3. A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway)
  4. Hard Times (Charles Dickens)
  5. Middlemarch (George Eliot)
  6. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
  7. Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)
  8. Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
  9. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
  10. Howards End (E. M. Forster)
  11. The Day of the Triffids (John Wyndham)
  12. Animal Farm (George Orwell)




The following 'Opening Lines' come from which Famous Books?


  1. Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.
  2. Late in the afternoon of a chilly day in February, two gentlemen were sitting alone over their wine, in a well-furnished dining parlor, in the town of P----, in Kentucky.
  3. When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.
  4. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and razor lay crossed.
  5. Call me Ishmael.
  6. There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
  7. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
  8. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
  9. It was a pleasure to burn.
  10. I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York...
  11. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
  12. It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.
  13. They’re out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them.
  14. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Answers:

  1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Arthur C. Clarke)
  2. Uncle Tom's Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe)
  3. Ulysses (James Joyce)
  4. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
  5. Moby Dick (Herman Melville)
  6. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
  7. The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
  8. David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)
  9. Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
  10. Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe)
  11. 1984 (George Orwell)
  12. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
  13. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Ken Kesey)
  14. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)


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