'First Lines' of Books Quizzes and Answers
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We give the first lines, can you name the books?
Quiz I
- You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.
- 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.
- 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.
- 'Now what I want is, Facts.'
- Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
- 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.
- A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hill-side bank and runs deep and green.
- The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.
- Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
- One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister.
- When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.
- 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:
- Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
- The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
- A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway)
- Hard Times (Charles Dickens)
- Middlemarch (George Eliot)
- Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)
- Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
- Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
- Howards End (E. M. Forster)
- The Day of the Triffids (John Wyndham)
- Animal Farm (George Orwell)
The following 'Opening Lines' come from which Famous Books?
- Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.
- 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.
- When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.
- Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and razor lay crossed.
- Call me Ishmael.
- There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
- In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
- 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.
- It was a pleasure to burn.
- I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York...
- It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
- It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.
- 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.
- It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Answers:
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (Arthur C. Clarke)
- Uncle Tom's Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe)
- Ulysses (James Joyce)
- To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
- Moby Dick (Herman Melville)
- Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
- The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)
- Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
- Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe)
- 1984 (George Orwell)
- Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Ken Kesey)
- Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
More book trivia...
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