First Lines from Novels

Question 1

All children, except one, grow up.

Answer 1

J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan (1911)

Question 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.

Answer 2

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

Question 3

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Answer 3

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

Question 4

Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the popholes.

Answer 4

George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945)

Question 5

You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.

Answer 5

Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

Question 6

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.

Answer 6

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

Question 7

The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry.

Answer 7

Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895)

Question 8

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

Answer 8

Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (1938)

Question 9

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen

Answer 9

George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

Question 10

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

Answer 10

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Question 11

When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.

Answer 11

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)

Question 12

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.

Answer 12

Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis (1915)

Question 13

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.

Answer 13

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)

Question 14

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Answer 14

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

Question 15

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.

Answer 15

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)

Question 16

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

Answer 16

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

Question 17

For a long time, I went to bed early.

Answer 17

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1913)

Question 18

Call me Ishmael.

Answer 18

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

Question 19

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

Answer 19

Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)

Question 20

I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.

Answer 20

Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (1847)

Question 21

Marley was dead, to begin with.

Answer 21

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)

Question 22

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

Answer 22

George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)

Question 23

It was a pleasure to burn.

Answer 23

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

Question 24

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Answer 24

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877)

Question 25

This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.

Answer 25

William Goldman, The Princess Bride (1973)

Question 26

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.

Answer 26

Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925)

Question 27

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticising any one, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.

Answer 27

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

Question 28

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

Answer 28

D,H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)

Question 29

124 was spiteful.

Answer 29

Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

Question 30

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Answer 30

William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

Question 31

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.

Answer 31

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)

Question 32

The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended.

Answer 32

Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Question 33

Mother died today. Or maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.

Answer 33

Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942)

Question 34

A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, and, in a shield, the World State’s motto, Community, Identity, Stability.

Answer 34

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)

Question 35

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.

Answer 35

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)

Question 36

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.

Answer 36

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)

Question 37

My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.

Answer 37

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)

Question 38

All this happened, more or less.

Answer 38

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Question 39

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

Answer 39

J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

Question 40

Under certain circumstance there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

Answer 40

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1880)

Question 41

The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.

Answer 41

Stephen Crane, The Red Badge Of Courage (1895)

Question 42

That was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.

Answer 42

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

Question 43

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.

Answer 43

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847)

Question 44

The year 1866 was signalized by a remarkable incident, a mysterious and inexplicable phenomenon, which doubtless no one has yet forgotten.

Answer 44

Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea (1870)

Question 45

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

Answer 45

Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)

Question 46

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.

Answer 46

Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Question 47

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

Answer 47

Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)

Question 48

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

Answer 48

L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)

Question 49

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

Answer 49

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)

Question 50

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.

Answer 50

Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye (1988)