Opening Lines

[jackie_w]

2: Anna Karenina - Tolstoy
1: The Silmarillion - Tolkien
5: A Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula Le Guin

[John F]

Oops, nevermind.

[Apache]

Originally Posted by Pulpmeister

#3 is actually from "Fletch's Fortune".

And the first 4 that "everyone knows" were of course (although "everyone" in relation to the last is a bit presumptuous):

Rebecca
Pride and Prejudice
The Bridge at San Luis Rey
Paul Clifford (by Bulwer-Lytton)

I read all of the Fletch books years ago. I knew it was his quote but, I was guessing on the actual book.
I actually like Gregory McDonald's other series better. The Francis Xavier Flynn series was even quirkier than the Fletch series.
Apache

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by Apache

I read all of the Fletch books years ago. I knew it was his quote but, I was guessing on the actual book.
I actually like Gregory McDonald's other series better. The Francis Xavier Flynn series was even quirkier than the Fletch series.
Apache

Quotes are funny things. One of the most famous quotes of all times "Play it Again, Sam" is actually a misquote. In the movie, Casablanca, it's always "Play it, Sam".

Famous opening lines is a fun topic. There are so many opening lines that set the tone for the rest of the book. A good opening line can really hook a reader. For example, Call me Ishmael is very meaningful to someone of Melville's original audience. It was the best of times and the worst of times, really does sum up the start of the French Revolution. Of course, it's also a fun trivia game.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Here's seven classics for you:

So there's only one left to get:

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”

This is the opening line of one book in a series of books.

The first lines of most of the rest of the books give the game away immediately, but here's a couple that don't:

"This is a story about something that happened long ago when your grandfather was a child."

"It was a dull autumn day and Jill Pole was crying behind the gym."

So - identify all three books, and the series!

[PeterT]

"This is a story about something that happened long ago when your grandfather was a child."
The Magician's Nephew

"It was a dull autumn day and Jill Pole was crying behind the gym."
The Silver Chair

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Narnia / C.S. Lewis

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by PeterT

"This is a story about something that happened long ago when your grandfather was a child."
The Magician's Nephew

"It was a dull autumn day and Jill Pole was crying behind the gym."
The Silver Chair

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Narnia / C.S. Lewis

Full marks!

[pdurrant]

How about this one.

"Part of the problem, Nita thought to herself as she tore desperately down Rose Avenue, is that I can’t keep my mouth shut."

[pdurrant]

And from a completely different genre:

"This story's about greed, desire, love and death – in the world of antiques you get them all."

[BenG]

1. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology.

2. I am a watchdog. My name is Snuff.

3. Daddy said it was a bedsheet, a fitted bedsheet, and he said she was wearing it up on her shoulders like a cape with two of the corners knotted around her neck. She was standing barefoot on an oak stump, he said, standing on the one nearest the front walk where there was ordinarily a clay pot of geraniums, and he said her hair was mostly braided and bunned up in the back but for some few squirrel-colored strands of it that had worked their way loose and hung kind of wild and scraggly down across her forehead and almost to her nose. She was talking, he said. Then he stopped himself and creased the newspaper twice and put it in his lap, and he changed it to ranting, full-fledged bad-planking-in-the-attic ranting. It was something about Creon, he said, something about Creon and the stink of corpses.

4. There were five of us—Carruthers and the new recruit and myself, and Mr. Spivens and the verger. It was late afternoon on November the fifteenth, and we were in what was left of Coventry Cathedral, looking for the bishop’s bird stump.


5. There were no lions any more. There had been lions once. Sometimes in the shimmer of the heat on the plains the motion of their running still flickered on the dry wind — tawny, great, and quickly gone. Sometimes the honey-colored moon shivered to the silence of a ghost-roar on the rising air.

There were no chariots any more. The chariots, wind-bereft and roadless in the night, slept with their tall wheels hushed in the tomb of the last king.


6. I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice-not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God...

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

And from a completely different genre:

"This story's about greed, desire, love and death – in the world of antiques you get them all."

I'm guessing that's one of the Lovejoy novels by Jonathan Gash.

[poohbear_nc]

6. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by BenG

1. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology.

The Once and Future King by T. H. White.

[poohbear_nc]

4. To Say Nothing of the Dog - Connie Willis

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

Dick said, "Look, look. Look up. Look up, up, up."

Still unnamed...


1. I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own skeptical incredulity during the days that followed for the balance of the strange tale.

2. On the 24th of May, 1863, my uncle, Professor Liedenbrock, rushed into his little house, No. 19 Königstrasse, one of the oldest streets in the oldest portion of the city of Hamburg.

3. At the hole where he went in, Red-Eye called to Wrinkle-Skin. Hear what little Red-Eye saith: “Nag, come up and dance with death!”

4. Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward, All in the valley of Death, Rode the six hundred.

5. 3 May. Bistritz.—Left Munich at 8:35 p. m. on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets.