Can you identify these famous first lines?
1. Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
2. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
3. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
4. Call me Ishmael.
5. Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?
6. 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.
7. I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man.
8. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
9. In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.
Answers:
ReplyDelete1. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
2. George Elliot, Middlemarch
3. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
4. Herman Melville, Moby Dick
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
6. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
7. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
8. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
9. Ludwig Bemelmans, Madeline
The only one I knew was from Melville. As a matter of fact, the guest author at the Kachemak writers' conference did an entire presentation on how to write the first sentence of a book and he focused on why "Call me Ishmael" is so powerful! Lorna bee
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