A Literary Lines Quiz

by

Lauren Roberts

How do you look for books when you are browsing? Probably the same way I do. You scan the shelves, head turned sideways until you come to an intriguing title. You pull it out, look at the front cover, then the back. Then you open it to the first page and read the first line or first paragraph or maybe the first page. Often you read a chapter or a couple of pages in the middle to get a feel for the author’s style, but most often it is that first sentence that determines whether you will try it or not.

Opening lines. Somehow, someway, they have to grab you by the throat and yank you into the book if they are going to get your attention. It matters not whether it is fiction or non-fiction. One of my all-time favorite first lines—though I love the entire first paragraph—comes from Orchid Fever, a book about plant obsession: There is something distinctive about the sight and sound of a human body falling from the rain forest canopy. The breathless scream, the wildly gyrating arms and legs pumping thin air, the rush of leaves, snapping branches, and the sickening thud, followed by an uneasy silence. Listening to that silence, I reflected on how plant collecting can be an unpleasant sort of activity.

I shiver a little every time I come across it, and imagine how the editor who found that on her desk felt. If her reaction was anything like mine, she bought that book on the spot.

Not all memorable first lines need to be EXCITING!, but they should be powerful in some way. This week we’re going to have some fun with a quiz that highlights how even short and simple lines—if they are specific, thoughtful and intriguing—can entice and seduce. See how many of the following books, some fiction, some nonfiction, you can identify by their opening lines without googling them. Answers are at the end of the column.

(1)  They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.

(2)  It was love at first sight.

(3)  We are at rest five miles behind the front.

(4)  I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.

(5)  When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan riders galloped up to our home in Omaha, Nebraska, one night.

(6)  No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

(7)  A screaming comes across the sky.

(8)  ‘To be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die.’

(9) Bill Nagle’s life changed the day a fisherman sat beside him in a ramshackle bar and told him about a mystery he had found lying at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

(10) He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.

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

(12) One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.

(13) Mother died today.

(14) It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

(15) There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.

(16) By ten-forty-five it was all over.

(17) It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.

(18) It is cold at 6:40 in the morning of a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed.

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

(20) I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

(21) It was the day my grandmother exploded.

(22) You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.

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

(24) Madam, I sit down to give you an undeniable proof of my considering your desires as indispensable orders.

(25) I am an invisible man.

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

(27) 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.

(28) Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.”

(29) A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

(30) The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods.

(31) In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together.

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

(33) About fifteen years ago, at the end of the second decade of this century, four people were standing together on the platform of the railway station of a town in the hills of western Catawba.

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

(35) The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken.

(36) Mostly out of laziness, I decided to start my low-wage life in the town nearest to where I actually live.

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

(38) The telephone rang, and it chanced to be answered by the lame butler whom Lanny had hired in Spain.

(39) Straddling the top of the world, one foot in China and the other in Mepal, I cleared the ice from my oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind, and stared absently down at the vastness of Tibet.

(40) The senior partner studied the résumé for the hundredth time and again found nothing he disliked about Mitchell Y. McDeere, at least not on paper.

(41) If you are ever in Brooklyn, that borough of superb sunsets and magnificent vistas of husband-propelled baby carriages, it is to be hoped you may chance upon a quiet by-street where there is a very remarkable bookshop.

(42) I am living at the Villa Borghese.

(43) In 1815, M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D.

(44) The studio was filled with the rich odor of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amid the trees of the garden there came through the open door the heavy scent of lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

(45) The British are frequently criticized by other nations for their dislike of change, and indeed we love England for those aspects of nature and life which change the least.

(46) Not long after I moved with my family to a small town in New Hampshire I happened upon a path that vanished into a wood on the edge of town.

(47) I was seized by the idea of this book while sitting on a rotten little beach at the western tip of Crete, flanked by a waterlogged shoe and a rusted potty.

(48) 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, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

(49) It was a funeral to which they all came.

(50) All this happened a good many years ago.

Almost since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That “talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for her local newspaper and contributing editor to Booklist and Bookmarks magazines have reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, 750 bookmarks and nearly 1,000 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it


Answers:
1.  Wide Sargasso Sea
2.  Catch-22
3.  All Quiet on the Western Front
4.  The Razor's Edge
5.  The Autobiography of Malcolm X
6.  War of the Worlds
7.  Gravity's Rainbow
8.  The Satanic Verses
9.  Shadow Divers
10. Orland0     
11. Neuromancer
12. The Crying of Lot 49
13. The Stranger
14. Paul Clifford
15. Silent Spring
16. The Moon is Down
17. City of Glass
18. The Day of the Jackal
19. The Sound and the Fury
20. I Capture the Castle
21. The Crow Road
22. Frankenstein
23. The Bell Jar
24. Fanny Hill
25. Invisible Man
26. Murphy
27. David Copperfield
28. The Making of the Americans
29. The End of the Affair
30. Babbitt
31. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
32. The Red Badge of Courage
33. Of Time and the River
34. Lady Chatterley’s Lover
35. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
36. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
37. The Go-Between
38. Dragon Harvest
39. Into Thin Air
40. The Firm
41. The Haunted Bookshop
42. Tropic of Cancer
43. Les Misérables
44. The Picture of Dorian Gray
45. Mutiny on the Bounty
46. A Walk in the Woods
47. Travels with Myself and Another
48. A Tale of Two Cities
49. A Bright Shining Lie
50. The Narrow Corner