A Literary Lines Quiz

by

Lauren Roberts

Opening lines in books should be memorable in some way. Successful ones entice the reader into moving further into the book. This does not mean they need to be EXCITING!, but they should be powerful in a way that grabs a reader by the throat and yanks her into the story. So this week we’re going to have some fun with a quiz for all you literary lovers. See how many of the following books—some fiction, some nonfiction—you can identify by their opening lines without googling them. Answers can be found 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) Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.

(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 Nepal, 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 resume for the hundredth time and again found nothing he disliked about Mitchell Y. McDeere, at least not on paper.

Since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to almost anyone who will listen. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats 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) Lolita

(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