Fun Friday Quiz

I’m still working on the pictures from New Zealand. In the mean time, I thought I’d post a fun little Friday quiz for you literary types. 

You may or may not know that I’m a “first line” buff. That is I’m crazy about the first sentences of books, plays, poetry, etc. I especially like the ones that become as famous as the work itself. So, in honor of first lines, here’s a little quiz to test your literary mettle.

Arranged by brevity (shortest sentence first), try guessing the author, work and year it was published. (Highlight the blank space below the clue to reveal the answer.)

Call me Ishmael.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851

Mother died today.
Albert Camus, The Stranger, 1946

I am an invisible man.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952

It was love at first sight.
Joseph Heller, Catch-22, 1962

It was a pleasure to burn.
Ray Bradgury, Farenheit 451, 1953

All this happened, more or less.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, 1955

I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, 1864

In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together.
Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, 1940

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
George Orwell, 1984, 1949

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922

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.
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1885

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.
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 1929

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, 1963

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.
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939

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

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss, 1978

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.
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859

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

I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my fiends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot,” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Stammerer,” or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled.
Robert Graves, I, Claudius, 1934

The trackback URL for this entry is: http://www.nwoutdoorgrrl.com/index.php/trackback/283/

Trackbacks:

newegg

newegg

Comments:

Hey, you forgot this one:

There are some things nobody needs in this world, and a bright-red, hunch-back, warp-speed 900cc cafe racer is one of them - but I want one anyway, and on some days I actually believe I need one.

Hunter S. Thompson, “Song of the Sausage Creature”, Cycle World, 1995

Name:

Email:

Location:

URL:

Smileys

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

Please enter the word you see in the image below:

<< Back to main