Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, and books on tape. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.
My favorite first line. Despite the jokes, I like it. Madeleine L’Engle use the first part in Wrinkle in Time.
"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."
Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)
I hope you have fun with this.
The lists where I got these so you can find those I didn’t use are here:
http://classiclit.about.com/...
http://www.stylist.co.uk/...
http://americanbookreview.org/...
http://en.wikiquote.org/...
Some are really too easy, but oh, well! They are still fun. I have not read all of the books, but my readers have. Some authors that are hard may kindle an interest to check them out. I sometimes did not recognize the first lines of a book I had read…sigh. There are a few plays and movies included. I have read or watched 33 of the authors below.
Answers below.
1. Call me Ishmael.
2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
3. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
4. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
5. Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.
6. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
7. 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.
8. NARRATOR: Marley was dead. There is no doubt whatsoever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker and the chief mourner.
9. 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.
10. Narrator: In the year Eighteen Hundred and Seven, a small ship of the Royal Navy set sail from England for a secret destination. With five million French and Spanish soldiers poised on the Continent under Napoleon, nothing could save England from invasion except her 300 ships. HMS Lydia was soon far beyond battle-charged Europe. Under the most secret of sealed orders, she sailed for southern waters, fought her way around the Horn... headed north again into the Pacific. For seven months, she stayed out of sight of land. Becalmed finally, her weary crew toiled at the oars in the vain hope of towing her into a wind. They thirsted and hungered and wondered where she was going, what they would do when they got there... if she got there. These were things known only to one man.
11. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
12. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
13. Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.
14. For a long time, I went to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not time to say 'I am going to sleep.' And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light...
15. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane.
16. Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.
17. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
18. It was a pleasure to burn.
19. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
20. It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.
21. Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.
22. A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hill-side bank and runs deep and green.
23. I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.
24. I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
25. There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it.
26. I sing of arms and the man, he who, exiled by fate,first came from the coast of Troy to Italy, and to Lavinian shores – hurled about endlessly by land and sea, by the will of the gods, by cruel Juno’s remorseless anger, long suffering also in war, until he founded a city and brought his gods to Latium: from that the Latin people came, the lords of Alba Longa, the walls of noble Rome. Muse, tell me the cause: how was she offended in her divinity. how was she grieved, the Queen of Heaven, to drive a man, noted for virtue, to endure such dangers, to face so many trials? Can there be such anger in the minds of the gods?
27. 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.
28. "Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.
29. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
30. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
31. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together.
32. Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes.
33. 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;
34. The year that Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette.
35. Did you hear that? They've shut down the main reactor. We'll be destroyed for sure. This is madness!
36. When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.
37. Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.
38. You better not never tell nobody but God.
39. In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit
40. SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.
Answers:
1. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
2. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
3. Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)
4. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)
5. Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie
6. George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
7. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
8. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
9. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
10. C. S. Forester, dvd Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N. (1951), Gregory Peck, Virginia Mayo, Robert Beatty
11. Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell)
12. James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
13. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605; trans. Edith Grossman)
14. Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (1913; trans. Lydia Davis)
15. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)
16. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
17. Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
18. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
19. George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)
20. Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)
21. Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
22. John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
23. Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind (2001).
24. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
25. Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country (1948)
26. Virgil, Aeneid
27. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)
28. Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (1956)
29. Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)
30. Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921)
31. Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
32. George Orwell, Animal Farm
33. John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
34. William Goldman, The Princes Bride
35. George Lucas, Star Wars
36. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
37. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
38. Alice Walker, The Color Purple
39. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
40. Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
How did you do? What are your favorite first lines that I have not used? Do you have an autumn haiku to share?
Autumn
Tree candles glowing
Golden carpets, bluest skies
Dancing leaf shadows.
cfk
Night
Skeins of geese fly low
A full searchlight beacon moon
Leads us, smiling, home.
cfk
Diaries of the Week:
Write On! Editing-- paper or screen?
by SensibleShoes
http://www.dailykos.com/...
In case you missed this!!
It was a beautiful day - last AIDS Walk Austin diary this year
by anotherdemocrat
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Help Black Children Appear in Children's Books
by The Book Bear
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Robert Fuller says:
The Rowan Tree Chapter 29 has now been posted:
http://www.rowantreenovel.com/...
Still welcoming reviewers.
NOTE:
plf515 has book talk on
Wednesday mornings early
Poll Quotes here:
http://www.brainyquote.com/...
http://www.goodreads.com/...
http://www.quotegarden.com/...
The quotations that got cut off in the poll:
“After the keen still days of September, the October sun filled the world with mellow warmth...The maple tree in front of the doorstep burned like a gigantic red torch…The fields stretched like a carpet of jewels, emerald and topaz and garnet. Everywhere she walked the color shouted and sang around her...In October any wonderful unexpected thing might be possible.”
― Elizabeth George Speare, The Witch of Blackbird Pond
“That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.”
― Ray Bradbury
There is a part of me that will forever want to be walking under autumn leaves, carrying a briefcase containing the works of Shakespeare and Yeats and a portable chess set. I will pass an old tree under which once on a summer night I lay on the grass with a fragrant young woman and we quoted e.e. cummings back and forth.
Roger Ebert
The autumn wind is a pirate. Blustering in from sea with a rollicking song he sweeps along swaggering boisterously. His face is weather beaten, he wears a hooded sash with a silver hat about his head... The autumn wind is a Raider, pillaging just for fun.
Steve Sabol
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel
John Keats, Ode to Autumn