A bonus quiz today, suggested by nursemyra on the moby dick haiku post.
How many famous first lines can you identify?
Can you think of any others?
My score was 8/10
famous first line quiz
10 Sunday Feb 2008
10 Sunday Feb 2008
A bonus quiz today, suggested by nursemyra on the moby dick haiku post.
How many famous first lines can you identify?
Can you think of any others?
My score was 8/10
casa azahar 
Here are a couple from nursemyra (9/10) …
1. “Mother died today….”
2. “Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way….”
Do you know which books they are from? I don’t, but they both sound familiar.
If you like, number your quotes so that people can refer back to them more easily.
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I got 8/10, though I had to guess a couple.
Quote no. 2 is from “Anna Karenina”, I think.
3. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”
4. “The bees of Death are big and black.”
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8 out of 10. Mistook Frankenstein for Dracula (at least I was in the right ball park). Disgracefully mistook Pride and Prejudice for Jane Eyre!
5. “It all began the day my grandmother exploded.”
6.“Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again.”
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I mistook Scarlet & Black for War & Peace, and Middlemarch for 39 Steps.
3 – obviously The Hobbit
4 – ooooh, I know (well, knew) this one!
5 – no idea, but I know I’ve heard or read it before
6 – sounds very familiar
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Ooh ooh, number 4 is a Pratchett book, but which one? Nog tells me it isn’t Mort.
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no 6 is Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. would love to know no 5. what is it bluesshark?
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Nooooo… wait for someone to guess! 🙂
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Eight out of 10 for me – one of those I’d gotten wrong, I’d already read, others I’d never read, I got right!
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Surely, if 4 is a Pratchett, it’s either Wyrd Sisters or Lords and ladies – ie it’s the one where Granny Weatherwax does the bee trick, but I can’t remember which one that is. I’m thinking it’s Lords and Ladies because Wyrd Sisters is the Shakespeare pastiche…
Az – you probably know 5 because I always quote it as my absolute favourite first line in the history of literature.
6 was of course a gimme, but then so is ‘Call Me Ishmael’.
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It’s neither of those, blues.
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And Nog says it’s from one that I don’t have (and I have at least 25 Pratchett books) so I obviously have no idea which one it could be.
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Probably one of the ones about Death then , which narrows it down.
Reaper MAN?
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5/10
Not that bad considering I’ve not read all of them in English.
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7/10 : screwed up on Man and Boy, Pride and Prejudice, and – horror of horrors – Frankenstein – I read Dracula at least 10 times in high school and college.
I’m so ashamed.
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Not Reaperman, blues…
Yes, I can imagine things would get lost in translation, dq.
There was a clue word for me in the Frankenstein opening line – I didn’t actually remember it, though I have read it.
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another favourite first line is from a book I no longer have so I can’t verify (unless I use google but that’s cheating) but I think it’s goes like this
“my family had always been into death, we kept an ice pick at the table in case anyone needed an emergency tracheotomy”
I SO want to perform an emergency tracheotomy! once I found a book in the library called “the 72 most commonly performed operations and how to do them”. I photocopied the page on tracheotomies just in case I was ever near a choking person. (And this was in the days before I worked at the gimcrack 🙂
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8/10
And I have read almost none of those – just “educated” guesswork.
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7/10, including a guess (using elimination), so more accurately 6/10
Man I love “The Catcher in the Rye”
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I got 9 out of 10. Missed “Man and Boy” which I have never read.
I got the others except for the beginning of the Terry Pratchett quote. 36 is Iain Banks’s “The Crow Road”
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Oh geez, I must must proofread: #5 Is the Iain Banks. Geez.
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I got 7 out of 10. Oh my, time to step away from the television and computer and crack open a classic book every now and again.
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Hi LazyBuddhist and welcome!
Want to stump us with an opening line? 🙂
7/10 isn’t bad … is it?
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Hmm.. I got 6/10 and two of those were guesses. I only guessed the Harry Potter one right because it was such an awful opening line it had to be! 😉
So,
7. “Modern thought has realised considerable progress by reducing the existent to the series of appearances which manifest it.”
Not a novel, but philosophy buffs ought to know it. 🙂 Nog?
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