First Lines not yet guessed

The below are un-guessed first lines of novels (from a game played here all weekend).

Anyone? NO CHEATING. Google it if you like, but if you do so – don’t post it. Someone will guess it.

1. A screaming comes across the sky.

2. Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”

Note: This is obviously from ONE of the 2 Lewis Carroll books about Alice. The question now is: which one?? (Er – isn’t that how one of his books ends? “Which one do you think it was?”)

3. Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos.

And that’s IT!

Excellent work, everyone. I am humbled and awed by each and every one of you.

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20 Responses to First Lines not yet guessed

  1. Da Goddess says:

    I have to say, sadly, that I had to Google #1. D’oh!

    But #2 – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. (Helps if you’ve read it 100 times to a kid)

    #3 – Tropic of Capricorn. And that fairly killed my brain, thank you very much.

    So, am I right? Am I right?

  2. Linus says:

    I’ve been away and am just back now, from Delaware. The first is, of course, one of the great opening lines of the last century, from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. The second is, I belatedly agree, from the first Alice book.

    No Googling here. “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.” Or summat.

    Have I mentioned that my chest tattoo is of a muted postal horn? W.A.S.T.E., dudine.

  3. Dave J says:

    I humble myself all the time, so it’s good to know someone else feels the same. Awe, OTOH, that’s considerably rarer. ;-)

    This reminds me that Churchill famously said of Clement Atlee, “he is a humble man, with much to be humble about.”

  4. red says:

    Da Goddess: Yes, indeed, you are right!

    And Linus: you are correct as well. I agree – it’s the best first line, perhaps, of the 20th century.

    And now the game is FINIS.

  5. Emily says:

    Hey, your little game made it into the E-verse Radio newsletter! Woo-hoo!

  6. red says:

    Emily – Actually I pimped it to him. And he complied.

  7. Emily says:

    Oh, in that case, you’re just a slut.

  8. red says:

    I am totally an E-verse slut. I admit it.

  9. Ash says:

    I was a little disapointed not to find this one in the list:

    “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

  10. red says:

    Oh Ash. I put in hours of work to compile all of these. And you’re disappointed. Sheesh.

  11. Ash says:

    OK, that was too strong a word. I’ll shoulda said: I looked for it, and it wasn’t there.

    It’s not you. It’s me: I spent the mid-1980’s obsessing over that novel, and I still have flashbacks. (At one point, I had the first few paragraphs memorized.)

    I also looke for Gatsby, and it was there. Woo hoo!

  12. red says:

    I think I said this to someone else who missed the entire game: I will most DEFINITELY do this again. I left out a couple of my own favorites (Pride and Prejudice is one…)

    I also want to do a “last lines” one.

  13. Emily says:

    Sheila O’Malley – your resident humbled and awed literary E-verse link slut.

    BTW, did you hear that Janet Leigh died?

  14. red says:

    Ernie would crack up to see that comment. heh heh

    Did you notice my Cary Grant top 5s I kept sending him?? I’m a lunatic.

    Yes, I did see that Ms. Leigh died – I was going to post something on it. She was 77 – I can only picture her like she was in Psycho

  15. dad says:

    Dearest: posting stuff like this on weekends is not fair. I’m just reading through all of these quotes now, but knew very few. Lovely quiz. Last lines i’ll know better, but only because of you. love, dad

  16. red says:

    Dad – Yes. You are right. I couldn’t seem to stop myself from posting all of these.

    There’s a ton of first lines I love that I did not include … as well as (heh heh) the “last lines” … I’ll do it again, and make sure to announce it beforehand.

    Of course I didn’t include “stately plump Buck Mulligan”…

  17. Ken Hall says:

    Ash–That’s Neuromancer, ennit?

  18. John says:

    1. Gravity’s Rainbow! The greatest book of the 20th C., beyond doubt.

    2. Alice in Wonderland

    3. ToC, the hottest book being passed around 8th grade class as I was passing through.

    A spectacular taste in books you have!

  19. Ash says:

    Ken Hall:

    Yes, that’s right. From the first line, you knew you were in for some sort of updated noire.

    The Japanese had already forgotten more neurosurgery than the Chinese had ever known. The black clinics of Chiba were the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly, and still they couldn’t repair the damage he’d suffered in that Memphis hotel.

    A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he’d taken and the corners he’d cut in Night City, and still he’d see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void…The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he’d cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn’t there.

  20. Ash says:

    (Oops. Imagine the last paragraph was italicised as well.)

    http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/books/neuromancer.asp

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