I have run my own contest along these lines in the past - similar to what we will do with the Movie Guessing Game on Thursday - but just now I came across a thing on American Book Review which listed the 100 Best First Lines of Novels.
I have stripped out the authors in the list below - so why don't you all have a go at guessing these suckers? Some are obvious - some have the titles of the books IN the sentence - but here they all are. Some of the books I have never even HEARD of - but some of you may be familiar with them.
GO! GUESS! NOW!!!
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. A screaming comes across the sky.
4. 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.
5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
7. 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.
8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
9. 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.
10. I am an invisible man.
11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard.
12. 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.
13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
16. 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.
17. 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.
18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
19. I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.
20. 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.
21. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
22. 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.
23. 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.
24. 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.
25. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
26. 124 was spiteful.
27. 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.
28. Mother died today.
29. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.
30. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
31. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man.
32. Where now? Who now? When now?
33. 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."
34. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner.
35. It was like so, but wasn't.
36. —Money . . . in a voice that rustled.
37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
38. All this happened, more or less.
39. They shoot the white girl first.
40. For a long time, I went to bed early.
41. The moment one learns English, complications set in.
42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.
43. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane;
44. Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.
45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation.
47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
48. 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.
49. It was the day my grandmother exploded.
50. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
51. Elmer Gantry was drunk.
52. We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
53. It was a pleasure to burn.
54. 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.
55. Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression.
56. I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho' not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call'd me.
57. In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.
58. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
59. It was love at first sight.
60. What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?
61. I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.
62. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.
63. The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.
64. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
65. You better not never tell nobody but God.
66. "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die."
67. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
68. Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.
69. If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
70. Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.
71. Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.
72. When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson.
73. Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World.
74. She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him.
75. 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.
76. "Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.
77. He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.
78. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
79. On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.
80. Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.
81. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash.
82. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
83. "When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing."
84. In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.
85. 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.
86. It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man.
87. 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 friends 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.
88. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women.
89. I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.
90. 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.
91. I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl's underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self.
92. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
93. Psychics can see the color of time it's blue.
94. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together.
95. Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen.
96. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.
97. 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.
98. High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.
99. They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.
100. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.
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.
Unfurling below you are unidentified first lines of novels.
Please begin the beguine. Some of these are translations, and I feel a bit odd about that, like I should post it in the original. A couple of these books I have ONLY read in their original language - one in particular - I think the first line of this particular book is FAR better in the original language - but oh well. No need to be too pedantic. Chill out, Sheil-babe. It's Saturday.
(Emily? If you're out there? I posted a couple of these for you. You too, Dan - one of these I picked out for you, knowing that you love the author - or ... I seem to recall that you do!)
Oh, and provide title and author, please. (There's a bunch still un-guessed in the lines I posted earlier today.)
Have at it.
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories.
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
On top of everything, the cancer wing was Number 13.
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head.
Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow loveable.
1801 -- I have just returned from a visit to my landlord -- the solitary neighbor that I shall be troubled with.
One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away.
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.
The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth.
Robert Cohn was once the middle-weight boxing champion of Princeton.
Weidmann appeared before you in a five o'clock edition, his head swathed in white bands, a nun and yet a wounded pilot fallen into the rye one September day like the day when the world came to know the name of Our Lady of the Flowers.
The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home.
A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.
It is three hundred forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago today that the citizens of Paris were awakened by the pealing of all the bells in the triple precincts of the City, the University, and the Town.
Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the popholes.
Someone must have traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called True Stories from Nature, about the primeval forest.
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?"
"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.
Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.
It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?
Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos.
riverrun, past Eve and Adam's from swerve of share to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
"To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die."
The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum!
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
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.
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.
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing; -- that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibily the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind; -- and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost: -- Had they duly weighted and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly, -- I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.
"Where's Papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
In the ancient city of London, on a certain autumn day in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, a boy was born to a poor family of the name of Canty, who did not want him.
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, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way-- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
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....