Memorable First Lines: A Quiz by Susan Van Kirk

 

First lines often make great books memorable, and they’re quoted for years. Writers, even now, are told to make their first lines memorable. Consider the first line of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Three words. I’ll bet you can remember them from your high school English class. I thought I’d collect some first lines from books in my earlier life as an English teacher. Do you know the title of the books that contain these first lines? The answers are at the end, but don’t peek.

 

1. “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.

2. “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.”

 

3. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”       

 

4. “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”

 

5. “When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister’s address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money.”

 

6. “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."

 

7. “The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.”

 

8. “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.”

 

9. “I went back to Devon School not long ago, and found it looking oddly newer than when I was a student there fifteen years before.”

 

10. “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.” [So, I had to throw in an easy one.]

 

11. “When he was three, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.”

 

12. “My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.”

 

 

 

 

 

Answers: 1. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott 2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald  3. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen  4. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier  5. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser   6. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck  7. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane  

8. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne 9. A Separate Peace by John Knowles  10. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell  11. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee  12. The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy

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