First Line to Book

Call me Ishmael

It was a bright day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

It was a pleasure to burn

Tell me Muse, the story of that resourceful man who was driven to wander far after and wide after he had sacked the holy citadel of Troy

When Gregor Samsa woke up from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed right there in his bed into some sort of monstrous insect.

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

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

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.

Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called True Stories from Nature, about the primeval forest. It was a picture of a boa constrictor in the act of swallowing an animal.

Centuries ago there lived— “A king!” my little readers will say immediately. No, children, you are mistaken. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.

In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind ...

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

Once there was a tree, and she loved a little boy.

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.

One Christmas Eve, many years ago, I lay quietly in my bed.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ...

In a hole in the ground there lived a ____.

A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism.

When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold.

When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.

We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.

A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green.

The called him Moishe the Beadle, as if his entire life he had never had a surname.

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975.

It was seven o'clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills when Father Wolf woke up from his day's rest scratched himsel yawned, and spread out his paws.

Once upon a bye, there was a mischievous boy named ____ _____, who was always getting into trouble, getting off on danger.

Marley was dead, to begin with.

In the week before the departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.

The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way towards the lagoon.

My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.

The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play, so we sat in the house all that cold, cold wet day.

The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years-if it ever did end-began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.

When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.

All children, except one, grow up.

What's it going to be then, eh?

"Where's Papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank.

Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy.

The year of grace 1866 was made memorable by a marvelous event which doubtless still lingers in men's minds.

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.

All this happened, more or less.

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 ...

On the 24th of February, 1815, the look-out at Notre–Dame de la Garde signalled the three-master, the Pharaon, from Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples.

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of [another answer on this quiz]; but that ain't no matter.

A told B and B told C, I'll meet you at the top of the coconut tree.

In the light of the moon, a little egg lay on a leaf.

The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another his mother called him...

It was five o’clock on a winter’s morning in Syria.

Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow...