First Lines of Books Quiz

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. Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

The Salinas Valley is in North California

The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest

It was love at first sight.

"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."

In the country of Westphalia, in the castle of the most noble baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh, lived a youth whom nature had endowed with a most sweet disposition

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

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.

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

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.

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.

All this happened, more or less / Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time

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.

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.

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