Post Quiz: Famous First Lines - Answers
Created | Updated Feb 4, 2018
Read any good books lately?
Famous First Lines: Answers
Does this quiz make you reflect, 'How many actual books have I read in the past six months?'? Maybe it should.
Here are the answers.
- It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen.
- There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte.
- 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 all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. Catcher in the Rye, by JD Salingerr.
- 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. Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce.
- Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French. The Luck of the Bodkins, by PG Wodehouse.
- Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. Rebecca, by Daphne Du Maurier.
- I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith.
- It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath.
- 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. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez.
- Call me Ishmael. Moby Dick, by Herman Melville. (We had to give you one easy one.)
Harder than it looked? Full disclosure: your Editor hadn't even heard of two of these books. That's how British they were. More for the reading list.