I have put the references for these famous and not-so-famous first lines in white font, so that if you move your cursor to highlight the spaces immediately after the quote, you should be able to read the reference. How many can you guess without looking?
1. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. ~Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
2. 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. ~Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
3. Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. ~Daphne DuMaurier, Rebecca
4. There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb and he almost deserved it. ~C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
5. 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. ~Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
6. Now, Bix Rivers has disappeared, and who do you think is going to tell his story but me? Maybe his stepfather? Man, that dude does not know Bix deep and now he never will, will he? ~Bruce Brooks, The Moves Make the Man
7. “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug. “It’s so dreadful to be poor!”
~Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
8. Dr. Strauss says I shud rite down what I think and evrey thing that happins to me from now on. Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
9. It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen. ~George Orwell, 1984
10. All children, except one, grow up. ~J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
11. In the history of the world there have been lots of onces and lots of times, and every time has had a once upon it. ¨~N.D. Wilson, Leepike Ridge
12. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. ~Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
13. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
14. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. ~Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
15. In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. ~JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit
16. Once on a dark winter’s day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares. ~Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess
17. In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines lived twelve little girls in two straight lines. ~Ludwig Bemelmans, Madeleine
18. Mr. and Mrs. Mallard were looking for a place to live. ~Robert McCloskey, Make Way for Ducklings
19. 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?” ~Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
20. Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. ~Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind
21. As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into a giant insect. ~Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis
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 housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. ~Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford
23. Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know. Albert Camus, The Stranger
24. Taran wanted to make a sword; but Coll, charged with the practical side of his education, decided on horseshoes. ~Lloyd Alexander, The Book of Three
25. Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter. ~Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit
26. As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a den, and laid me down in that place to sleep and as I slept, I dreamed a dream. ~John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress
27. Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost. ~Dante Alighieri, Inferno
28. The year that Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette. ~William Goldman, The Princess Bride
29. True! –nervous—very, very nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? ~Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart
30. As I sat in the bath-tub, soaping a meditative foot and singing, if I remember correctly, “Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar,” it would be deceiving my public to say I was feeling boomps-a-daisy. ~P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit
31. “Where’s Papa going with that axe?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast. ~E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
32. My name is India Opal Buloni, and last summer my daddy, the preacher, sent me to the store for a box of macaroni-and-cheese, some white rice, and two tomatoes and I came back with a dog. ~Kate DiCamillo, Because of Winn-Dixie
33. We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck. M.T. Anderson, Feed
34. On the morning of the best day of her life, Maud Flynn was locked in the outhouse singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” ~Laura Amy Schlitz, A Drowned Maiden’s Hair
35. The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. ~Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
36. There are dragons in the twins’ vegetable garden. ~Madeleine L’Engle, A Wind in the Door
37. I have had not so good of a week. ~Sara Pennypacker, Clementine
38. To start with, look at all the books. ~Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
39. I saw Byzantium in a dream, and knew that I would die there. ~Stephen R Lawhead, Byzantium
40. The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. ~Natalie Babbit, Tuck Everlasting
41. Rose sat all alone in the big best parlor, with her little handkerchief laid ready to catch the first tear, for she was thinking of her troubles, and a shower was expected. ~Louisa May Alcott, Eight Cousins
42. On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below. ~Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
43. While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton’s Academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour. ~William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
44. Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York. ~William Shakespeare, Richard III
45. What can you say about a twenty-five year old girl who died? ~Erich Segal, Love Story
46. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. O’Henry, The Gift of the Magi
47. Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St. George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge. G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography
48. This is the forest primeval. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline
49. The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail. Peter Benchley, Jaws
50. On the morning of the eleventh of November, 1937, precisely at eleven o’clock, some well-meaning busy-body consulted his watch and loudly announced the hour, with the result that all of us in the dining car felt constrained to put aside drinks and newspapers and spend the two minutes’ silence in rather embarrassed stares at one another or out of the window. James Hilton, Random Harvest
51. Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
52. This is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
53. Mark was eleven and had been smoking off and on for two years, never trying to quit but being careful not to get hooked. John Grisham, The Client
54. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The Bible, Genesis
55. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Bible, The Gospel of John
How many did you guess right? What are your favorite opening lines from your favorite books?
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