The Opening Lines Quiz

Here we go fellow bibliophiles. 50 Opening Lines from famous books 📚

Once you have written down ALL the Titles and Authors

 (1 point each) Click Here for the answers. 

We start with the easy peasy lemon squeezy ones first and then it's on to the more tricky ones.

They range from classics to modern and from horror to poetry.

 Some are one liners others are whole paragraphs. 

Some you can guess from the context, others you cant.

 Hopefully a little something for everyone. Good Luck 😁 

 1. Call me Ishmael  

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

3. 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.

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

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

6. All children, except one, grow up.

7. Amergo Bonasera sat in New York Criminal Court Number 3 and waited for justice; vengeance on the men who had so cruelly hurt his daughter, who had tried to dishonor her.

8. No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were being scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

9. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

10. Marley was dead, to begin with.

11. 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.

12. In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort

13. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

14 .All this happened, more or less.”

15.We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold

16 .It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York

17. In fairy-tales, witches always wear silly black hats and black coats, and they ride on broomsticks. But this is not a fairy-tale. This is about REAL WITCHES.

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

19. Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

20. This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.

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

22. It’s a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.

23.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

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

 25. A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words “Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre” and, in a shield, the World State's Motto: “Community, Identity, Stability”.

26. It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs Shears' house. Its eyes were closed.

27. Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.

28. In the week before their 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

29. It was a pleasure to burn.

30. 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

31. The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there

32. 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.

33. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

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

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

36. Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter.

37. People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day.

38. When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none.

39. Tom glanced behind him and saw the man coming out of the Green Cage, heading his way. Tom Walked faster. There was no doubt the man was after him.

40.The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail.

41. In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages. His story will be told here. His name was Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, and if his name – in contrast to the names of other gifted abominations, de Sade’s, for instance, or Stain-Just’s, Fouché’s, Bonaparte’s, etc. – has been forgotten today, it is certainly not because Grenouille fell short of those more famous blackguards when it came to arrogance, misanthropy, immortality, or, more succinctly, wickedness, but because his gifts and his sole ambition were restricted to a domain that leaves no traces in history: to the fleeting realm of smell.

42. 3 May. Bistritz. Left Munich at 8.35pm, on 1 May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6.46pm, but train was an hour late.

43. To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobble streets silent and the hunched, courters' and rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.

44.Well, let's start with Elizabeth, shall we? And see where that gets us?I knew who she was, of course; everybody here knows Elizabeth. She has one of the three-bedroom flats in Larkin Court. It's the one on the corner, with the decking? Also, I was once on a quiz team with Stephen, who, for a number of reasons, is Elizabeth's third husband.

45. Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband.

46. Three hundred and forty–eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago to–day, the Parisians awoke to the sound of all the bells in the triple circuit of the city, the university, and the town ringing a full peal.

47. umber whunn yerrrnnn umber whunnn fayunnn These sounds: even in the haze.

48. Mr Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable

49. A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.

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