FINE FIRST LINES: A QUIZ
Match the first lines below with their well-known authors and novels.
| ( ) The small boys came early to the hanging. | 1. Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice |
| ( ) I reached out a hand from under the blankets and rang the bell for Jeeves. | 2. Dickens, Charles: David Copperfield |
| ( ) Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. | 3. Eliot, George: Middlemarch |
| ( ) Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. | 4. Follett, Ken: The Pillars of the Earth |
| ( ) Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. | 5. García Márquez, Gabriel: One Hundred Years of Solitude |
| ( ) It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. | 6. Hardy, Thomas: The Return of the Native |
| ( ) 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. | 7. Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God |
| ( ) Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. | 8. James, Henry: The Portrait of a Lady |
| ( ) Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. | 9. Mitchell, Margaret: Gone with the Wind |
| ( ) No one would have believed in the last years of the nine-teenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own. | 10. Tolstoy, Leo: Anna Karenina |
| ( ) A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. | 11. Wells, H. G.: The War of the Worlds |
| ( ) 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. | 12. Wodehouse, P. G.: The Code of the Woosters |
Cecily Nabors 