First Few Lines |
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Would you like to play the First Few Lines game? Don't Cheat! Think of all the good books you have read, before checking out the answers. Have Fun! |
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Opening Lines |
Answer |
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1. |
On they went, singing 'Eternal Memory', and whenever they stopped, the sound of their feet, the horses and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing. Passers-by made way for the procession, counted the wreaths and crossed themselves. Some joined in out of curiosity and asked: 'Who is being buried?' ... |
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2. |
On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor. |
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3. |
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. |
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4. |
This is the saddest story I have ever heard. |
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5. |
"I am a sick man ... I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver. |
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6. |
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.' |
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7. |
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen. |
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8. |
The unusual events described in this chronicle occurred in 194- at Oran. Everyone agreed that considering their somewhat extraordinary character, they were out of place there. |
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9. |
Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster. |
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10. |
Somebody must have made a false accusation against Josef K., for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong. |
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11. |
For a long time I would go to bed early. Sometimes, the candle barely out, my eyes closed so quickly that I did have time to tell myself: 'I'm falling asleep.' And half an hour later the thought that it was time to look for sleep would awaken me, |
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12. |
Harry Joy was to die three times, but it was his first death which was to have the greatest effect on him, and it is this first death which we will now witness. |
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13. |
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball nets were still in place, though the nets were gone. |
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14. |
Idle reader, you can believe without any oath of mine that I would wish this book, as the child of my brain, to be the most beautiful, the liveliest and the cleverest imaginable. But I have been unable to trangress the order of nature, by which like gives birth to like." (from the prologue) In a certain village in La Mancha, which I do not wish to name, there lived not long ago a gentleman - one of those who have always a lance in the rack, ... (from the first chapter) |
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15. |
'What's it going to be then, eh?' There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat ... |
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16. |
I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull. |
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17. |
On a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky. She saw no Indians now; she saw flour-mills and the blinking windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis and St. Paul. |
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18. |
'And so they've killed our Ferdinand,' said the charwoman to _______, who had left military service years before, after having been finally certified by an army medical board as an imbecile, and now lived by selling dogs - ugly, mongrel monstrosities whose pedigrees he forged. |
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19. |
A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the flesh balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. |
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20. |
There lived in Westphalia, at the country seat of Baron Thunder-ten-tronckh, a young lad blessed by nature with the most agreeable manners. You could read his character in his face. He combined sound judgement with unaffected simplicity. |
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21. |
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question. |
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22. |
Mr. ___, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brother-in-law. It could be done, because there was very little business at any time, and practically none at all before the evening. |
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23. |
In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of ___, the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity- had never been comercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo. |
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24. |
Mr. ___, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table. I stood upon the hearth-rug and picked up the stick which our visitor had left behind him the night before. |
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25. |
He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. |
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26. |
It was love at first sight. The first time ____ saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him. ____ was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled by the fact it wasn't quite jaundice. |
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27. |
____'s first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that ____ was apparently not to arrive till evening he was not wholly disconcerted. |
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28. |
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 ____'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. |
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29. |
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. |
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30. |
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. |
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31. |
The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and withdrawn way of life. |
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32. |
'And - and - what comes next?' 'Oh, yes, yes, what the dickens comes next? C'est la question, ma tres chere demoiselle' |
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33. |
Six North Africans were playing boules beneath ____'s statue. Clean cracks sounded over the grumble of jammed traffic. With a final, ironic caress from the fingertips, a brown hand dispatched a silver globe. |
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34. |
At the rise of the curtain somone is taking a shower in the bathroom, the door of which is half open. A pretty young woman, with anxious lines in her face, enters the bedroom and crosses to the bathroom door. ____ [shouting above roar of water]: One of those no-neck monsters hit me with a hot buttered biscuit so I have t'change! |
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35. |
At one o'clock on a spring day of 1868, in Petersburg, a man of twenty-seven, carelessly and shabbily dressed, was mounting the back stairs of a five-storied house in Officers' Street. |
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36. |
The new church of St. John's, on Fifth Avenue, was thronged the morning of the last Sunday of October, in the year 1880. Sitting in the gallery, beneath the unfinished frescoes, and looking down the nave, one caught an effect of autumn gardens, a suggestion of chrysanthemums and geraniums, or of October woods, dashed with scarlet oaks and yellow maples. |
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37. |
Around quitting time, Tod Hackett heard a great din on the road outside his office. The groan of leather mingled with the jangle of iron and over all beat the tattoo of a thousand hooves. He hurried to he window. |
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38. |
Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos. |
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39. |
I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead. |
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40. |
The morning express bloated with passengers slowed to a crawl, then lurched forward suddenly, as though to resume full speed. The train's brief deception jolted its riders. The bulge of humans hanging out of the doorway distended perilously, like a soap bubble at its limit. |
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41. |
May in ________ is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun. |
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42. |
'The Signora had no business to do it,' said ___ _____, 'no business at all. She promised us ... ' |
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43. |
Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John. |
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44. |
On August 23, the day before the hurricane struck, Max and Bonnie Lamb awoke early, made love twice and rode the shuttle bus to Disney World. |
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45. |
All of this happened while I was walking around starving in Christiania -- that strange city no one escapes from until it has left its mark on him.... |
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46. |
GRANTED: I AM an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. |
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47. |
IT WAS INEVITABLE: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide. |
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