JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 170
Just a slight, little quiz here, a true/false quiz, linking great first sentences to their novels. Hint: they're all true. I just wanted to see them collected like this.
(1) "All children, except one, grow up." Peter Pan
(2) "In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines lived twelve little girls in two straight lines." Madeline, Ludwig Bemelmans
(3) "The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home." Wind in Willows, Kenneth Grahame
(4) "In the great green room, there was a telephone and a red balloon." Goodnight Moon, MW Brown
(5) "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 conversation?" Alice in Wonderland.
(6) "When Mrs. Frederick C. Little's second son arrived, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse." Stuart Little EB White
(7) "This is George. He lived in Africa." Curious George HA Rey
(8) "Chug, chug, chug. Puff, puff, puff. Ding-dong, ding-dong." The Little Engine that Could
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(9) "For many days we had been tempest-tossed." Swiss Family Robinson
(10) "The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it." Black Beauty
(11) "I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751, when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father's house." Kidnapped
(12) "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." Tale of Two Cities
(13) "Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo." Portrait of the Artist
(14) "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." Great Expectations
(15) "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." Personal History David Copperfield
(16) "The day broke gray and dull." Of Human Bondage
(17) "Now, what I want is Facts." Hard Times
(18) "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." Good Soldier, FM Ford
(19) "As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream. " Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
(20) "I am an invisible man." Invisible Man R Ellison
(21) "Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York." Tree Grows in Brooklyn Betty Smith
(22) "In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since." Great Gatsby
(23) "The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there"." In Cold Blood.
(24) "A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hill-side bank and runs deep and green." Of Mice and Men
(25) "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow." To Kill a Mockingbird
(26) "In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together." Heart is a Lonely Hunter
(27) "Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting." Sound and the Fury
(28) "Isaac McCaslin, 'Uncle Ike', past seventy and nearer eighty than he ever corroborated any more, a widower now and uncle to half a county and father to no one ---- this was not something participated in or even seen by himself, but by his elder cousin, McCaslin Edmonds, grandson of Isaac's father's sister and so descended by the distaff, yet not withstanding the inheritor, and in his time the bequestor, of that which some had thought then and some still thought should have been Isaac's, since his was the name in which the title to the land had first been granted from the Indian patent and which some of the descendants of his father's slave still bore in the land." Go Down Moses
(29) "Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth." Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
(30) "To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth." Grapes of Wrath