Weekly Geeks #21: Name that (first) line!

Dewey‘s theme for Weekly Geeks #21 is sort of a combination group project / scavenger hunt / contest: 

Below, you’ll find a list of 100 first lines from books. The basic project is to identify their sources.

1. Look over the list of first lines. How many can you identify immediately? Post these in your blog, with the answer (the book title and author). If you’re not 100% positive of your answer, please Google the line to be sure. Otherwise, your wrong answer will be spread around to other bloggers. Step 1 is the most basic step in the project.

2. If you like, list a few or more first lines without answers and ask your readers if they can identify any of them. It’s fine to list all of them for your readers to look at, if you’re so inclined.

3. If you want to, you can also go around visiting other Weekly Geeks and commenting with the answers to any lines that stumped them. The more WGs you visit, the more will visit you!

4. If you want to take part in a contest to see who can get all 100 lines identified, visit the Weekly Geeks who sign Mr Linky (at Dewey’s Weekly Geeks post linked above), take their identified lines from their blogs and post them in your own post. Your own list will grow this way. Please don’t forget to link to any Weekly Geeks whose identified lines you take!

5. If you eventually have all 100 lines identified in your blog post, please email me at dewpie at gmail dot com. Don’t email me if you get all 100 by looking at the blog of someone else who got all 100, though, because obviously that person beat you to it.

6. There is a prize! If no one gets all 100 answers, the prize goes to the blogger who gets the most. If multiple bloggers get all 100, the winner is the first person who emails me a link to a post with all 100 correct answers.

7. I’ll offer the winner a choice of a few of the prizes I was setting aside for the read-a-thon and he or she will get to choose one. These choice won’t be anything donated by other bloggers, though, because those bloggers intended those prizes for the read-a-thon.

I started by reviewing the list to identify the first lines I knew right off the bat, and those answers are in black bold font. Next, I checked out a few of the other Weekly Geeks participants in my Google Reader feeds to see if they might be able to help me out, and quite a few were – those responses are linked to the blogs where I found them, with my thanks!

*But before I share those, I’ll list the first lines – in blue – that I was unable to identify even with help. If you know any of them – please observe Dewey’s rules above and do NOT Google them except to confirm that your response is correct! – please leave a comment with the line number (or quote the whole thing if you want), book title, and author. I will edit this post to include your response and a link to you!

33. Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.”
34. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner.
35. It was like so, but wasn’t.

36. —Money . . . in a voice that rustled.

41. The moment one learns English, complications set in.

42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.

46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex’s admonition, against Allen’s angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa’s antipodal ant annexation.

49. It was the day my grandmother exploded.

52. We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
55. Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression.

57. In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.

60. What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?

63. The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.

70. Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.

72. When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson.

73. Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World.

76. “Take my camel, dear,” said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.

80. Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.

84. In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.

86. It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man.

91. I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl’s underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self.

93. Psychics can see the color of time it’s blue.

95. Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen.

Here’s the rest of the first-lines list, with the answers, for your reading enjoyment:

1. Call me Ishmael. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. A screaming comes across the sky. Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon (Joanne @ Book Zombie) 
4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. Finnegan’s Wake, James Joyce (Eva @ Striped Armchair) 
8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. 1984, George Orwell (Eva @ A Striped Armchair) 
9. 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. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathanael West (Rachel @ Not Another Mom, via Joanne @ Book Zombie) 
12. You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.The Trial, Franz Kafka (Eva @ A Striped Armchair) 
14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino (Eva @ A Striped Armchair) 
15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy, Samuel Beckett (Maree @ Just Add Books, via Joanne @ Book Zombie) 
16. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
17. 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. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce (Alessandra @ Out of the Blue via Joanne @ Book Zombie) 
19. I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne (Alessandra @ Out of the Blue via Joanne @ Book Zombie) 
20. 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. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens (Eva @ A Striped Armchair) 
21. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. Ulysses, James Joyce (Yasmin @ APOOO Books via Joanne @ Book Zombie) 
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 house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. Paul Clifford, Edward Bulwer-Lytton (OK, full disclosure: I looked this one up. I knew the author of this most infamous first line, but didn’t know the name of the book – does anyone know anything except the first line?)
23. One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon (Joanne @ Book Zombie) 
24. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. City of Glass, Paul Auster (Joanne @ Book Zombie) 
25. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (Megan @ Leafing Through Life) 
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. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
29. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. Waiting, Ha Jin
30. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. Neuromancer, William Gibson (Joanne @ Book Zombie) 
31. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky (Megan @ Leafing Through Life) 
37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
38. All this happened, more or less. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut (Joanne @ Book Zombie) 
40. For a long time, I went to bed early. Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust (Rachel @ Not Another Mom)
43. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov (Shelly @ Chain Reader via Rachel @ Not Another Mom)
45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton (Susan @ Just Books via Rachel @ Not Another Mom) 
47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis (Eva @ A Striped Armchair) 
48. 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. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
50. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
51. Elmer Gantry was drunk. Elmer Gantry, Sinclair Lewis
54. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. The End of the Affair, Graham Greene (Joanne @ Book Zombie) 
56. I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho’ not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call’d me. Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
58. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Middlemarch, George Eliot (Eva @ A Striped Armchair) 
62. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. Back When We Were Grownups, Anne Tyler (Softdrink(Jill)/Valerie @ Fizzy Thoughts via Rachel @ Not Another Mom)
64. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (Rachel @ Not Another Mom) 
65. You better not never tell nobody but God. The Color Purple, Alice Walker (Eva @ A Striped Armchair) 
66. “To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.” The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie (Eva) 
67. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath (Samantha @ Book Minx via Joanne @ Book Zombie) 
68. Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. The Broom of the System, David Foster Wallace (Lenore @ Presenting Lenore via Joanne @ Book Zombie)
69. If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. Herzog, Saul Bellow (Rachel @ Not Another Mom) 
71. 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. The Tin Drum, Gunter Grass (Melydia @ It Never Stops via Rachel @ Not Another Mom)
74. She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. The Wings of the Dove, Henry James (Susan @ Just Books via Rachel @ Not Another Mom) 
75. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway (Susan @ Just Books via Rachel @ Not Another Mom) 
77. He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad (Susan @ Just Books via Rachel @ Not Another Mom) 
78. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley (Katherine @ A Girl Walks Into a Bookstore via Rachel @ Not Another Mom) 
79. On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. Riddley Walker, Russell Hobam (Maree @ Just Add Books via Rachel @ Not Another Mom)
81. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. Crash, J.G. Ballard (Joanne @ Book Zombie)
82. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith (Eva @ A Striped Armchair) 
83. “When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.” Geek Love, Katherine Dunn (Megan @ Leafing Through Life)
85. When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. Last Good Kiss, James Crumley (Joanne @ Book Zombie) 
87. I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot,” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Stammerer,” or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled. I, Claudius, Robert Graves (Megan @ Leafing Through Life) 
88. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I’ve come to learn, is women. Middle Passage, Charles Johnson (Yasmin @ APOOO Books via Rachel @ Not Another Mom) 
89. I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow (Softdrink(Jill)/Caite @ Fizzy Thoughts via Rachel @ Not Another Mom) 
90. The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis (Susan @ Just Books via Rachel @ Not Another Mom) 
92. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. Scaramouche, Rafael Sabatini (Becca via Joanne @ Book Zombie) 
94. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers (Rachel @ Not Another Mom) 
96. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood (Joanne @ Book Zombie) 
97. He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. Orlando, Virginia Woolf (Dreamybee @ Subliminal Intervention via Joanne @ Book Zombie) 
98. High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. Changing Places, David Lodge (Penryn @ Penryn’s Dreams via Rachel @ Not Another Mom) 
99. They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys (Rachel @ Not Another Mom) 
100. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane (Icedream @ Reading in Appalachia via Rachel @ Not Another Mom)

Join in on the “unknowns”, or share a favorite first line, in the comments!

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7 comments

  1. Yasmin – So you did :-), but I got your answers secondhand!

    Karen H – It’s actually been fun. I’m sure some participants have worked at it a lot harder than I have, though (although putting so many links into a post is a time-eater in itself!).

  2. Wow – what an amazing post! I’ll have to go back and really take some time with it – lots to absorb and learn…and blanks to fill in…

    Cool!

  3. Well, the only ones I would know you already answered, but you probably expected that. I’m better at remembering endings than beginnings for some reason.

  4. Mike – Most of the ones I knew were pretty obvious. I’m impressed that some of the Weekly Geeks were able to identify so many!