Quiz  /  Memorable Beginnings Vol. 1: Match the Opening Line to the Work Quiz

  • 1. 
    “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 …”

  • William Makepeace Thackeray, The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon (1856)
  • Samuel Richardson, Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740)
  • Lawrence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759—67)
  • Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (1749)

  • 2. 
    “Now it comes on the spring of 1931, after a long hard winter, and times are very tough indeed, what with the stock market going all to pieces, and banks busting right and left, and the law getting very nasty about this and that, and one thing and another, and many citizens of this town are compelled to do the best they can.”

  • Raymond Chandler, “Trouble is My Business” (1939)
  • John Dos Passos, The Big Money (1936)
  • Damon Runyon, “The Snatching of Bookie Bob” (1950)
  • Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man (1934)

  • 3. 
    “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

  • Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1875—77)
  • Vladimir Nabokov, Ada (1969)
  • Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (1862)
  • Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  • 4. 
    “‘All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike …’”

  • Vladimir Nabokov, Ada (1969)
  • Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)
  • Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (1862)
  • Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1875—77)

  • 5. 
    “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …”

  • Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857)
  • Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
  • Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd (1874)
  • Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862)

  • 6. 
    “I am an invisible man.”

  • H.F. Saint, Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1987)
  • H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man (1897)
  • Philip Roth, My Life as a Man (1974)
  • Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

  • 7. 
    “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.”

  • Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (1866)
  • Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (1958)
  • Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925)
  • Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (1930—43)

  • 8. 
    “Call me Ishmael.”

  • Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)
  • Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
  • Sir Walter Scott, Waverley (1814)
  • Anthony Trollope, The Warden (1855)

  • 9. 
    “She was so deeply embedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.”

  • Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
  • John Updike, Rabbit Run (1960)
  • Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
  • George Orwell, “Such, Such Were the Joys” (1952)

  • 10. 
    “I am a sick man … I am a spiteful man.”

  • Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward (1968)
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground (1864)
  • Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (1912)
  • Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)
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