Most writers are remembered for their famous sentences. In between the opening lines and the final lines of a good novel or play there lies an immense array of emotions, powerful feelings and experiences turned into a work of art: a liberation in most cases.
See if you can identify both the author and the title of the following masterpieces:(We are just providing you with the initials)
1) . Call me Ishmael. —H. M, M-D
2. It is a truth universally
acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must
be in want of a wife. —J A, P & P)
3. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.- G.O. N.E.F.
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. —G. G
M, O H Y o S
5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —V N, L
6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —L T, A K
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. —J J, F W
8. 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. D.D. R.C.
9.The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art´s aim.O.W. T.P o D.G.
10. Mr and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. J.K. R. H.P & t P.S.
11.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. —C D, ATo TC.
12. I am an invisible man. —R. E., I M
13. 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. —N
W, M L
14. 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. —M T, A o H F
15. 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.
—J. D. S, T C i t R
16 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. —J J, A P o t A a a Y M
17. This is the saddest story I have ever heard. —F M F T G S
18. 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. —L S, T S
19. 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. —C D, D C
20. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came
from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a
razor lay crossed. —J J, U
22. 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. —M d C, D Q
23. Mother died today. —A C, T S
24. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. —F D N f t U
25. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. —V W, M. D
26. I had the story, bit by bit, from
various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it
was a different story. —E W, E F
27. 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. —E H, T O M a t S
28. Elmer Gantry was drunk. —S L, E G
29. 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. —G G, T E o t A
30. It was love at first sight. —J H, C-22
31. I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. —W. S M, T R's E
32. 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. —G. K. C, T N of N H
33. In my younger and more vulnerable
years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my
mind ever since. —F. S F T G G
34. If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. —S B, H
35. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. —L. P. H, T G-B.
36. 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. —R G I C
37.This is a tale of arms and of a man.Fated to be an exile, he was the first to sail from the land of Troy and reach Italy at its Lavinian shore. V T AE
38. 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. —J
H, S S
39. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. —CMC, T H i a L H
40. 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. —D
L, C P
NOW TEN BOOKS ABOUT SPAIN I LOVE DEEPLY:
41. The stooping figure of my mother, waist-deep in the grass and caught there like a piece of sheep´s wool, was the last I saw of my country home as I left to discover the world. L. L. A I W O O MM
42.The dirt road wound upwards between narrow terraces of olives and wheat, circling on itself without destination. R. F. T P A M V o t C d S
43.Spain is almost an island-a fragment crudely soldered, so the poet Auden thought, to the shape of Europe. J. M. S.
44.Like many other Spanish place-names the name Alcalá derives from an Arabic word. J.A.P.R. T P o t S..
45.We left Northolt airport just before sunrise and flew under a ceiling of grey clouds. Caen, Bordeaux, Saint Jean de luz G.B. T F o S
46. The kingdom of Spain, which looks so compact on the map, is composed of many distinct provinces, each of which in earlier times formed a separate and independent kingdom. R.F. G f S
47. Our house stands upon a little hill. Its windows look southward across the vega, the fertile, low-lying plain that skirts the Andalusian coast. M G.H. M F
48 . On the morning of 10th of November 1835, I found myself off the coast of Galicia, whose lofty mountains, gilded by the rising sun, presented a magnificent appearance. G.B. T B i S.
49. It was in September 1919 that I went to Spain for the first time. I had just been demobilized and I was looking for a house where I could live for as long as possible on my officer´s bounty. G.B. S f G.
50. A few weeks ago, I carelessly let fall the remark:" I should be glad to go to Spain!" T.G. A R i S.
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