WRITERS SENTENCED TO THEIR OWN SENTENCES AND THEN FREED

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.

  KEEP A  HOME READING RECORD like this:

AUTHOR        TITLE           PAGES              DATE