First Lines

Have you ever picked up a book, opened to the first page and been absolutely enthralled by the first sentence or the first paragraph? . Here are some of my all-time favorite openers which immediately hooked me. Can you guess the authors and/or the titles? I've left out names which would make it TOO obvious. And there will be no CHEATING!! No googling!

1. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. (Jane Austen - Pride & Prejudice)

2. You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of ____; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by______ and he told the truth mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. (Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)

3. So. The Spear Danes in days gone by and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness. We have heard of those princes heroic campaigns. There was ___, scourge of many tribes. A wrecker of mead benches, rampaging among foes. This terror of the hall-troops had come far. A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on as his powers waxed and his worth was proved. In the end, each clan on the outlying coasts had to yield to him and begin to pay tribute. That was one good king. (Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf)

4. ____ cut a comical little figure as he wobbled his way along the cloisters, with his large sandals flip-flopping and his tail peeping from beneath the baggy folds of an oversized novice's habit. (Brian Jacques - Redwall)

5. The last drops of the thundershower had hardly ceased falling when the Pedestrian stuffed his map into his pocket, settled his pack more comfortably on his tired shoulders, and stepped out from the shelter of a large chestnut tree into the middle of the road. (C.S. Lewis - Out of the Silent Planet)

6. In a hole in the ground there lived a ____. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a ____ hole, and that means comfort. (J.R.R. Tolkien - The Hobbit)

7. Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings. Her forward expression was steady and driving like the advance of a heavy truck. Her eyes never swerved to the left or right but turned as the story turned as if they followed a yellow line down the center of it. She seldom used the other expression because it was not often necessary for her to retract a statement, but when she did, her face came to a complete stop, there was an almost imperceptible movement of her black eyes, during which they seemed to be receding, and then the observer would see that Mrs. Freeman, though she might stand there as real as several grain sacks thrown on top of each other, was no longer there in spirit. (Flannery O'Connor - Good Country People)

8. There once lived, in a sequestered part of the country of Devonshire, one Mr. Godfrey ____; a worthy gentleman, who, taking it into his head rather late in life that he must get married, and not being young enough or rich enough to aspire to the hand of a lady of fortune, had wedded an old flame out of mere attachment, who in her turn had taken him for the same reason. Thus two people who cannot afford to play cards for the money, sometimes sit down to a quiet game for love. (Charles Dickens - Nicholas Nickleby)

9. It was___,it was____, 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 far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil in the superlative degree of comparison only (Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities)

10. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. This was the beginning with God and the duty of every faithful monk would be to repeat every day with chanting humility the never-changing event whose incontrovertible truth can be asserted. But we see now through a glass darkly, and the truth, before it is revealed to all, face to face, we see in fragments (alas, how illegible) in the error of the world, so we must spell out its faithful signals when they seem obscure to us and as if amalgamated with a will wholly bent on evil. (Umberto Eco - The Name of the Rose)