The library column, which received the most comments over the past year, was the quiz on first lines. Here’s another quiz for you. This one may be a little harder than the last but at least nobody’s mother died in this one. The titles and authors are provided below. Don’t peek!

"Frankly my dear, I don’t give a ________." (Fill-in the blank. Okay, so it is not a first line.)

"My father's family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip".

"The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home."

"On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below."

"I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plains of North America." (If you don’t know this one, you are living in the wrong state.)

"At a village of La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to remember, there lived a little while ago one of those gentlemen who are wont to keep a lance in the rack, an old buckler, a lean horse and a swift greyhound."

"I was leaning against a bar in a speak-easy on Fifty-second Street, waiting for Nora to finish her Christmas shopping, when a girl got up from the table where she had been sitting with three other people and came over to me."

"The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way towards the lagoon."

"You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings."

"On December 8th, 1915, Meggie Cleary had her fourth birthday."

Finally, I did not think that "It was a dark and stormy night," was really a first line in a book. I was wrong. (Now, there’s a first.) What is the book, and who is the author? I will not provide the answer. As you teacher probably told you when you asked a question in school, "Look it up."

Answers:

• "Gone With the Wind" – Margaret Mitchell
• "Great Expectations" – Charles Dickens
• "Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
• "Bridge of San Luis Rey" – Thornton Wilder
• "My Antonia" – Willa Cather
• "Don Quixote" – Miguel de Cervantes
• "The Thin Man" – Dashiell Hammett
• "Lord of the Flies" – William Golding
• "Frankenstein" – Mary Shelley
• "The Thorn Birds" – Colleen McCullough

:: Go to Library Home ::

Scottsbluff Public Library :: 1809 Third Avenue :: Scottsbluff, NE 69361 :: 308-630-6250