Novel Quiz: Famous Opening Lines

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."

Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Angels and Insects, A. S. Byatt

The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka

Kiss of the Spider Woman, Manuel Puig

"All children, except one, grow up."

Winnie the Pooh, A. A. Milne

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Caroll

Madeline, Ludwig Bemelmans

Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

The Fall of the House of Usher, Edgar Allan Poe

Dead Souls, Nikolay Gogol

Paul Clifford, by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton.

Bleak House, Charles Dickens

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James

The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Tennessee Williams

"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 ..."

Double Indemnity, James M. Cain

The Two Towers, J. R. R. Tolkien

All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

"Call me Ishmael."

Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe

Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed

Moby Dick, Herman Melville

The Letter of Marque, Patrick O’Brian

"Call me Jonah."

Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut

Moby Dick, Herman Melville

Catch-22, Joseph Heller

The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon

"I am a sick man ... I am a spiteful man."

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak

The Misanthrope, Molière

Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"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."

The Garden of Forking Paths, Jorge Luis Borges

Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar

One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez

The Old Gringo, Carlos Fuentes

"The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended."

Dune, Frank Herbert

2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury

"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."

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger

The Outsiders, S. E. Hinton

"'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die.'"

The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth

The Serpent and the Rope, Raja Rao