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First lines from novels: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Flaubert. Faulkner

A quiz for our readers

The Creation of Adam by Michaelangelo. A "first line announces a new world’s creation."
The Creation of Adam by Michaelangelo. A "first line announces a new world’s creation."

The Book of Genesis begins this way: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” A story or novel or essay or poem’s first line announces a new world’s creation. First lines are tricky to write. You want that initial sentence to beguile, enchant, seduce, invite, plop the reader right down, at once, in this new world you’ve made. Plus, you want this first sentence to work the old abracadabra, to actually bring that new world into being.

Below you will find some of my favorite first lines, all from novels. Author and title are printed further below.

  1. I shall soon be dead at last in spite of it all.
  2. This is a story to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night.
  3. A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment.
  4. At the beginning of the summer I had lunch with my father, the gangster, who was in town for the weekend to transact some of his vague business.
  5. I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life.
  6. “I have been here before,” I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were white with fools’ parsley and meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendor, such as our climate affords once or twice a year, when leaf and flower and bird and sun-lit stone and shadow seem all to proclaim the glory of God; and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.
  7. In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.
  8. “All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,” says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880).
  9. Our prison stood at the edge of the fortress grounds, close to the fortress wall.
  10. The cabin-passenger wrote in his diary a parody of Descartes: “I feel discomfort, therefore I am alive,” then sat pen in hand with no more to record.
  11. Forgive me my denomination and my town; I am a Christian minister, and an American.
  12. Once I was young and had so much more orientation and could talk with nervous intelligence about everything and with clarity and without as much literary preambling as this; in other words this is the story of an unself-confident man, at the same time of an egomaniac, naturally, facetious won’t do — just to start at the beginning and let the truth seep out, that’s what I’ll do •—.
  13. No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine.
  14. There was only one bench in the shade and Converse went for it, although it was already occupied.
  15. Iam all alone in my pad, man, my piled-up-to-the-ceiling-with-junk pad.
  16. If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
  17. Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tidewater dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.
  18. See the child.
  19. He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.
  20. A screaming comes across the sky.
  21. On a cold blowy February day a woman is boarding the ten a.m. flight to London, followed by an invisible dog.
  22. When he is sick, every man wants his mother; if she is not around, other women must do.
  23. Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks, “I have come from Alabama: a fur piece.”
  24. “When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she~ made the nipping off of hoggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned towards her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.”
  25. We were in study hall when the headmaster walked in, followed by a new boy not wearing a school uniform, and by a janitor carrying a large desk.
  26. The station wagons arrived at noon.
  27. It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
  28. Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?
  29. If this typewriter can’t do it, then fuck it, it can’t be done.
  30. In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.

ANSWERS

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Answers:

  1. Samuel Beckett: Malone Dies
  2. John Cheever: Oh, What a Paradise It Seems
  3. Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Native
  4. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
  5. James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room
  6. Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited
  7. Richard Brautigan: In Watermelon Sugar
  8. Vladimir Nabokov: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
  9. Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The House of the Dead
  10. Graham Greene: A Burnt-Out Case
  11. John Updike: A Month of Sundays
  12. JackKerouac: The Subterraneans
  13. Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey
  14. Robert Stone: Dog Soldiers
  15. William Kotzwinkle: The Fan Man
  16. Saul Bellow: Herzog
  17. Jack London: The Call of the Wild
  18. Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian
  19. Ernest Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls
  20. Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow
  21. Alison Lurie: Foreign Affairs
  22. Philip Roth: The Anatomy Lesson
  23. William Faulkner: Light in August
  24. Katherine Dunn: Geek Love
  25. Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
  26. Don DeLillo: White Noise
  27. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Love in the Time of Cholera
  28. Walker Percy: Love in the Ruins
  29. Tom Robbins: Still Life with Woodpecker
  30. Carson McCullers: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
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The Creation of Adam by Michaelangelo. A "first line announces a new world’s creation."
The Creation of Adam by Michaelangelo. A "first line announces a new world’s creation."

The Book of Genesis begins this way: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” A story or novel or essay or poem’s first line announces a new world’s creation. First lines are tricky to write. You want that initial sentence to beguile, enchant, seduce, invite, plop the reader right down, at once, in this new world you’ve made. Plus, you want this first sentence to work the old abracadabra, to actually bring that new world into being.

Below you will find some of my favorite first lines, all from novels. Author and title are printed further below.

  1. I shall soon be dead at last in spite of it all.
  2. This is a story to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night.
  3. A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment.
  4. At the beginning of the summer I had lunch with my father, the gangster, who was in town for the weekend to transact some of his vague business.
  5. I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life.
  6. “I have been here before,” I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were white with fools’ parsley and meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendor, such as our climate affords once or twice a year, when leaf and flower and bird and sun-lit stone and shadow seem all to proclaim the glory of God; and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.
  7. In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.
  8. “All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,” says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880).
  9. Our prison stood at the edge of the fortress grounds, close to the fortress wall.
  10. The cabin-passenger wrote in his diary a parody of Descartes: “I feel discomfort, therefore I am alive,” then sat pen in hand with no more to record.
  11. Forgive me my denomination and my town; I am a Christian minister, and an American.
  12. Once I was young and had so much more orientation and could talk with nervous intelligence about everything and with clarity and without as much literary preambling as this; in other words this is the story of an unself-confident man, at the same time of an egomaniac, naturally, facetious won’t do — just to start at the beginning and let the truth seep out, that’s what I’ll do •—.
  13. No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine.
  14. There was only one bench in the shade and Converse went for it, although it was already occupied.
  15. Iam all alone in my pad, man, my piled-up-to-the-ceiling-with-junk pad.
  16. If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
  17. Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tidewater dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.
  18. See the child.
  19. He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.
  20. A screaming comes across the sky.
  21. On a cold blowy February day a woman is boarding the ten a.m. flight to London, followed by an invisible dog.
  22. When he is sick, every man wants his mother; if she is not around, other women must do.
  23. Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks, “I have come from Alabama: a fur piece.”
  24. “When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she~ made the nipping off of hoggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned towards her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.”
  25. We were in study hall when the headmaster walked in, followed by a new boy not wearing a school uniform, and by a janitor carrying a large desk.
  26. The station wagons arrived at noon.
  27. It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
  28. Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?
  29. If this typewriter can’t do it, then fuck it, it can’t be done.
  30. In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.

ANSWERS

Sponsored
Sponsored

Answers:

  1. Samuel Beckett: Malone Dies
  2. John Cheever: Oh, What a Paradise It Seems
  3. Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Native
  4. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
  5. James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room
  6. Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited
  7. Richard Brautigan: In Watermelon Sugar
  8. Vladimir Nabokov: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
  9. Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The House of the Dead
  10. Graham Greene: A Burnt-Out Case
  11. John Updike: A Month of Sundays
  12. JackKerouac: The Subterraneans
  13. Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey
  14. Robert Stone: Dog Soldiers
  15. William Kotzwinkle: The Fan Man
  16. Saul Bellow: Herzog
  17. Jack London: The Call of the Wild
  18. Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian
  19. Ernest Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls
  20. Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow
  21. Alison Lurie: Foreign Affairs
  22. Philip Roth: The Anatomy Lesson
  23. William Faulkner: Light in August
  24. Katherine Dunn: Geek Love
  25. Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
  26. Don DeLillo: White Noise
  27. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Love in the Time of Cholera
  28. Walker Percy: Love in the Ruins
  29. Tom Robbins: Still Life with Woodpecker
  30. Carson McCullers: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
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