Famous Novels, First Lines Quiz

Question: “All children, except one, grow up.”

Answer: J.M. Barrie based his 1911 novel Peter and Wendy on his hit 1904 play Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up. In some later printings, the novel is titled Peter Pan.

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

Answer: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice recounts the courtship of Elizabeth Bennet and the wealthy Fitzwilliam Darcy.

Question: “It was a pleasure to burn.”

Answer: Books are unwelcome in the dystopian future of Fahrenheit 451. Author Ray Bradbury consulted a Los Angeles fire chief to find out the temperature at which paper in a book would ignite without the presence of an open flame. The actual temperature is about 480 °F.

Question: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into some sort of monstrous vermin.”

Answer: Although the creature into which Gregor has been transformed has sometimes been pictured as a cockroach, Franz Kafka used intentionally vague wording (originally in German) to give the character’s condition a broader range of possible meanings.

Question: "All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Answer: Sprawling across eight parts, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina relates the ups and downs of characters belonging to the Oblonsky, Karenin, and Levin families.

Question: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

Answer: In George Orwell’s satiric novel Nineteen Eighty-four, the ruling Party has the power to impose its own reality, including the use of 13-hour clocks and equations such as 2 + 2 = 5.

Question: “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.”

Answer: David Copperfield is said to be one of Charles Dickens’s most autobiographical novels, because the experience of its titular character resembles the writer’s own troubled youth.

Question: “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 all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

Answer: J.D. Salinger spent 10 years writing The Catcher in the Rye, which was published in 1951. As a soldier landing in Normandy on D-Day, he had carried with him six unpublished short stories that would form the core of the novel.

Question: “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.”

Answer: In Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Earth is held in such low regard that it is demolished to make way for a “hyperspace bypass.”

Question: “‘Where's Papa going with that ax?’ said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.”

Answer: In E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, Fern stops her father from using the ax to “do away with” the runt of a pig litter. She names the runt Wilbur, and he turns out to be “some pig.”

Question: “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”

Answer: The Dursleys are the mean-spirited Muggle uncle and aunt of Harry Potter.

Question: “You better not never tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy.”

Answer: Alice Walker was the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for her 1982 novel The Color Purple.

Question: “When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.”

Answer: Ponyboy, the narrator of S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, wishes he were more like Paul Newman, whom he describes as looking tough.

Question: “A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State’s motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.”

Answer: In Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World, every human embryo is “hatched” from a bottle rather than being carried to term in a womb.

Question: “124 was spiteful. Full of baby's venom.”

Answer: Toni Morrison’s Beloved follows a formerly enslaved woman named Sethe, who believes she is haunted by the ghost of her dead baby.

Question: “Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down.”

Answer: Celeste Ng’s 2017 novel Little Fires Everywhere has sold more than two million copies.

Question: “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.”

Answer: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God was published in 1937. It’s considered one of the great novels of the Harlem Renaissance.