Memorable Beginnings Vol. 2: Match the Opening Line to the Work

Question: “He — for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it — was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.”

Answer: Orlando explores issues of androgyny and the creative life of women.

Question: “What’s it going to be then, eh?”

Answer: Written in a futuristic slang invented by Burgess, A Clockwork Orange is the first-person account of a juvenile delinquent who undergoes state-sponsored psychological rehabilitation for his aberrant behavior.

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: The heroine of Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennett, is one of the most engaging characters of English literature.

Question: “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”

Answer: Plath committed suicide one month after the publication of The Bell Jar, a thinly veiled autobiography of a college woman who struggles through a mental breakdown.

Question: “All this happened, more or less.”

Answer: The novel is an absurdist narrative in which the bombing of Dresden in World War II serves as symbol of the cruelty of war through the centuries.

Question: “The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home.”

Answer: A classic of English children’s literature, Grahame began the book as a series of bedtime stories for his son.

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 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.”

Answer: Catcher in the Rye depicts two days in the life of 16-year-old Holden Caulfield following his expulsion from prep school.

Question: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

Answer: This author’s masterpiece is considered the foremost example of his style of magical realism.

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

Answer: Nineteen Eighty-Four was intended as a warning against totalitarianism, both of the right and of the left.

Question: “Mother died today.”

Answer: The opening line of The Stranger captures the complete anomie of its hero, who is unable to dissemble, to experience conventional modes of feeling, or to conform to society’s requirements.