Famous Lines Flashcards
(146 cards)
0
Q
All children, except one, grow up.
A
Peter and Wendy by J.M. Barrie (or Peter Pan or the play Peter Pan; The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up)
1
Q
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..
A
A Tale of Two Cities by Chales Dickens
2
Q
It was a pleasure to burn.
A
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
3
Q
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
A
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
4
Q
You better not never tell nobody but God.
A
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
5
Q
Not so long ago, a monster came to the small town of Castle Rock, Maine.
A
Cujo by Stephen King
6
Q
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf stream and he had gone 84 days now without taking a fish.
A
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest
Hemingway
7
Q
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
A
The Sound and the Fury by William
Faulkner
8
Q
124 was spiteful.
A
Beloved by Toni Morrison
9
Q
In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came
A
Dune by Frank Herbert
10
Q
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
A
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
11
Q
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
A
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12
Q
Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
A
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
13
Q
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..
A
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
14
Q
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
A
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
15
Q
It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
A
City of Glass (The New York Trilogy) by Paul Auster
16
Q
On they went, singing ‘Rest Eternal’, and whenever they stopped, the sound of their feet, the horses and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing.
A
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
17
Q
But I go to Hollywood but I go to hospital, but you are first but you are last, but he is tall but she is small, but you stay up but you go down, but we are rich but we are poor, but they find peace but they find…
A
Yellow Dog by Martin Amis
18
Q
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.
A
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
19
Q
The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.
A
Neuromancer by William Gibson
20
Q
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
A
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson
21
Q
I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way.
A
The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan
22
Q
When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.
A
Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
23
Q
It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.
A
Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
24
A screaming comes across the sky.
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
25
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by CS Lewis
26
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
27
Renowned curator Jacques Sauniere staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
28
It was love at first sight.
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
29
I was born in the city of Bombay...once upon a time
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
30
When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
31
It was the day my grandmother exploded
The Crow Road by Iain Banks
32
They shoot the white girl first.
Paradise by Toni Morrison
33
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.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
34
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
35
I am an invisible man.
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952)
36
The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-
she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard.
Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathaniel West (1933)
37
You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mary Twain (1885)
38
Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925)
39
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
If On A Winter's Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino (1979(
40
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
Murphy by Samuel Beckett (1938)
41
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (1916)
42
This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford (1915)
43
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Stern 1759-1767)
44
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.
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (18500
45
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
46
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 house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
Paul Clifford by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton (1830)
47
One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon 1966
48
Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a
lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes 1605
49
Mother died today.
The Stranger by Albert Camus 1942
50
Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.
Waiting by Ha Jin 1999
51
I am a sick man...I am a spiteful man.
Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1864)
52
Where now? Who now? When now?
The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett (1953)
53
Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did
not drag my father beyond this tree.”
The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein (1925)
54
In a sense, I am Jacob Horner.
The End of the Road by John Barth (1958)
55
It was like so, but wasn't.
Galatia 2.2 by Richard Powers (1995)
56
—Money . . . in a voice that rustled.
J R by William Gaddis (1975)
57
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woollf (1925)
58
All this happened, more or less.
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
59
For a long time, I went to bed early.
Swann's Way by Proust (1913)
60
The moment one learns English, complications set in.
Chromos by Felipe Alfau (1990)
61
Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.
The Debut by Anita Brookner (1981)
62
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane;
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (1962)
63
Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
64
I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (1911)
65
Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation.
Alphabetical Africa by Walter Abish (1974)
66
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy,
in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (2002)
67
Elmer Gantry was drunk.
Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis (1927)
68
We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
Tracks by Louise Eldrich (1988)
69
A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to
look ahead.
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)
70
Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired
into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression.
At Swim-Two-birds by Flann O'Brien (1939)
71
I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho' not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and
leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson
Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call'd me.
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719)
72
In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.
Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson (1988)
73
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
Middlemarch by George Eliot (1872)
74
What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad,
should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?
Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things by Gilbert Sorrentino (1971)
75
I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.
The Razors' Edge by W. Somerset Maughm
76
Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.
Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler (2001)
77
The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.
The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton (1904)
78
“To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.”
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (1988)
79
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
80
Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.
The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace (1987)
81
If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
Herzog by Saul Bellow (1964)
82
Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.
The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O'Connor (1960)
83
Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole
in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass (1959)
84
Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the
faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely
Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World.
The Origin of the Brunists by Robert Coover (1966)
85
She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her
unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the
irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him.
The Wings of the Dove by Henry James (1902)
86
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (1929)
87
He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders,
head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (1900)
88
On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any
how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.
Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban (1980)
89
Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.
A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis (1994)
90
In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends- in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth (1960)
91
When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley (1978)
92
It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man.
Interuder in the Dust by William Faulkner (1948)
93
I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the- other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot,” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Stammerer,” or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled.
I, Claudius by Robert Graves (1934)
94
Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women.
Middle Passage by Charles Johnson (1990)
95
I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)
96
The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods.
Babbitt by SInclair Lewis (1922)
97
I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl's underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self.
Second Skin by John Hawkes (1964)
98
He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
Scaramouche by Raphael Sabatini (1921)
99
Psychics can see the color of time it's blue.
Blown Away by Robert Sukenick (1986)
100
In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (1940)
101
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.
Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood (1988)
102
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.
Orlando by Virginia Woolf (1928)
103
High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.
Changing Places by David Lodge (1975)
104
They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966)
105
The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)
106
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic vermin.
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
107
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the riverbank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book’, thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversation?
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
108
Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.
Inferno by Dante
109
In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ’s disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen, and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.
A River Runs Through it by Norman McLean
110
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.
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
111
It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
112
It was a Saturday afternoon on La Salle Street, years and years ago when I was a little kid, and around three o'clock Mrs. Shannon, the heavy Irish woman in her perpetually soup-stained dress, opened her back window and shouted out into the courtyard, "Hey, Cesar, yoo-hoo, I think you're on television, I swear it's you!"
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos
113
The two women were alone in the London flat. "The point is," said Anna, as her friend came back from the telephone on the landing, "the point is, that as far as I can see, everything's cracking up."
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
114
Riding up the winding road of Saint Agnes Cemetery in the back of the rattling old truck, Francis Phelan became aware that the dead, even more than the living, settled down in neighborhoods.
Ironweed by William Kennedy
115
I first heard of Antonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America.
My Antonia by Willa Cather
116
I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.
Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
117
She was one of those pretty, charming ladies, born, as if through an error of destiny, into a family of clerks.
The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant
118
Brrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiinng!
Native Son by Richard Wright
119
Nothing to be done.
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
120
It was Wang Lung's marriage day.
The Good Earth by Pearl Buck
121
To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
122
Buck did not read the newspapers or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
123
The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick way toward the lagoon.
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
124
A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over:"Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en!"
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
125
When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
126
A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
127
They're Out There
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
128
"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
129
What can you say about a twenty-five year old girl who died?
Love Story by Erich Segal
130
When Mrs. Frederick C. Little's second son arrived, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse.
Stuart Little, by E.B. White
131
A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the doo of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
132
"When I saw Finn waiting for me at the corner of the street I knew at once that something had gone wrong."
Iris Murdoch's Under the Nest
133
Name the classic: "This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it."
The Princess Bride
134
"The sun sets in the west (just about every one knows that), but Sunset Towers faced east."
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
135
I did two things on my 75th birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army.
Old Man's War by John Scalzi
136
A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside.
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
137
"It's better to look at the sky having lived there" is from what book?
Breakfast at Tiffany's
138
"This morning I got a note from my aunt asking me to come to lunch."
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
139
"I hope, or I could not live."
The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells
140
Name the book: "You've no right to walk into people's castles and take their guitars."
Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones
141
"Amem! Even so come, Lord Jesus." Last words from what novel
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
142
"No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine."
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
143
"1801.--I have just returned from a visit to my landlord--the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with."
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
144
"There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air."
The Awakening by Kate Chopin. Last lines.
145
“After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn’s for an oyster supper.”
The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox
