I found this old draft in here of a bunch of book quotes that Stephanie and the JSTOR Production folks put up at an office party last year. See how many you know and I’ll post the answers below it.
1) “It was a pleasure to burn”
2) “My Father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Phillip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip”
3) “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenburgs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in
4) “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a giant insect.”
5) “If music be the food of love, play on/ Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting/ The appetite may sicken, and so die.”
6) “It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain, he fell madly in love with him.”
7) “Call me Ishmael”.
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
9) “In 1815, M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D—-.”
10) “Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith.”
11) “The Time Traveler (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.”
12) “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 the road met a nicens little boy named Baby Tuckoo.”
13) “In the country of
14) “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.”
15) “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”
16) “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”
17) “In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to recall, there lived not so long ago one of those gentlemen who always have a lance in the rack, and ancient buckler, a skinny nag, and a greyhound for the chase.”
18) “Once, when I was six years old, I was a magnificent picture in a book about the jungle called True Stories”.
19) “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith…”
20) “The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest.”