I’ve been feeling literary lately, so here goes. Answer if you can, then share your own:
“The amber light came on.”
“AUTHOR: Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, came to power in 1740.”
“Of bodies changed to other forms I tell; …”
“The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex.”
“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” – there are of course two answers, of which I want the less obvious.
“One day Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could make anything starting with n.”
“I want a hero, an uncommon want…”
“Like many fathers, mine could occasionally be prevailed upon for a spot of ‘airplane.’”
“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.”
“Like many fathers, mine could occasionally be prevailed upon for a spot of ‘airplane.’” is the first line of Fun Home by Allison Bechdal. Great book.
Here’s mine:
“Five straight days she spent in front of the television, staring at crumbled banks and hospitals, whole blocks of stores in flames, severed rail lines and expressways”
“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own…”
“Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse…”
“One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it:–it was the black kitten’s fault entirely.”
Now, here’s mine, but it’s from a short story rather than a book. Just such a wonderful sentence.
“One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for 6 days and 6 nights when I was 12 or whether it snowed for 12 days and 12 nights when I was 6.”
Wow, nice; I didn’t expect anyone to get that one (or Fun Home either). Good show. I read it translated into Spanish on the way from Cuenca to Madrid in 2005; creeped me the fuck out. And I just finished Seeing yesterday.
That’s definitely Dickens. Most probably Oliver Twist. (Which I’ve never read - this is straight deduction. So I reserve the right to be extra-smug if I’m right, and not too crushed if I’m wrong.)
“The amber light…”: Blindness, by José Saramago.
“Of bodies changed…”: Metamorphoses, by Ovid.
“The family of Dashwood…”: Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen.
“In the beginning…”: The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco…
“One day Trurl…”: Cyberiad, by Stanislaw Lem.
“Like many fathers…”: Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel.
“I was born twice…”: Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides.
“No one would have believed…”: War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells.
“Not so long ago…”: Knuffle Bunny, by Mo Willems.
“One thing was certain…” Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Saw There, by Lewis Carroll.
“Five straight days…”: After the Quake, by Haruki Murakami.
“Among other public buildings…”: Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens.
And here are the ones that have not yet been guessed:
“AUTHOR: Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, came to power in 1740.”
“I want a hero, an uncommon want…”
“One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for 6 days and 6 nights when I was 12 or whether it snowed for 12 days and 12 nights when I was 6.”
“I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighbourhoods.”