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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” We all know famous lines like these, but can you identify the classic novels they come from?
That one, by the way, is the opener to Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. There’s another Dickens novel in the group below. How many of them can you identify?
“Call me Ishmael.”
An easy one to start. This is one of the best-known opening lines in all of literature, from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. But perhaps that was too easy. OK, no quotes with character names from now on!
“All this happened, more or less.”
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 – also called The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death – is an anti-war novel centring on the infamous firebombing of Dresden during WWII.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
The roundabout sentence structure and the Victorian theme of marrying well are both big tip-offs that this is Jane Austen. But which one of her many novels is it? Perhaps her most famous one: Pride and Prejudice (the original, not the one with the zombies).
Here are 15 gripping memoirs by women who overcame the impossible.
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Considered by many to be the greatest work of literature, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina follows a young couple in search of happiness. Spoiler alert: They don’t find it.
“It was a pleasure to burn.”
This might not seem like a lot to go on, but book-burning features prominently in Ray Bradbury’s great dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451. Now you know the temperature at which paper catches fire.
“You better not never tell nobody but God.”
This is from The Color Purple, Alice Walker’s epic tale of a poor, uneducated Black woman growing up in the American South.
“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road.”
No, there isn’t any missing punctuation here. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce begins with a young Stephen Dedalus – who also appears in Joyce’s Ulysses – telling a story the way only a small child would.
“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.”
And here’s the other Dickens! This one is David Copperfield, although the novel’s full title is The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account). Oh, Dickens.
“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.”
That’s a lot of words, but Holden Caulfield is a pretty long-winded guy. This is J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, considered one of the best coming-of-age books ever.
