An old book meme I'm reviving...
Sep. 26th, 2003 04:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mousmeFirst Lines Meme
(Okay, normally you're only supposed to do ten, but I got carried away, as usual.)
1- "Jacob Blunt was my last patient. He came into my office wearing a scarlet hibiscus in his curly blond hair. He sat down in the easy chair across from my desk, and said, 'Doctor, I think I'm losing my mind' "
2- "A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate."
3- "Most people walk down stairs, putting one foot more or less carefully in front of the other, and perhaps holding onto the banisters. Not Harry Holdsworth, oh no, not he!"
4- "Puis-je, monsieur, vous proposer mes services, sans risquer d'être importun?"
5-"They're out there."
6-"At an age when most young Scotsmen were lifting skirts, plowing furrows and spreading seed, Mungo Park was displaying his bare buttocks to al-haj' Ali Ibn Fatoudi, Emir of Ludamar."
7- "Tom glanced behind him and saw the man coming out of the Green Cage, heading his way. Tom walked faster. There was no doubt that the man was after him."
8- "I reached out a hand from under the blankets and rang the bell for Jeeves.
'Good evening, Jeeves.'
'Good morning, sir.'
This surprised me."
9- "C'était à Mégara, faubourg de Carthage, dans les jardins d'Hamilcar."
10- "Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn."
11- "Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his."
12- "'I have been here before,' I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest."
13- "Maman est morte aujourd'hui. Ou peut-être était-ce hier, je ne sais pas."
14- "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow."
15- "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."
16- "Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense."
17- "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."
18- "Call me Ishmael."
19- "It must have been late autumn of that year, and probably it was towards dusk for the sake of being less conspicuous. And yet a meeting between two professional gentlemen representing the chief branches of the law should surely not need to be concealed.
Let us imagine, then, how Law might have waited upon Equity."
20- "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."
21- "'Hey, Childish!'
'Ignore him,' I told Bix. 'He'll stop if you just ignore him.'
'But, Jeff, you've been ignoring him, and he isn't stopping.'"
22-"In the week before their departure to Àrrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul."
23- "One morning —during the record cold spell of 1851— a big menacing black bird, the likes of which had never been seen before, soared over the crude mill town of Magog, swooping low again and again."
24- "It was a dark and stormy night.
In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind."
25- (I cheated; this isn't quite the first line, but it's the beginning of the story)
"I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow; a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man; his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulders of his soiled blue coat; his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails; and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him looking round the cove and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards:
'Fifteen men on the dead man's chest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!'"
(Okay, normally you're only supposed to do ten, but I got carried away, as usual.)
1- "Jacob Blunt was my last patient. He came into my office wearing a scarlet hibiscus in his curly blond hair. He sat down in the easy chair across from my desk, and said, 'Doctor, I think I'm losing my mind' "
2- "A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate."
3- "Most people walk down stairs, putting one foot more or less carefully in front of the other, and perhaps holding onto the banisters. Not Harry Holdsworth, oh no, not he!"
4- "Puis-je, monsieur, vous proposer mes services, sans risquer d'être importun?"
5-"They're out there."
6-"At an age when most young Scotsmen were lifting skirts, plowing furrows and spreading seed, Mungo Park was displaying his bare buttocks to al-haj' Ali Ibn Fatoudi, Emir of Ludamar."
7- "Tom glanced behind him and saw the man coming out of the Green Cage, heading his way. Tom walked faster. There was no doubt that the man was after him."
8- "I reached out a hand from under the blankets and rang the bell for Jeeves.
'Good evening, Jeeves.'
'Good morning, sir.'
This surprised me."
9- "C'était à Mégara, faubourg de Carthage, dans les jardins d'Hamilcar."
10- "Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn."
11- "Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his."
12- "'I have been here before,' I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest."
13- "Maman est morte aujourd'hui. Ou peut-être était-ce hier, je ne sais pas."
14- "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow."
15- "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."
16- "Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense."
17- "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."
18- "Call me Ishmael."
19- "It must have been late autumn of that year, and probably it was towards dusk for the sake of being less conspicuous. And yet a meeting between two professional gentlemen representing the chief branches of the law should surely not need to be concealed.
Let us imagine, then, how Law might have waited upon Equity."
20- "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."
21- "'Hey, Childish!'
'Ignore him,' I told Bix. 'He'll stop if you just ignore him.'
'But, Jeff, you've been ignoring him, and he isn't stopping.'"
22-"In the week before their departure to Àrrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul."
23- "One morning —during the record cold spell of 1851— a big menacing black bird, the likes of which had never been seen before, soared over the crude mill town of Magog, swooping low again and again."
24- "It was a dark and stormy night.
In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind."
25- (I cheated; this isn't quite the first line, but it's the beginning of the story)
"I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow; a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man; his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulders of his soiled blue coat; his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails; and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him looking round the cove and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards:
'Fifteen men on the dead man's chest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!'"
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Re: what I know...
Date: 2003-09-26 04:40 pm (UTC)18 - Moby Dick. Which I haven't read, but that's one of the Famous First Lines.
25 sounds like it ought to be Treasure Island, which, again, I have not read.
Re: what I know...
Date: 2003-09-26 07:29 pm (UTC)