Guess the opening lines...

[kinkytoes]

Hi all, hope it's ok to start this here.

Thought it might be fun and stretch the old grey matter a bit.

I'll attach a shot of some opening lines and whoever guesses correctly post their own?

We could all just post pics but then we might lose track. I don't mind.

Let me know what you think (of the idea, and the opening lines here - hopefully started off with an easyish one but let me know if any clues are needed!)

If it's being done elsewhere please someone direct me 😊

How about an old classic -

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb and he almost deserved it.

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice — not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God

I edited out the end of that lengthy sentence as it rather gives the game away.

A Prayer for Owen Meany?

That's the fella!

One of dp's favourite books.
I realise I'm hampered by the fact that I didn't read books in English until my teens. I don't recognize a lot of the English language children's literature.

A book whose protagonist divided my family, half love him the other half loathes him:
"The clock struck half past two. In the little office at the back
of Mr McKechnie's bookshop, Gordon--Gordon Comstock, last member
of the Comstock family, aged twenty-nine and rather moth-eaten
already--lounged across the table, pushing a four-penny packet of
Player's Weights open and shut with his thumb."

A photo one - or it won't be right!

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb and he almost deserved it.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Another classic:
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

I Capture the Castle.

Correct

I could be quite wrong about this, but is it one of George Orwell's novels from the 1930s - Keep the Aspidistra Flying?

Yep :)

Neverending Story.

Viv buried her greatsword in the scalvert’s skull with a meaty crunch.

That's it!

The guard at Exeter warned him he would have to change at Dulverton to pick up the westbound train to Bamfylde Bridge Halt, the nearest railhead to the school, but did not add that the wait between trains was an hour. It was one of those trivial circumstances that played a part in the healing process of the years ahead....

A book much beloved by some Mnetters.

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Bleak House.

I was going to say must be Dickens, but didn't know the book.

Yes, Bleak House it is. My favourite Dickens novel.

The farmer is dead, he is dead and all anyone wants to know is who killed him.

There were four of us - George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency. We were sitting in my room, smoking, and talking about how bad we were - bad from a medical point of view I mean, of course.

He appeared at our house on a Sunday in November in 189...
I still say 'our' house though it is ours no longer; nearly fifteen years have passed since we left the neighbour, and we shall not be going back to it.

Three Men in A Boat!