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 😊

Pardon my French but it is better in the original. My teenaged angst loved this. Even better when listening to The Cure.

Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.

Persuasion.

Yes, my favourite Jane Austen novel.

There were crimson roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood.

The judge was an old man; so old, he seemed to have outlived time and change and death. His parrot-face and parrot-voice were dry, like his old, heavily-veined hands. His scarlet robe clashed harshly with the crimson of the roses. He had sat for three days in the stuffy court, but he showed no sign of fatigue.

He did not look at the prisoner as he gathered his notes into a neat sheaf and turned to address the jury, but the prisoner looked at him. Her eyes, like dark smudges under the heavy square brows, seemed equally without fear and without hope. They waited.

Is that Strong Poison?

The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry.

Is that Strong Poison?

Yep.

L’Etranger?

L'Etranger, Camus

The gunslinger!

L'Etranger?

"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."

‘Call me Ishmael.’
’My name being Philip Pirrip …’

Moby Dick
Great Expectations

1. It is difficult to know quite where to begin this story, but I have fixed my choice on a certain Wednesday at luncheon at the Vicarage. The conversation, though in the main irrelevant to the matter in hand, yet contained one or two suggestive incidents which influenced later developments.
2. The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child.
3. The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its sky-line was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had been the outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who called its architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne, apparently under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical. It was described with some justice as an artistic colony, though it never in any definable way produced any art. But although its pretensions to be an intellectual centre were a little vague, its pretensions to be a pleasant place were quite indisputable. The stranger who looked for the first time at the quaint red houses could only think how very oddly shaped the people must be who could fit in to them.

Great Expectations.

‘It was a pleasure to burn’.

‘Octavia’, Jilly Cooper?

Wuthering Heights- my all time favourite.

Correct!

Persuasion

It is difficult to know quite where to begin this story, but I have fixed my choice on a certain Wednesday at luncheon at the Vicarage. The conversation, though in the main irrelevant to the matter in hand, yet contained one or two suggestive incidents which influenced later developments.

The Murder at the Vicarage?

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’

There have been two moments in my life. Moments when everything changed. Moments when things could have gone either way. Moments when I had to make a choice. The first occurred when, after another disruptive day at school, I stood in front of my head teacher, Mrs De Winter.

Camus/L'Etranger. It used to be on the A level syllabus; I didn't enjoy it but will never forget it!

"Once, when I was six years old, I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called True Stories from Nature, about the primeval forest. It was a picture of a boa constrictor swallowing a wild beast."