Literature

first lines

1. "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."
2. "It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see."
3. "This is the room of the wolfmother wallpaper."
4. "The Citadel of Troizen, where the Palace stands, was built by giants before anyone remembers."
5. "The sky above the port was the color of telelvision tuned to a dead channel."
6. "Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy."
7. "The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended."
8. "I always get the shakes before a drop. I've had the injections, of course, and hypnotic preparation, and it stands to reason that I can't really be afraid.
9. "'Where's Papa going with that ax?' said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast."
10. "These two very old people are the father and mother of Mr. Bucket. Their names are Grandpa Joe and Grandma Josephine."
11. "What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?"
12. "Robert Cohn was once middle weight boxing champion of Princeton."
13. "It was in Warwick Castle that I cam across the curious stranger whom I am going to talk about."
14. "From my grandfather Verus I learned good morals and the government of my temper."
15. "On the first Monday of the month April, 1625, the market town of Meuns, in which the author of the 'Romance of the Rose' was born

author's day jobs

1. Francis Bacon
2. John Bunyan
3. Anton Chekov
4. Arthur Conan Doyle
5. Oliver Goldsmith
6. Nathaniel Hawthorne
7. John Locke
8. Ben Jonson
9. Chaim Potok
10. Samuel Pepys
11. Aleksandr Pushkin
12. Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

subtitles (or, other names for books)

1. Uncle Tom's Cabin
2. Godel, Escher, Bach
3. The Hobbit
4. Flatland
5. Good omens

Given the subtitle of the work, give the name of the work and the author:

1. A Tale of the Christ
2. A Story of Wall Street
3. The Children's Crusade
4. A Hot Fairy Tale
5. An Heroi-Comical Poem

locations

1. Absalom, Absalom/William Faulkner
2. The Age of Innocence/Edith Wharton
3. (2) Brave New World/Aldous Huxley
4. Call of the Wild/Jack London
5. (2) Catch-22/Joseph Heller
6. A Doll's House/Henrik Ibsen
7. Emma/Jane Austen
8. The Great Gatsby/F. Scott Fitzgerald
9. The House of Seven Gables/Nathaniel Hawthorne
10. Jude the Obscure/Thomas Hardy
11. A Lost Lady/Willa Cather
12. Maggie, A Girl of the Streets/Stephen Crane
13. The Maltese Falcon/Dashiell Hammett
14. The Mikado/W.S. Gilbert
15. (2) Othello/Shakespeare
16. Our Town/Thornton Wilder
17. Pere Goriot/Balzac
18. A House Like a Lotus/Madeleine L'Engle
19. Rabbit, Run/John Updike
20. Romeo & Juliet/Shakespeare
21. The Scarlet Letter/Nathaniel Hawthorne
22. (2) The Sun Also Rises/Ernest Hemingway
23. The Swiss Family Robinson/J.R. Wyss
24. To Kill a Mockingbird/Harper Lee
25. Tom Sawyer/Mark Twain

quote identification section!

1. The Rembrandt painting of Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer may not be by Rembrandt but by a pupil so divinely gifted in learning the lessons of his master that he never was able to accomplish anything more and whose name, as a consequence, has been lost in obscurity. The bust of Homer that Aristotle is shown contemplating is not of Homer. The man is not Aristotle.
2. I think in the context of our adventures--and Henry's--that it's fitting to conclude with my erection, the circumcised erection of the Jewish father, reminding you of what you said when you first had occasion to hold it. I wasn't so chagrined by your virginal diffidence as by the amusement that came in its wake. Uncertainly I asked, "Isn't it to your liking?" "Oh, yes, it's fine," you said, delicately weighing it in the scale of your hand, "but it's the phenomenon itself: it just seems a rather rapid transition." I'd like those words to stand as the coda to that book you so foolishly tell me you wish to excape. To escape into what, Marietta? It may be as you say that this is no life, but use your enchanting, enrapturing brains: this life is as close to life as you, and I, and our child can ever hope to come.
3. I was born in the city of Bombay...once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it's important to be more...On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And, outside the window, fireworks and crowds. A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thatnks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate--at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn't even wipe my own nose at the time.
4. After that he didn't ask for the children to be sent to America and didn't answer when Nicole wrote asking him if he needed money. In the last letter she had from him he told her that he was practising in Geneva, New York, and she got the impression that he had settled down with someone to keep house for him. She looked up Geneva in an atlas and found it was in the heart of the Finger Lakes Section and considered a pleasant place. Perhaps, so she liked to think, his career was biding its time, again like Grant's in Galena; his latest note was post-marked from Hornell, New York, which is some distance from Geneva and a very small town; in any case he is almost certainly in the section of the country, in one town or another.
5. [NOTE: Skipped to due inability to scan or create needed pictures]
6. The nymph's resentments none but I Can well imagine or condole; But none can guess Lysander's soul, But those who swayed his destiny. His silent griefs swell up to storms, And not one god his fury spares; He cursed his birth, his fate, his stars; But more the shepherdess's charms, Whose soft bewitching influence Had damned him to the hell of impotence.
7. IT HAD BEEN LIKE DYING, that sliding down the mountain pass. It had been like the death of someone, irrational, that sliding down the mountain pass and into the region of dread. It was like slipping into fever, or falling down that hole in sleep from which you wake yourself whimpering. We had crossed the mountains that day, and now we were in a strange place--a hotel in central Washington, in a toown near Yakima. The eclipse we had traveled here to see would occur early the next morning.
8. [SKIPPED]
9. And he wnet back for some more fir-cones. It did. It kept on doing it. Then he dropped two in at once, and leant over the bridge to see which of them would come out first; and one of them did; but as they were both the same size, he didn't know if it was the one which he wanted to win, or the other one. So the next time he dropped one big one and one little one, and the big one came out first, which was what he had said it would do, and the little one came out last, which was what he had said it would do, so he had won twice...
10. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo ..... His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face. He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.
    O, the wild rose blossoms On the little green place.
    He sang that song. That was his song.
    O, the geen wothe botheth.
11. Now, I feel just as sure as I'm sure that my name Isn't Willow, titwillow, titwillow, That 'twas blighted affection that made him exclaim, "Oh, willow, titwillow, titwillow!" And if you remain callous and obdurate, I Shall perish as he did, and you will know why, Though I probably shall not exclaim as I die, "Oh, willow, titwillow, titwillow!"

random questions about literature that didn't fit anywhere else:

1. Laura Ingalls Wilder
2. Jane Eyre
3. Anne Shirley
4. Buttercup
5. How many times is Mouse 'married' in Tales of the City?

Just plain random questions

1. In Red Dragon, what book does Hannibal Lechter use as code to get a serial killer a message?
2. Goodnight Moon is a Classic, but what's the name of it's yuppie spoof (which also pays it considerable homage)?
3. Where is Jane Eyre's uncle from, and what does he do? (hint: the two are related.)
4. What two figures play dice for the Mariner's Soul (Coleridge)?
5. Tam Lin is a traditional tale about a young man doomed to be the Fairie Queen's tithe to Hell and the young woman who attempts to save him. It was recently name of that folk-rock group?

work-within-works

1. What play does Hamlet have the players perform?
2. How does he accidentally mistakenly refer to the play?
3. What play is performed in A Midsummer Night's Dream?
4. Shakespeare used this play as a basis for one of his own. Which?
5. In "The Parliament of Fowls," Chaucer gives an account of what classical work?
6. In the work-within-a-work-within-a-work cycle of "Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead" by Tom Stoppard, what is "buried deepest?"
7. What book by what author is actually ten different books, each purporting to be the first chapter of a book that the reader is attempting to find and read?
8. What book by what author contains three stories framed within "The Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius," itself framed within the larger

and, an essay question, because Rich wanted it

Trace the lineage of Equus. Feel free to use the backs of pages if you need to.