Famous First Lines of Books
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50 free Famous First Lines of Books trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
A great first line does a lot of work. In a dozen words it sets a voice, makes a promise and, when it really lands, gets quoted for centuries by people who never finished the book. That is why opening sentences make such good trivia: you probably know more of them than you think. This quiz covers the openers readers argue about most. You will match well-known first sentences to their novels, name the narrators and characters they introduce, and pick up the stories behind them: a line scribbled in an odd place, a line borrowed from an older book, and one mocked so often that it inspired a bad-writing contest. Classic novels, ancient epics, children's favourites and a few twentieth-century landmarks are all here. Older lines are quoted; newer ones are described, so you still have to recognise them. It suits book clubs, English classes from middle school up, and anyone who likes a literary pub round. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches you something.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Jane Austen novel opens by calling it 'a truth universally acknowledged' that a rich single man needs a wife?
Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice starts with a joke: in Austen's society it was really the unmarried daughters without fortunes who needed a wealthy husband.
Q 02Which seafaring novel opens with its narrator's three-word request, 'Call me Ishmael'?
Moby-Dick
Moby-Dick was a commercial failure and out of print when Herman Melville died in 1891, yet its opening sentence is now among the most famous ever written.
Q 03Which Charles Dickens novel opens with the words 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times'?
A Tale of Two Cities
A Tale of Two Cities keeps that sentence going for well over a hundred words of paired opposites, from wisdom and foolishness to hope and despair.
Q 04Which fantasy novel's first line was scribbled by an Oxford professor on a blank exam paper?
The Hobbit
The Hobbit began as one sentence about a creature living in a hole, jotted by J. R. R. Tolkien when he found an empty page among the School Certificate papers he was marking.
Q 05Which children's novel, adapted from a 1904 stage play, opens with the line 'All children, except one, grow up'?
Peter Pan
Peter Pan's famous opener was written for the 1911 novel, seven years after the boy who would not grow up first appeared on the London stage.
Q 06Which dystopian novel opens on a cold, bright spring day with the clocks striking an impossible thirteen?
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four nearly had another name: George Orwell wavered between that title and The Last Man in Europe until shortly before he finished the second draft.
Q 07Which Victorian ghost story opens with the blunt announcement 'Marley was dead: to begin with'?
A Christmas Carol
A Christmas Carol's narrator then stops to wonder why a door-nail, rather than a coffin-nail, counts as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.
Q 08Which Leo Tolstoy novel opens by claiming that happy families are all alike but each unhappy family is different?
Anna Karenina
Anna Karenina lent its first sentence to the Anna Karenina principle, which Jared Diamond used to explain why so few animal species were ever domesticated.
Q 09Which American children's novel opens with a farm girl named Fern asking where her father is going with an ax?
Charlotte's Web
Charlotte's Web first opened in the barn with Wilbur; E. B. White moved that scene to chapter three so the story starts with Fern saving the runt.
Q 10Which Newbery Medal-winning novel opens with the much-mocked line 'It was a dark and stormy night'?
A Wrinkle in Time
A Wrinkle in Time borrows its opener from an 1830 novel, a sentence so often parodied that it became the textbook example of purple prose.
Q 11Which Jazz Age novel opens with its narrator recalling his father's advice from his 'younger and more vulnerable years'?
The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby begins with Nick Carraway's father telling him to remember, before criticising anyone, that not everybody has had his advantages.
Q 12Which Mark Twain novel opens with its narrator mentioning 'a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'?
Huckleberry Finn
Huckleberry Finn adds that the earlier book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, who 'told the truth, mainly', so the author gets teased by his own character.
Q 13Which Charles Dickens title character begins his story wondering whether he will be 'the hero of my own life'?
Q 21Which Frances Hodgson Burnett novel calls its heroine 'the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen' in its first line?
The Secret Garden
The Secret Garden introduces Mary Lennox as a thin, sour-faced girl born in India and sent to her uncle's house, Misselthwaite Manor, on the Yorkshire moors.
Q 22Which Jack London novel opens by noting that its hero, Buck, 'did not read the newspapers'?
The Call of the Wild
The Call of the Wild explains the trouble at once: men had found gold in the Arctic and wanted heavy, strong-muscled dogs like Buck to toil for them.
Q 23Which 1922 modernist novel opens with 'Stately, plump Buck Mulligan' carrying a bowl of shaving lather?
Ulysses
David Copperfield
David Copperfield tells his story in the novel Dickens called his favourite child, and its first chapter is plainly titled 'I Am Born'.
Q 14In Great Expectations, the narrator's infant tongue shortens Philip Pirrip to which nickname in the first line?
Pip
Pip gives his name in the opening chapter, set in a marsh churchyard where the escaped convict Abel Magwitch seizes him.
Q 15Which Brontë novel opens with the line 'There was no possibility of taking a walk that day'?
Jane Eyre
Jane Eyre spends that wet afternoon hidden behind a red curtain with Bewick's History of British Birds, until her bullying cousin John Reed comes looking for her.
Q 16Which Jane Austen heroine is described in a famous first line as 'handsome, clever, and rich'?
Emma Woodhouse
Emma Woodhouse was built to be hard to love: before starting the novel, Austen said she was taking a heroine whom no one but herself would much like.
Q 17Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland opens with Alice bored by her sister's book, which lacks pictures and what else?
Conversations
Conversations arrive within moments: a White Rabbit runs past fretting that it will be late, then pulls a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket.
Q 18Which Louisa May Alcott novel opens with Jo grumbling that the holiday won't be the same without any presents?
Little Women
Little Women opens on the March sisters facing a lean winter at home while their father is far away, where the fighting of the Civil War is.
Q 19Which H. G. Wells novel opens with Earth being watched by 'intelligences greater than man's'?
The War of the Worlds
The War of the Worlds says the watchers studied humans the way a man with a microscope studies the tiny creatures that swarm in a drop of water.
Q 20Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows opens with which animal hard at work spring-cleaning his little home?
Mole
Mole soon flings down his brush, says 'Hang spring-cleaning!' and bolts out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat.
Ulysses follows three Dubliners through a single day, 16 June 1904, which fans now celebrate every year as Bloomsday.
Q 24Which Irish novelist opened his debut novel like a nursery tale, with a 'moocow coming down along the road'?
James Joyce
James Joyce begins A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with a story told by a father to his infant son, Stephen Dedalus, the 'baby tuckoo' of the tale.
Q 25Which castaway novel opens with its narrator stating 'I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York'?
Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe adds that the family name was really Kreutznaer, worn down by English tongues because his father was a foreigner from Bremen.
Q 26Which novel, narrated by a horse, opens with his first memory of a pleasant meadow and a pond?
Black Beauty
Black Beauty was the only novel its author, Sewell, ever wrote; she meant it to induce kindness to horses and died just five months after it was published.
Q 27Which storybook bear is introduced in his first line as 'Edward Bear', bumping downstairs on the back of his head?
Winnie-the-Pooh
Winnie-the-Pooh comes down behind Christopher Robin, and the narrator adds that it is, as far as the bear knows, the only way of coming downstairs.
Q 28Which Ernest Hemingway novel opens by noting that Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton?
The Sun Also Rises
The Sun Also Rises has its narrator, Jake Barnes, add at once that he is not very impressed by that boxing title, though it meant a lot to Cohn.
Q 29Which work co-written by Friedrich Engels opens with the line 'A spectre is haunting Europe'?
The Communist Manifesto
The Communist Manifesto names its ghost in the same breath, the spectre of communism, and says the powers of old Europe have allied to exorcise it.
Q 30Which Old Testament book opens with the words 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth'?
Genesis
Genesis is known in Hebrew as Bereshit, a title taken directly from that first word, which means 'in the beginning'.