Hello, all! Welcome to my mini-challenge for Dewey's 24 Hour Read-a-Thon. How is everyone faring? Eyes crossed from twelve straight hours of reading? Slightly numb and/or sore unmentionable extremities? Well, you have come to the right place. Do some stretches, blink a few times, and participate in this challenge! It will be fun, I promise. Afterward, you can get back to your hardcore reading.
Oh, and did I mention there's a prize involved?
So, I like quotes. And by that, I mean I am obsessed with them beyond the reaches of what is generally considered normalcy. Which is why I picked this as my challenge.
Here's the deal. I've compiled a list of 25 quotes. Look at this list. Wrack your brain. Leave a comment with as many guesses as possible! No Googling, looking at other comments for the answers, or any of that nonsense. That's just lame. This challenge will stay open for four hours. After closing, one comment will be chosen randomly, with no consideration of the accuracy of the answers, and the winner will be contacted via e-mail. If there is no response within 48 hours, another winner will be chosen randomly, contacted, and so on.
The prize is a $5 Gift Certificate to Amazon or Barnes & Noble! It is therefore open to anywhere they ship.
This list is comprised entirely of opening lines. With one exception, all the quotes are here for one of two reasons. 1) The quote itself is made of awesome, or 2) The book it introduces is made of awesome. I haven't read one of the books, thus the exception. If you can guess which one, bonus points to you! These will not, of course, help you in the giveaway, but who doesn't like to say they have a nice stack of bonus points stacked up in their personal history? But I digress, as usual. Some of the quotes are pretty obvious (like really, really obvious), and others are more obscure. All sorts of genres are included here, from YA to romance to classics.
Okay, that is officially all I have to say regarding the challenge. Your turn! May the odds be ever in your favor. (Is that getting old yet? Sorry. Had to do it at least once. And really, this was the perfect opportunity.)
1) The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning.
2) Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
3) Paulette Lestafier wasn't as crazy as they said. Sure, she knew what day it was, since that was all she had left to do now.
4) It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
5) The play -- for which Briony had designed the posters, programs and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper -- was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch.
6) I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
7) 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 none others are to see.
8) All children, except one, grow up.
9) Jason was going to Brain Camp. It had another name, a real name, but that's what everyone called it.
10) We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
11) 1801 -- I have just returned from a visit to my landlord -- the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.
12) Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
13) I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
14) In every life there is a turning point. A moment so tremendous, so sharp and clear that one feels as if one’s been hit in the chest, all the breath knocked out, and one knows, absolute knows without the merest hint of a shadow of a doubt that one’s life will never be the same.
15) Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
16) First the colors.
Then the humans.
That’s usually how I see things.
Or at least, how I try.
17) There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
18) I remember the day the Aleut ship came to our island. At first it seemed like a small shell afloat on the sea.
19) Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York. Especially in the summer of 1912.
20) Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
21) There is one mirror in my house.
22) In the spring of 1792, Dominick Edward Guy de Ath Ballister, third Marquess of Dain, Earl of Blackmoor, Viscount Launcells, Baron Ballister and Launcells, lost his wife and four children to typhus.
23) This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.
24) Sophie Dempsey didn't like Temptation even before the Garveys smashed into her '86 Civic, broke her sister's sunglasses, and confirmed all her worse suspicions about people from small towns who drove beige Cadillacs.
25) Which one of Johnny Burwell's eyebrows do you think is cuter?
