Month: April 2005

Fresh off of Surrealism really takes it out of you (or rather a friend) comes yet another first-line meme. This one’s the first lines of ten favorite movies. As such, it’s likely a little more difficult. First lines are not necessarily the most memorable quotes. But feel free to guess anyway. The films aren’t obscure, but the lines may be:

  1. Whoa there! [Monty Python and the Holy Grail, guessed by Eric]
  2. He was the most extraordinary man I ever knew. [Lawrence of Arabia, guessed by Christy]
  3. The young girl sat perfectly still in the confessional… [Wonder Boys, guessed by Christy]
  4. Beat it, Mottola. [The Sting]
  5. Come on, son, this is no place for us. [12 Monkeys] — Huh. That’s what I get for relying on online screenplays. The first line of the film is actually “No!”
  6. No, please….No, no goddamn you. [Unforgiven]
  7. You feeling any better? [The Princess Bride, guessed by Sharon]
  8. We’re exiting the time knot now sir! [Galaxy Quest, guessed by Christy]
  9. Here’s the deal: we are in the garden, right, and everything is great, and there’s this tree, okay, and the man says, “ooh, see that tree? You don’t eat the fruit of that tree.” [A Life Less Ordinary]
  10. All right, ladies and gents, comical poems suitable for the occasion extemporized and thought up before your very eyes. [Mary Poppins, guessed by Christy]

As with the book meme below, I’ll post answers by the weekend.

A book meme, stolen from Surrealism really takes it out of you:Post the first sentence of ten favorite books, and see if your friends can figure out what those books are.

So here goes:

  1. Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of the road in northern Wisconsin. [Leviathan by Paul Auster]
  2. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain [Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, guessed by Christy]
  3. Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his. [Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, guessed by Sharon]
  4. I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice–not because of his voice, of 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… [A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, guessed by Sharon and Brian]
  5. All this happened, more or less. [Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, guessed Christy]
  6. The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm. [Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, guessed by Betty]
  7. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Bundía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. [One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez]
  8. It is only ten miles beyond the city that the river loses its momentum, drooling into the brackish estuary that feeds Iron Bay. [The Scar by China Miéville]
  9. For legal reasons, I have had to alter a number of facts in this book. [Operation Shylock by Philip Roth]
  10. Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. [The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, guessed by pretty much everybody]

They’re all from novels, and only in one case did I cut anything — I stopped at a semi-colon; to quote any further would have given it away. Guess away.