February+28+-+Opening+Lines

1. These two very old people are the father and mother of Mr. Bucket. Their names are Grandpa Joe and Grandma Josephine. (//Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl)//

2. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.(//The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald//)

3. The day after my mother died, the priest and I wrapped her body in a gray shroud and carried her to the village church. Our burden was not great. In life she has been a small woman with little strength. Death made her even less. Her name had been Asta. (//Crispin – The Cross of Lead by Avi//)

4. Gramps says that I am a country girl at heart, and that is true. I have lived most of my thirteen years in Bybanks, Kentucky, which is not more than a caboodle of houses roosting in a green spot alongside the Ohio River. (//Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech//)

5. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.(//1984 by George Orwell)//

6. Once upon a time there was a pair of pants. They were an essential kind of pants – jeans, naturally, blue but not that stiff, new blue that you see so often on the first day of school. They were a soft, changeable blue with a little extra fading at the knees and the seat and white wavelets at the cuffs. //(The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares)//

7. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone 84 days now without taking a fish. //(The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway)//

8. “Are you Martha Boyle?” Martha nodded. “You don’t know me,” said the woman at the door. “Olive Barstow was my daughter. I was her mother.” //(Olive’s Ocean by Kevin Henkes)//

9. 12th DAY OF SETEMBER I am commanded to write an account of my days: I am bit by fleas and plagued by family. That is all there is to say (//Catherine, Called Birdy - Karen Cushman)//

10. On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor. (//Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy)//

11. "Where's papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast. (//Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White//)

12. Some things start before other things. It was a summer shower but didn’t appear to know it, and it was pouring rain as fast as a winter storm. Miss Perspicacia Tick sat in what little shelter a raggedy hedge could give her and explored the universe. She didn’t notice the rain. Witches dried out quickly//. (The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett)//

13. You better not never tell nobody but God. //(The Color Purple by Alice Walker)//

14. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. (//One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez//)


 * 15.** A column of smoke rose thin and straight from the cabin chimney. The smoke was blue where it left the red of the clay. It trailed into the blue of the April sky and was no longer blue but gray. The boy Jody watched it, speculating. (//The Yearling - Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings//)

16. It was a pleasure to burn. (//Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury//)

17. Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. (//The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway)//

18. It was Wang Lung's marriage day. (//The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck)//

19. In the shade of the house, in the sunshine on the river bank by the boats, in the shade of the sallow wood and the fig trees, Siddharta, the handsome Brahmin's son, grew up with his friend Govinda. (//Siddharta by Herman Hesse)//

20. We were in the study-hall when the headmaster entered, followed by a new boy not yet in school uniform and by the handyman carrying a large desk//. (Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert)//