On Tuesday, we offered some lines from well-known literary works, missing but a word or two. How well did you do in filling in the blanks?
We’ve placed the answers below the fold.
You shouldn’t peek unless you really want to know.
All right then. Here are the answers:
1. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. – Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)
2. Where now? Who now? When now? – Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)
3. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. – William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
4. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)
5. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. – George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. – Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)
7. They shoot the white girl first. – Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)
8. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. – Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
9. It was the day my grandmother exploded. – Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)
10. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I’ve come to learn, is women. – Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)
I like my answers better