#518 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Friday November 25)
Good morning,
Keeping it light over this Thanksgiving holiday. Another selection of first lines of famous novels:
All this happened, more or less
Happy families are all alike; unhappy families are all unhappy in their own way.
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.
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
Squire Trelawney, Dr Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about [name deleted], from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17-, and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn, and the brown old seaman, with the sabre cut, first took up his lodging under our roof.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
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.
Old John of Gaunt, time-honour'd Lancaster, hast thou, according to thy oath and band, brought hither Henry Hereford thy bold son, here to make good the boisterous late appeal, which then our leisure would not let us hear, against the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Mowbray?"
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
Here are the sources (out of order)
Romeo & Juliet
Slaughterhouse Five
The Old Man and the Sea
Catcher in the Rye
Treasure Island
A Tale of Two Cities
Anna Karenina
The Great Gatsby
Richard III
One Hundred Years of Solitude
The Year of Magical Thinking
Richard II
I love this game…
Have a great day,
Glenn
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