Book Quiz: Identify These Famous Lines and Win a Guest Blog Post

Today’s post is a quiz with famous lines (sometimes the very first lines) from books. See how many you can identify without cheating!  No using Google or other forms of the internet.  (Or good old fashioned books…)

1.  “Call me Ishmael.”
2. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
3. “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
4. “I would prefer not to.”
5. “My dear, I don’t give a damn.”
6. “Behind every great fortune, there is a crime.”
7. “Ah!  Vanitas Vanitatum!  Which of us is happy in this world?”
8. “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
9. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
10. “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”
11. “Mma Ramotswe had a detective agency in Africa, at the foot of Kgale Hill.”
12. “The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women.  It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States.”
13. “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”
14. “What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them.”
15. “Madness were easy to bear compared with truth like this.”
16. “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.”
17. “On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field.  The sun was sinking just behind it. . . . There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.”
18. “And Wang Lung, hearing this, felt his mouth suddenly dry and parched and his voice came from him in a whisper; ‘Silver, then!  Silver and gold!  Anything to the very price of my land!’”
19. “I dont [sic] hate it . . . I dont hate it.  I dont.  I dont!  I dont hate it!  I dont hate it!” (303).
20.  “Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.”

I will announce the answers and a winner on Thursday, September 6.  I will pick a winner randomly from everybody who leaves a comment using random.org.  The winner will then have the opportunity to write a guest blog post on my blog.  This is a fun chance for one of you to share your favorite book or to write a review of a recent book you’ve read.  It’s also an opportunity to get more readers to see your work and your blog.  I will link your post back to your blog and some 1,986 of my followers will see your work.  (I’m almost at 2,000 followers!)

So, identify as many of the above quotes as you can and leave a comment for a chance to win a guest blog post!  Ready?  Set?  Go!