📚 Literary Quotes Openings Trivia Questions & Answers
Below are 30 free literary quotes openings trivia questions with answers — part of Literature trivia on BUZZ. Want a real challenge that adapts to what you know? Play the Literature quiz — no signup needed to start.
30 Literary Quotes Openings trivia questions
Q1. Which novel begins: 'It is a truth universally acknowledged...'?
Answer: Pride and Prejudice
💡 Austen originally drafted the novel as 'First Impressions' before renaming it in 1813.
Q2. Which Dickens novel features a workhouse orphan asking 'Please, sir, I want some more'?
Answer: Oliver Twist
💡 It was Dickens's second novel and among the first in English with a child protagonist.
Q3. Which novel opens with Jo grumbling Christmas 'won't be Christmas without any presents'?
Answer: Little Women
💡 Jo speaks the line while lying on the rug, kicking off the sisters' talk about their poverty.
Q4. Which Tolkien novel opens: 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit'?
Answer: The Hobbit
💡 Tolkien said the line came to him unplanned while marking a stack of student exam papers.
Q5. Which novel's Party plasters posters reading 'Big Brother is watching you'?
Answer: Nineteen Eighty-Four
💡 The Party's three core slogans are 'War is Peace,' 'Freedom is Slavery,' 'Ignorance is Strength.'
Q6. Which novel has Catherine declare to Nelly: 'Nelly, I am Heathcliff'?
Answer: Wuthering Heights
💡 Catherine makes the declaration in Chapter 9, while weighing whether to marry Edgar Linton.
Q7. Which novel opens: 'If you really want to hear about it...'?
Answer: The Catcher in the Rye
💡 Holden Caulfield name-drops David Copperfield in that very first sentence.
Q8. Which novel opens: 'Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins'?
Answer: Lolita
💡 Nabokov, a native Russian speaker, wrote Lolita entirely in English.
Q9. Which Victor Hugo novel is home to bell-ringer Quasimodo?
Answer: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
💡 Hugo's original French title was simply 'Notre-Dame de Paris,' naming the cathedral, not Quasimodo.
Q10. Which Vonnegut novel repeats 'So it goes' after every single death?
Answer: Slaughterhouse-Five
💡 The phrase recurs roughly 106 times across the novel, once for each death Billy Pilgrim meets.
Q11. Which Camus novel famously opens with the line 'Mother died today'?
Answer: The Stranger
💡 Narrator Meursault's flat reaction to his mother's death later damns him at his murder trial.
Q12. Which novel opens: 'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again'?
Answer: Rebecca
💡 The book's narrator, the second Mrs. de Winter, is never given a first name in the whole novel.
Q13. Which classic opens: 'All children, except one, grow up'?
Answer: Peter Pan
💡 A 2006 UK poll voted this the nation's favourite opening line in all of literature.
Q14. Which novel opens the summer 'they electrocuted the Rosenbergs'?
Answer: The Bell Jar
💡 Plath sets Esther Greenwood's breakdown against the real 1953 execution of the Rosenbergs.
Q15. Which story opens with Fern asking, 'Where's Papa going with that ax?'
Answer: Charlotte's Web
💡 E.B. White reportedly tried several other openings before settling on Fern's question.
Q16. Which novel's famously bad opener is 'It was a dark and stormy night'?
Answer: Paul Clifford
💡 The line inspired the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for intentionally terrible opening sentences.
Q17. Which novel opens: 'It was love at first sight'?
Answer: Catch-22
💡 Yossarian's love interest in that opening line is not a woman, but the army chaplain.
Q18. Which novel opens with the words '124 was spiteful'?
Answer: Beloved
💡 124 is the house's street number, home to the ghost that haunts Sethe's family.
Q19. Which novel opens: 'When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken'?
Answer: To Kill a Mockingbird
💡 The injury isn't explained until the novel's final pages, framing the whole book as a flashback.
Q20. Which novel opens: 'I became what I am today at the age of twelve'?
Answer: The Kite Runner
💡 The narrator pinpoints the moment to 'a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975' in Kabul.
Q21. Which novel opens: 'We slept in what had once been the gymnasium'?
Answer: The Handmaid's Tale
💡 The old basketball hoops are still bolted up, though the nets are long gone.
Q22. In which Melville tale does a clerk endlessly reply 'I would prefer not to'?
Answer: Bartleby, the Scrivener
💡 The passive-resistant clerk has become a byword for quiet, baffling refusal.
Q23. Which novel opens: 'In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to recall'?
Answer: Don Quixote
💡 The line coined a lasting Spanish cliche for glossing over an awkward detail.
Q24. Which novel opens: 'There was no possibility of taking a walk that day'?
Answer: Jane Eyre
💡 The gloomy weather in line one mirrors ten-year-old Jane's friendless life with her aunt's family.
Q25. Which novel opens: 'Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life...'?
Answer: David Copperfield
💡 Dickens called it his 'favourite child' among all his novels in an 1867 preface.
Q26. Which novel closes: 'It is a far, far better thing that I do...'?
Answer: A Tale of Two Cities
💡 Sydney Carton thinks this as he goes to the guillotine in place of Charles Darnay.
Q27. Which novel opens: 'You don't know about me without you have read a book...'?
Answer: Huckleberry Finn
💡 Hemingway later claimed all modern American literature 'comes from one book' — this one.
Q28. Huxley's Brave New World borrows its title from a line in which Shakespeare play?
Answer: The Tempest
💡 The line is Miranda's, marveling at other humans after years alone on an island with her father.
Q29. Which novel opens: 'The sky above the port was the color of television'?
Answer: Neuromancer
💡 Gibson wrote the novel on a manual typewriter, without ever having used a computer.
Q30. Which novel opens: 'The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there'?
Answer: The Go-Between
💡 Hartley's famous line echoes a phrase his friend Lord David Cecil used in a 1949 Oxford lecture.
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