Classic book quiz?

Would anyone here care to have a online quiz, where we try to guess different classic (or not) books? Say someone posts a paragraph from whatever book, and so on?

Sure, I doubt I'll be very good, but I'll play along.

Here is my paragraph.

Presently she began again. "I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it'll seem to come out among the people that walk with their head downwards! The Antipathies, I think-" (she was rather glad there was no one listening, this time, as it didn't sound at all the right word) "-but I shall have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know. Please, Ma'am, is this New Zealand or Australia?" (and she tried to curtsey as she spoke-fancy curtseying as you're falling through the air! Do you think you could manage it?" "And what an ignorant little girl she'll think me! No, it'll never do to ask: perhaps I shall see it written up somewhere."

I'm guessing Alice in Wonderland or Alice through the looking glass. Something like that. I bet I'm totally off, though!

Alice in Wonderland is the correct answer

"To none. No, Miss --, to none. If you will hear me through a very little more, all you can ever do for me is done. I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul. In my degradation I have not been so degraded but that the sight of you with your father, and of this home made such a home by you, has stirred old shadows that I thought had died out of me. Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever. I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it."

I took the name out, because that might make it too obvious.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“Not so hasty, if you please. I have by no means done. To all the
objections I have already urged, I have still another to add. I am no
stranger to the particulars of your youngest sister ’s infamous elope-
ment. I know it all; that the young man’s marrying her was a patched-
up business, at the expence of your father and uncles. And is such a
girl to be my nephew’s sister? Is her husband, is the son of his late fa-
ther ’s steward, to be his brother? Heaven and earth!—of what are you
thinking? Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?”
“You can now have nothing further to say,” she resentfully an-
swered. “You have insulted me in every possible method. I must beg
to return to the house.”

Pride & Prejudice! ^

"The pool he had just got out of was not the only pool. There were dozens of others- a pool every few yards as far as his eyes could reach. You could almost feel the trees drinking the water up with their roots. This wood was very much alive."

The Magician's Nephew, by CS Lewis

She asked me, in a very soft voice, what I meant.... Then I made her understand that, where she was concerned, I was only a poor dog, ready to die for her...but that she could marry the young man when she pleased, because she had cried with me and mingled her tears with mine!..."

The Phantom of the Opera, by Gaston Leroux. I had to blink out some parts to make it a bit of a challenge, but I think it should be really easy to guess all the same...

In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen ram- part and stood upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me. A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it, huge mounds of material and strange shelter places. And scattered about it, some in their over- turned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling- machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the ______--DEAD!--slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unpre- pared; slain as the ____ was being slain; slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.

War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells.

"What a consternation of soul was mine that dreary afternoon! How all my brain was in tumult, and all my heart in insurrection! Yet in what darkness, what dense ignorance, was the mental battle fought! I could not answer the ceaseless inward question--why I thus suffered; now at the distance of--I will not say how many years, I see it clearly."

Jane Eyre!

"[He] believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

The Great Gatsby, by Scott Fitzgerald!

"I have just returned from a visit to my landlord- the solitary neighbor that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed a situation so completely removed from the stir of society.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte!

"The sound of the approaching grain teams was louder, thud of big hooves on hard ground, drag of brakes and the jingle of trace chains. Men were calling back and forth from the teams."

Of Mice and Men, by John Steinback!

"He had played about with politics, he told me, at first for the interest of them, and then because he couldn't help himself. I read him as a sharp, restless fellow, who always wanted to get down to the roots of things. He got a little further down than he wanted."

The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan.


As if his indomitable spirit had set its potency in motion, the glass blazed suddenly like a white torch in his hand. It flamed like a star that leaping from the firmament sears the dark air with intolerable light. No such terror out of heaven had ever burned in ____'s face before. The beams of it entered into her wounded head and scored it with unbearable pain, and the dreadful infection of light spread from eye to eye. She fell back beating the air with her forelegs, her sight blasted by inner lightnings, her mind in agony. Then turning her maimed head away, she rolled aside and began to crawl, claw by claw, towards the opening in the dark cliff behind.

I'm not sure which LOTR book that excerpt is from. Return of the King, maybe?

"Oh, they meant to be- I know they meant to be just as good and kind as possible. And when people mean to be good to you, you don't mind very much when they're not quite- always. They had a good deal to worry them, you know. It's very trying to have a drunken husband, you see; and it must be very trying to have twins three times in succession, don't you think? But I feel sure they meant to be good to me."

Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables!

*Should you know this book, this will be very easy for you. Should you not, it won't be hard to find.*


Dantes had been flung into the sea, and was dragged into its depths by a thirty-six pound shot tied to his feet. The sea is the cemetery of the Chateau d'If.

Thanks for the easy one ... Count of Monte Cristo ... lol


Wow, I'm actually surprised people are interested in this thread I started.


Try this


But in the end, I didn't kill my sister. She did it all by herself. At least, that's what I tell myself.

My sister's keeper



Now, by my mother's son, and that's myself,
It shall be moon, or star, or what I list,
Or ere I journey to your father's house.

The Taming of the Shrew!

"In the deep shade, at the farther end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight tell: it groveled, seemingly on all fours: it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair wild as a mane, hid its head and face."

Wild guess ... probably wrong ... This Present Darkness?

Since Luthien guessed and did not put up a new excerpt, I will post a new excerpt to get things going again.



I don't know how it is I seem to be always writing about myself. I mean all the time to write about other people, and I try to think about myself as little as possible, and I am sure, when I find myself coming into the story again, I am really vexed and say, "Dear, dear, you tiresome little creature, I wish you wouldn't!" but it is all of no use. I hope any one who may read what I write will understand that if these pages contain a great deal about me, I can only suppose it must be because I have really something to do with them and can't be kept out.

My darling and I read together, and worked, and practised, and found so much employment for our time that the winter days flew by us like bright-winged birds. Generally in the afternoons, and always in the evenings, Richard gave us his company. Although he was one of the most restless creatures in the world, he certainly was very fond of our society.

Dickens' "Bleak House"

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found
himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.

Kafka's Metamorphasis.


Three young men stood together on a wharf one bright October day awaiting the arrival of an ocean steamer with an impatience which found a vent in lively skirmishes with a small lad, who pervaded the premises like a will-o'-the-wisp and afforded much amusement to the other groups assembled there.

"They are the Campbells, waiting for their cousin, who has been abroad several years with her uncle, the doctor," whispered one lady to another as the handsomest of the young men touched his hat to her as he passed, lugging the boy, whom he had just rescued from a little expedition down among the piles.

Rose in Bloom, by Louisa May Alcott

It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my cnadle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed har, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.