Have you ever been tempted to improve the opening lines of well-known novels? Occasionally I’ve tried, as in italics below.
It was said that a new person had appeared on the sea-front: a lady with a little dog. She had been a man. – Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the Dog (1899).
Call me Ishmael, at your peril. – Herman Melville. Moby-Dick (1851).
Happy families are so boring; but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. – Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877).
READ MORE
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be wary of would-be mothers-in-law. – Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813).
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Seriously? – Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859).
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 – Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).
The sun shone, having no alternative, so? – Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938).
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. Yes, the newspapers were right. – James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather, fell on the mirror and a razor which lay crossed there – James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).
Mother died today. Or maybe, yesterday; who cares? – Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942).
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. He was lucky he brought those sandwiches – Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952).
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in Fire Island – Sylvia Plath. The Bell Jar (1963).
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. But that’s okay, we’re liberal here. LP Hartley, The Go-Between (1953).
Improvement, from Anglo-French emprowement, for an “act of making better”.
