Tag Archives: first lines

Famous Fundy Novels


photo by Stewart Butterfield

Call me…Pastor. (Moby-Dick)

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a preacher boy in possession of a bible school diploma, must be in want of a wife. (Pride and Prejudice)

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. (no change required to 1984)

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life is a foregone conclusion. I’m an evangelist, how could I not be? (David Copperfield)

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. We went soulwinning anyway. (Paul Clifford)

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel, the only real channel that any good Christian should be watching given the filth on television these days. (Neuromancer)

I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man . . .(no change required to Notes from Underground)

It was like so, but wasn’t. At least that’s what the pastor kept insisting. (Galatea 2.2)

All this happened to the evangelist, more or less. (Slaughterhouse-Five)

Elmer Gantry was drunk. (no change needed to Elmer Gantry)

It was a pleasure to burn Vatican Corrupted Bibles. (Fahrenheit 451)

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by frumpy jean jumpers. (Middlemarch)

Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. (No change needed to Back When We Were Grownups)

He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. Then he’d introduce himself as Doctor Pastor Brother Hyles. (Lord Jim)

Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. (no change needed to A Frolic of His Own)

They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the fundamentalist people did. (Wide Sargasso Sea)

Do you have any to add? Let’s hear them!