First-line Game: The Ones That Got Away
Ok, you know the routine by now. These are the ten that no-one guessed the first time around. Watch this space for the answers.
1. Horror and fatality have been stalking abroad in all ages. ('Metzengerstein', Edgar Allan Poe, picked by murasaki_1966)
2. 'You know the song, don't you? "There's no business like show business".' Harry gets the Ethel Merman intonation just right as he heats up a poker in the gas burner.
3. This all began about ten years ago in a house at the top of a flight of rickety wooden stairs in Laurel Canyon.
4. All day it has been windy - strange weather for late July - the wind swirling through the hedges like an invisible floodtide among seaweed: tugging, compelling them in its own direction, dragging them one way until the patches of elder and privet sagged outward from the tougher stretches of blackthorn on either side.
5. The flea market in Saint-Ouen: war medals, glass taxidermists' eyes, a bicycle wheel, a leopard's skin, a pack of cards, an acrobat's costume (for Helene?) with half the pink sequins gone.
6. Here the sloops of war and the dollymops flash it to spie a dowry of parny; there the bonneteers cooled their longs and shorts in the hazard drums. ('A Victorian Fable', Angela Carter, picked by sovay)
7. Isolated here in the North, planted long ago by a Roman pilgrim, a chestnut grew, strong and solitary, by the colonnade of rounded double arches at the entrance to the cloister of Mariabronn: a noble, vigorous tree, the sweep of its foliage drooping tenderly, facing the winds in bold and quiet assurance; so tardy in spring that when all glowed green around it and even the cloister nut trees wore their russet, it awaited the shortest nights to thrust forth, through little tufts of leaves, the dim exotic rays of its blossom, and in October, after wine and harvests had long been gathered, let drop the prickly fruits from its yellowing crown; fruits which did not ripen every year, for which the cloister schoolboys fought one another, and which Gregory, the Italian sub-prior, burned amid the logs of his fireplace. (Narziss and Goldmund, Hermann Hesse, picked by sovay)
8. There was a God.
9. As I dressed that morning I ran over in my mind the long list of statistics, evasions, and exaggerations that they would expect in my report. (The Space Merchants, Fred Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth, picked by chaosmanor)
10. She took the corner too fast, and it was definitely not much of a road.
1. Horror and fatality have been stalking abroad in all ages. ('Metzengerstein', Edgar Allan Poe, picked by murasaki_1966)
2. 'You know the song, don't you? "There's no business like show business".' Harry gets the Ethel Merman intonation just right as he heats up a poker in the gas burner.
3. This all began about ten years ago in a house at the top of a flight of rickety wooden stairs in Laurel Canyon.
4. All day it has been windy - strange weather for late July - the wind swirling through the hedges like an invisible floodtide among seaweed: tugging, compelling them in its own direction, dragging them one way until the patches of elder and privet sagged outward from the tougher stretches of blackthorn on either side.
5. The flea market in Saint-Ouen: war medals, glass taxidermists' eyes, a bicycle wheel, a leopard's skin, a pack of cards, an acrobat's costume (for Helene?) with half the pink sequins gone.
6. Here the sloops of war and the dollymops flash it to spie a dowry of parny; there the bonneteers cooled their longs and shorts in the hazard drums. ('A Victorian Fable', Angela Carter, picked by sovay)
7. Isolated here in the North, planted long ago by a Roman pilgrim, a chestnut grew, strong and solitary, by the colonnade of rounded double arches at the entrance to the cloister of Mariabronn: a noble, vigorous tree, the sweep of its foliage drooping tenderly, facing the winds in bold and quiet assurance; so tardy in spring that when all glowed green around it and even the cloister nut trees wore their russet, it awaited the shortest nights to thrust forth, through little tufts of leaves, the dim exotic rays of its blossom, and in October, after wine and harvests had long been gathered, let drop the prickly fruits from its yellowing crown; fruits which did not ripen every year, for which the cloister schoolboys fought one another, and which Gregory, the Italian sub-prior, burned amid the logs of his fireplace. (Narziss and Goldmund, Hermann Hesse, picked by sovay)
8. There was a God.
9. As I dressed that morning I ran over in my mind the long list of statistics, evasions, and exaggerations that they would expect in my report. (The Space Merchants, Fred Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth, picked by chaosmanor)
10. She took the corner too fast, and it was definitely not much of a road.