Famous First Lines...Famous Last Lines

This I Believe essays were returned last class period, and you were asked to create an editing check list..  We will begin freewriting today by looking at famous first lines just for fun.  Digging into your writer's notebook, you will be challenged to compose your freewriting today based on a famous first line of your choice and a famous last line of your choice.  This may become a part of your next writer's notebook (#3). 

Just for kicks, here's some information about two various lines...

Famous First Line:

"You better not never tell nobody but God."

This line opens the novel The Color Purple, published in 1982 by author Alice Walker, who was born in Georgia on 9 February 1944. Through letters written back and forth to one another, the novel traces the story of two poor, African-American sisters who are separated, one married off to an older, misogynistic neighbor and the other called to serve as a missionary in Africa. The main character Celie also writes letters to God because she has no one else to share her shameful secrets and her deepest feelings with.

The book was lauded by critics and was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award. The NY Times deemed Walker "a lavishly gifted writer" and this, her third novel, "her most impressive." Readers responded to Walker's narrative style and identified with her female characters especially. Most agree that Walker's novel is "a poignant tale of women's struggle for equality and independence." Some of Walker's other works include In Search of Our Mother's Gardens (a non-fiction book about her life and her writing) and Meridian.  

I’m planning to read this book again.  I know I will find something to shake my head at, mumble an "amen" to, laugh about, cry about...Such a powerful work to me--I will read it many times more, I know.

Famous Last Line:

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

F.Scott Fitzgerald ended his most famous novel The Great Gatsby with these lines, considered by some to be the best closing lines of any novel ever. The novel came out back in 1925 but still shows up on collections of all-time classics and high school reading lists. Narrator Nick Carraway offers insight into the vapid society of West Egg, New York, in the 1920s, as well as the mostly empty marriage between Tom and Daisy Buchanan. The action centers on languid afternoons and extravagant parties at the mansion of Gatsby, an enigmatic millionaire.

The NY Times called The Great Gatsby "a curious book, a mystical, glamourous story of today" and one that "takes a deeper cut at life" than others before and after. Fitzgerald also wrote This Side of Paradise and The Jazz Age and is also known for his tumultuous marriage to his wife Zelda. Fitzgerald, born in 1896, lived a lavish lifestyle and died of a heart-attack at the age of 44.

I read The Great Gatsby in English class my junior year in high school. I re-read it again last summer with my English III class.