One Line to Rule Them All: Vote Now in the Sweet 16!

Mar 25, 2024

Round two is over and we’re on to the Sweet 16—and whereas round one had plenty of close matchups, round two was full of blowouts. Very little drama from the first votes, it appears. Will round three, which is full of classics, be more of the same? Is it going to get even more predictable? Is Anne of Green Gables somehow going to knock of Moby Dick? Are we on a collision course to another all-Dickens matchup in a future round? Will Lewis and Tolkien meet in the final round? It’s up to you! Vote now.

Matchup #1

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

vs.

“Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women.”
from The Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

Matchup #2

"Kidnapping children is never a good idea; all the same, sometimes it has to be done." from Island of the Aunts by Eva Ibbotson

vs.

“Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wilderness, for I had wandered from the straight and true.”
from The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

Matchup #3

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

vs.

“Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s secret citadel.”
from The Odyssey, trans. Lattimore

Matchup #4

”Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.”
from The Luck of the Bodkins by P. G. Wodehouse

vs.

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”
from The Hobbit by J.R.R Tolkien

Matchup #5

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

vs.

“The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.”
from The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton

Matchup #6

“A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
from The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

vs.

“Marley was dead: to begin with.”
from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Matchup #7

“Call me Ishmael.”
from Moby Dick by Herman Melville

vs.

“Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde’s Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.”
from Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

Matchup #8

“Ships at a distance have every man’s hopes aboard.”
from Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

vs.

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis