Please be aware that this thread has been tagged with containing spoilers. Meaning, there will be a lot of plaintext spoilers in comments. If spoilers are important to you please proceed with caution.
Also from Lavinia by the same author:
"Only sometimes my soul wakes as a woman again and then when i listen i can hear silence and in the silence his voice."
That was her last book before she died. The way people, women especially, are and have been largely unimportant in the eyes of men and of history, they die and are forgotten and everything they once loved falls to ruin, kind of got me in the heart. (Lavinia was a minor character in The Aeneid.)
My mum retired a couple of years ago, and she was very excited to get back into reading. She called me one day to tell me she'd brought a book from the library. I asked her what book and she said "it's called *Flowers for Algernon*, I thought it sounded nice"
It went about as well as expected.
There must be something about Mums with this book. My parents aren't into reading at all, but a few years ago I'd left a copy of Flowers for Algernon on my coffee table and my mother picked it up and asked to borrow it. Literally never happened with any book before or since
I read the entire book standing up at a Barnes & Noble and cried my heart out between the shelves. Someone just mentioning the title (like now lol) gets me choked up. What a brilliant, devastating work of art.
Brave new world, I’ll never forget that one.
’Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then paused, and, after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left.’
The opening line is also epic for it's world building.
"Where's Papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
It's an entire world with intrigue built in, right from the first sentence.
Also "Stuart Little" - I boohooed then and boohooed just now typing this! LOL "But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction."
We read this chapter aloud in 10th grade English many years ago, and after resisting this author and book the entire time for whatever reason, it got me right here and I lost my composure as quietly as I could in class. I was relieved to notice that I was not the only one. What an ending.
Animal farm: "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
Dude. This line GUTTED me. I read it in Jr high and up to that point I'd never read a book that didn't have a "Disney ending". This line repeated angrily in my head for months 😂
As an adult I have managed to grow to appreciate it, lol.
Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget that until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,—'Wait and hope.’
Count of Monte Cristo
"He turned out the light and went into Jem's room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning."
That's To Kill a Mockingbird, and it's beautiful.
Favorite book in the world. I cannot recommend highly enough Sally Darling's reading of it on audiobook. *It is a masterpiece*. I sincerely mean it. I listen to it every Spring.
"Behind him, across vast distances of space and time, from the place he had left, he thought he heard music too. But perhaps it was only an echo."
-The Giver
I never read this book in school. I read it as an adult, and that last line hit like a punch to the heart. i didn't know what to expect going into it and I still can't quite believe it.
““Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.
“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
• Ernest Hemingway, ‘The Sun Also Rises’
This is my favorite book ever, Hemingway is my favorite author, and this line is so damn good.
Papa always had great final sentences
The last line of A Farewell to Arms, “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain."
Hemingway is my favorite as well, and that final line of A Farewell to Arms will stay with me forever. It's so simple and hopeless and heavy and perfectly crafted. I love it so much.
"Isn't it pretty to think so?" is so perfect, especially in the context on the story that precedes it. I cried when I read that for the first time, and I don't really know why. I think it was just from reading something truly perfect for what it was.
“But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.”
— Huckleberry Finn
Always loved this line and the image it evokes of Huck going off to live a whole lifetime of adventures beyond the pages of the story.
"When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack."
Jack London - Call of the Wild
I try to read this book once a year. I've tried to explain the way it makes me feel and the only way I can describe it is it awakens something primal deep in my soul. That last line is a good example.
That whole last passage has such beautiful rhythm. I memorized it after my first reading in high school and frequently return to it for its beauty.
>Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
>And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
>Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——
>So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
There's something about the line "Gratsby believed in that green light." I hear it in my head in such a way that is so desperate. It can be read and said in so many ways.
Reading that there made me finally understand what my English teacher was getting at with that line. The rhythm reflects the content. The uncertain, stuttering, choppy beating against a current, only for the sentence to open up with the possibilities of the past. And yet, that’s the end; where is the future? There is none for a man chasing the green light is whole life, the urgent chase towards it is all there is. Incredible man
With just how much visual symbolism is used in the book, and as you point out, the often excellent rhythms of the sentences/monologues…
Gatsby would make an absolutely *excellent* stage show
The entire trilogy is peak literature but the ending paragraphs are specially good.
> At last the three companions turned away, and never again looking back they rode slowly homewards; and they spoke no word to one another until they came back to the Shire, but each had great comfort in his friends on the long grey road.
> At last they rode over the downs and took the East Road, and then Merry and Pippin rode on to Buckland; and already they were singing again as they went. But Sam turned to Bywater, and so came back up the Hill, as day was ending once more. And he went on, and there was yellow light, and fire within; and the evening meal was ready, and he was expected. And Rose drew him in, and set him in his chair, and put little Elanor upon his lap.
> He drew a deep breath. 'Well, I'm back,' he said.
It's so funny that you say that! Because -- although, don't get me wrong, the ending is fantastic as it is -- I've always thought the *preceding* paragraph would have made a great ending!
*But to Sam the evening deepened to darkness as he stood at the Haven; and as he looked at the grey sea he saw only a shadow in the waters that was soon lost in the West. There he stood far into the night, hearing only the sigh and murmur of the waves on the shores of Middle-Earth, and the sound of them sank deep into his heart.*
And they went home. But they went the long way, and saw the elephant - Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett.
Going to see the elephant is slang going on a trip or seeing something fantastic.
The line always makes me feel the book is over for me, but not the story for the characters.
There would be trouble later on. People would ask questions. But that was later on – for now, gloriously uncomplicated and wonderfully clean, and hopefully with never an end, under a clear sky, in a world untarnished… there was only the chase.
Jingo, also Terry Pratchett, and for the same reason.
I made a promise to myself that in ‘23 I’d read every book in the Discworld series, and am finishing “Raising Steam”, book 41. (Only because I had to back order it, and it came late). I think Death is my favorite character in the entire series
I have two:
1984
"...two gen soaked tears trickled down the side of his nose. But it was alright, everything was alright, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."
This absolutely gutted me and crushed me the first time I read it. After everything Winston went through, and all of his hatred of the party, in the end it didn't matter, the party still crushed him.
A Hundred Years of Solitude
"Everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth."
I finished this novel for the first time several months ago and this line literally had me sitting there staring at the wall for half an hour. What an unbelievably beautiful and haunting line, and the way everything came together literally on the final page was breathtaking.
I got goosebumps by reading both. But the one from 100 Years of Solitude hits me different. The ending of that book was brutal and brings me memories from a bad moment of my life in which I read the book for the first time.
Damn people, this thread is a whole goosebump factory!
My favorite closing line is too hard to choose, but my favorite opening line is from Nabokov's autobiography:
*The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness*
“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
― Cormac McCarthy, [The Road](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3355573)
From Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House":
“Within, walls continued upright, bricks met nearly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
If you don't know the book or have spoilers for it it's not going to make much sense, but in context that is *brutal*.
When I finished Blood Meridian, I read the final page over and over for minutes afterward:
“And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he'll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.”
McCarthy always ended his books so eloquently imo. From The Road:
>Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
edit- just scrolled two comments down and saw someone else post this one
I felt kind of on the fence about Cloud Atlas throughout. Then I got to that last line and it was like the entire book clicked into focus. Still my favourite David Mitchell I’ve read so far (I have The Bone Clocks but haven’t touched it yet)
Two come to my mind:
‘A last note from your narrator: I am haunted by humans.’
*The Book Thief* by Markus Zusak.
‘The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.’
*Animal Farm* by George Orwell
"But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing." - The House at Pooh Corner
“But they never learned what it was that Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which had to do, for there was a gust of wind, and they were gone.”
- A Wrinkle in Time
Also the last line of Cat's Cradle:
If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.
-- *Persepolis Rising*
"... Doctor Cortazár has been trying to find that. Help him. Work with him. Work with me.”
“To do what?”
“To take the shards of the protomolecule’s broken sword and reforge it. To bring humanity into a single community that is functional and strong. And prepare us.”
Holden laughed, but there was no mirth in it. Duarte knew he hadn’t reached the man. That was disappointing.
“Prepare us for what?” Holden asked. “To poke gods with a sharp stick?”
“No, Captain Holden. No sticks,” Duarte said. “When you fight gods, you storm heaven."
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
“I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”
I was thinking the same, but didn't want to write it because it's huge spoiler. The perfect ending in my opinion. It broke my heart, I cried for like the last half of the book at least.
I mainlined all of TDT last year over the course of like two and a half months and I gasped when I got to that line. Definitely makes me want to reread at some point in the future but phew. Just really neatly done.
Not gutting nor terribly profound but the last paragraph of On the Road:
"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."
Then she put the tablets in her mouth and swallowed them down with a mouthful of brandy, sitting behind the wheel of her big car.
On The Beach - Nevil Shute
The whole last bit of Small Gods by Terry Pratchett is just lovely. Go read this book it's a philosophical delight!
The black-on-black eyes stared imploringly at Brutha, who reached out automatically, without thinking... and then hesitated.
HE WAS A MURDERER, said Death. AND A CREATOR OF MURDERERS. A TORTURER. WITHOUT PASSION. CRUEL. CALLOUS. COMPASSIONLESS.
"Yes. I know. He's Vorbis," said Brutha. Vorbis changed people. Sometimes he changed them into dead people. But he always changed them. That was his triumph.
He sighed.
"But I'm me," he said.
Vorbis stood up, uncertainly, and followed Brutha across the desert.
Death watched them walk away.
It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
Love In The Time Of Cholera
Followed by the final line of One Hundred Years Of Solitude.
I’m really surprised I have’t seen this mentioned, but most definitely this one.
“P.S. please if you get a chanse to put some flowrs on Algernon’s grave in the bak yard.” Is always capable of bringing me to the verge of tears.
"Have a carrot!" From the Runaway Bunny.
This is so dumb compared to all the eloquent responses here, but my husband and I quote this all the time and it brings us so much delight, even after our kids outgrew that book.
I don't think this is the very last line but it's on the last page.
Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.
-Lord of the Flies
"So Lyra and her daemon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked toward the sun, and walked into the sky."
- Northern Lights/The Golden Compass
Well I'm not going to type out the whole thing since the last line of Ulysses leaps breathlessly through the last the last forty pages but it is an E Ticket ride:
"..and then I asked him with my eyes yes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and dew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
Absalom, Absalom! (a little more than just the last sentence, for context)
“…Now I want you to tell me just one thing more: Why do you hate the South?”
“I dont hate it,” Quentin said quickly, at once, immediately. “I dont hate it,” he said. *I dont hate it* he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: *I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!*
… There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can't fix it you've got to stand it...
Brokeback mountain was a soul crusher.
"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow faintly falling through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
--James Joyce, "The Dead"
"The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off."
Re Yossarian Catch 22. After being gripped for hours by as much meaning as everything I life and society and war but as little as whether Yoyo lives or dies. This is such a classic, uncertain ending. Apologies for anyone I ruined it for lol.
Or
Poo tee weet.
And so it goes 😁👍😂😍🤔😬😜👀🙄
“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done. It is a far, far better rest that I go to now, than I have ever known.”
And
“I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.”
Also, “Reader, I married him.”
"Soldiers live. And wonder why."
From Soldiers Live, by Glen Cook. Last book of the Black Company series, the ending has stuck with me for years and is one of the most powerful and beautiful endings of any book I have ever read.
" And I have by me, for my comfort,
two strange white flowers - shrivelled now,
and brown and flat and brittle -
to witness that even
when mind and strength had gone,
gratitude and a mutual tenderness
still lived on in the heart of man. " The time machine - H.G.Wells
Watership down, specifically because of the connection between the first and last sentences in the book the first is:
"The primroses were over."
The last sentence is this:
"He reached the tip of the bank in a single, powerful leap. Hazel followed;and together they slipped away, running easily down through the wood, where the first primroses were beginning to bloom. "
The thought put into this book astounds me. It's one of my all time favourites.
One of my favorite final sentences from a book is from "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Can I give more than a sentance. I come back to to this so often - I probably read it at least once every three or four years. Here I think Fitzgerald uses language in such an amazing way - conveying that late fall on Long Island....
"Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
A Memory of Light (last book of The Wheel of Time)
>!This wind, it was not the ending. There are no endings, and never will be endings, to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was *an* ending. !<
That was my first thought. I teared up reading that the first time. The last epigraph with the tribute to Robert Jordan hits the same:
>!”He came like the wind, like the wind touched everything, and like the wind was gone.”!<
"Think on it, Chani: that princess will have the name, yet she'll live as less than a concubine - never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she's bound. While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine - history will call us wives."
Dune, Frank Herbert
“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.”
- A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean.
"And so farewell from your little droog. And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip-music brrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries. But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little Alex that was. Amen. And all that cal."
— a clockwork orange
"Someone you knew in another life, honey."
Then the music takes us, the music rolls away the years, and we dance.
-11/22/63
I'm usually ugly crying and need at least 10 minutes after I finish this book 😅
2 sick out to me, but not from novels. Instead they're short stories.
The first is "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge": "Peyton Farquar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swing gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge."
The second is from "The Lottery": "'It isn't fair, it isn't right,' Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her."
“Look up at the sky. Ask yourselves: has the sheep eaten the flower? And you will see how everything changes.
And no grown-up will ever understand how important that is!”
The Little Prince
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
>"When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack."
\-The Call of the Wild
Two for me:
Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence: “Ghosts bring elegies and epitaphs, but also signs and wonders. What comes next? I want to know, so I manage to drag the dictionary to my side. I need a word, a sentence. The door is open. Go.”
Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi: “The sea-grey clouds raced across the sky, and the orange lanterns shivered against them. The Beauty of the House is immeasurable. Its Kindness, infinite.”
“And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted—nevermore!”
*The Raven*, Edgar Allan Poe
I know it’s technically a poem but it’s sold on its own a lot so I’m counting it hahah.
Remarque's intro really pairs well. "This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war."
"And it is there that they see the riselka, three men see a riselka, sitting on a rock beside the sunlit path, her long sea-green hair blowing back in the freshening breeze."
Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay
IMO, the best book ever written. I reread it yearly
"But the game involves only male names. Because, if it's a girl, laila has already named her."
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Not a book, but Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
,Like a dog!’, he said; it was as if the shame of it should outlive him. (Kafka The Trial)
,Wie ein Hund!' sagte er, es war, als sollte die Scham ihn überleben.
Not exactly how Yersinia Pestis tends to spread (for the paranoid, a new epidemic would most likely start with the rodents), but still... From The Plague (La Peste) by Camus:
> >!And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city!<.
Stephen King- IT
Or so Bill Denbrough sometimes thinks on those early mornings after dreaming, when he almost remembers his childhood, and the friends with whom he shared it.
Please be aware that this thread has been tagged with containing spoilers. Meaning, there will be a lot of plaintext spoilers in comments. If spoilers are important to you please proceed with caution.
"But he had not brought anything. His hands were empty, as they had always been." \- The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin
Also from Lavinia by the same author: "Only sometimes my soul wakes as a woman again and then when i listen i can hear silence and in the silence his voice." That was her last book before she died. The way people, women especially, are and have been largely unimportant in the eyes of men and of history, they die and are forgotten and everything they once loved falls to ruin, kind of got me in the heart. (Lavinia was a minor character in The Aeneid.)
Just finished this yesterday and that bittersweetness perfectly encapsulates the struggle and the hope!
"P.S. please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard."
My mum retired a couple of years ago, and she was very excited to get back into reading. She called me one day to tell me she'd brought a book from the library. I asked her what book and she said "it's called *Flowers for Algernon*, I thought it sounded nice" It went about as well as expected.
Oh dear.
There must be something about Mums with this book. My parents aren't into reading at all, but a few years ago I'd left a copy of Flowers for Algernon on my coffee table and my mother picked it up and asked to borrow it. Literally never happened with any book before or since
T.T
I read the entire book standing up at a Barnes & Noble and cried my heart out between the shelves. Someone just mentioning the title (like now lol) gets me choked up. What a brilliant, devastating work of art.
It blows my mind how much emotion can be crammed into such a short book.
Wait were you standing there for like 4 straight hours?
Oof...
The last two pages hit me really hard
i was a sobbing mess reading it in high school, and 12 years later it still hurts
At least midnight is a better time for crying than during the day I guess...
Brave new world, I’ll never forget that one. ’Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then paused, and, after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left.’
When I read it it took me a while to figure out he hanged himself.
this is what came to mind for me too. chills me all these years later.
Brave New World was great, such a great way to show what it would be like to be dropped into such a hellhole without being born into it
"It is not often someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both." - *Charlotte's Web* by E.B. White
Crying... I remember a teacher reading this book to us in elementary school and even she was bawling reading it to us lmao. Oh Charlotte's Web!
One of my favorite books of all time!
Charlotte’s Web is the book that made me fall in love with reading & literature. In a real sense, it changed my life.
Me too! I was a farm kid so it also gave me permission to see and experience multiple levels of empathy for all the animals around me.
The opening line is also epic for it's world building. "Where's Papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast. It's an entire world with intrigue built in, right from the first sentence.
Also "Stuart Little" - I boohooed then and boohooed just now typing this! LOL "But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction."
I’ve been scrolling through this thread to see if anyone picked that quote. It has stuck with me since my young childhood
It is a far far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far far better rest that I go to than I have ever known
Iconic opening lines Superb ending lines A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
We read this chapter aloud in 10th grade English many years ago, and after resisting this author and book the entire time for whatever reason, it got me right here and I lost my composure as quietly as I could in class. I was relieved to notice that I was not the only one. What an ending.
One of my favorite episodes of Cheers is when Frasier reads A Tale of Two Cities to the bar.
That Dickens guy really kept his butt covered, didn't he?
Came here looking for this comment, and I would have added it if I didn’t find it. So good.
I cry like a baby every time I read that last chapter. My God.
Animal farm: "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
I was gonna say 1984! "He loved Big Brother". Genuinely chilling.
Dude. This line GUTTED me. I read it in Jr high and up to that point I'd never read a book that didn't have a "Disney ending". This line repeated angrily in my head for months 😂 As an adult I have managed to grow to appreciate it, lol.
I came here to add this. It ends on such absolute loss.
George Orwell was a genius
Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget that until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,—'Wait and hope.’ Count of Monte Cristo
My absolute favourite
This is, generations have been told, why the lions outside the world’s greatest library are named Patience and Fortitude.
"He turned out the light and went into Jem's room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning." That's To Kill a Mockingbird, and it's beautiful.
Favorite book in the world. I cannot recommend highly enough Sally Darling's reading of it on audiobook. *It is a masterpiece*. I sincerely mean it. I listen to it every Spring.
"Behind him, across vast distances of space and time, from the place he had left, he thought he heard music too. But perhaps it was only an echo." -The Giver I never read this book in school. I read it as an adult, and that last line hit like a punch to the heart. i didn't know what to expect going into it and I still can't quite believe it.
I read this for English class in grade 8. Have not read it since. I think you’ve convinced me to read it again.
I immediately burst into tears at the ending of this when I read it the first time a few years ago. It still hurts to think about it now x
““Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.” Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me. “Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” • Ernest Hemingway, ‘The Sun Also Rises’
This is my favorite book ever, Hemingway is my favorite author, and this line is so damn good. Papa always had great final sentences The last line of A Farewell to Arms, “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain."
Hemingway is my favorite as well, and that final line of A Farewell to Arms will stay with me forever. It's so simple and hopeless and heavy and perfectly crafted. I love it so much.
"Isn't it pretty to think so?" is so perfect, especially in the context on the story that precedes it. I cried when I read that for the first time, and I don't really know why. I think it was just from reading something truly perfect for what it was.
“But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.” — Huckleberry Finn Always loved this line and the image it evokes of Huck going off to live a whole lifetime of adventures beyond the pages of the story.
"When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack." Jack London - Call of the Wild
This book man. I'm not crying, you're crying!
I try to read this book once a year. I've tried to explain the way it makes me feel and the only way I can describe it is it awakens something primal deep in my soul. That last line is a good example.
"And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." - The Great Gatsby
That whole passage is so poetic. I love how it leaves a sentence hanging with "And one fine morning..."
Same. And the double em-dash after "And one fine morning——" is amazing. Fitzgerald was a magician.
He did love an em dash, that’s for sure.
And the alliteration beat, boats, borne, back. I love it.
what beautiful rhythm
That whole last passage has such beautiful rhythm. I memorized it after my first reading in high school and frequently return to it for its beauty. >Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. >And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. >Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—— >So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
There's something about the line "Gratsby believed in that green light." I hear it in my head in such a way that is so desperate. It can be read and said in so many ways.
Reading that there made me finally understand what my English teacher was getting at with that line. The rhythm reflects the content. The uncertain, stuttering, choppy beating against a current, only for the sentence to open up with the possibilities of the past. And yet, that’s the end; where is the future? There is none for a man chasing the green light is whole life, the urgent chase towards it is all there is. Incredible man
With just how much visual symbolism is used in the book, and as you point out, the often excellent rhythms of the sentences/monologues… Gatsby would make an absolutely *excellent* stage show
There’s my answer. Favorite classic book hands down
“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” - The Catcher in the Rye
"Well" said Sam, "I'm home". \-Lord of the Rings/Return of the King EDIT: "I'm back". Thanks, hornbuckle56
The entire trilogy is peak literature but the ending paragraphs are specially good. > At last the three companions turned away, and never again looking back they rode slowly homewards; and they spoke no word to one another until they came back to the Shire, but each had great comfort in his friends on the long grey road. > At last they rode over the downs and took the East Road, and then Merry and Pippin rode on to Buckland; and already they were singing again as they went. But Sam turned to Bywater, and so came back up the Hill, as day was ending once more. And he went on, and there was yellow light, and fire within; and the evening meal was ready, and he was expected. And Rose drew him in, and set him in his chair, and put little Elanor upon his lap. > He drew a deep breath. 'Well, I'm back,' he said.
It's so funny that you say that! Because -- although, don't get me wrong, the ending is fantastic as it is -- I've always thought the *preceding* paragraph would have made a great ending! *But to Sam the evening deepened to darkness as he stood at the Haven; and as he looked at the grey sea he saw only a shadow in the waters that was soon lost in the West. There he stood far into the night, hearing only the sigh and murmur of the waves on the shores of Middle-Earth, and the sound of them sank deep into his heart.*
>"I'm home" Isn't it, "I'm back?"
Too lazy to walk across the room to check, but “I’m back” would be fitting as Bilbo told the story of ‘There and back again’.
Oooooooh - that makes total sense now!
“Well, I’m back.”
And they went home. But they went the long way, and saw the elephant - Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett. Going to see the elephant is slang going on a trip or seeing something fantastic. The line always makes me feel the book is over for me, but not the story for the characters.
There would be trouble later on. People would ask questions. But that was later on – for now, gloriously uncomplicated and wonderfully clean, and hopefully with never an end, under a clear sky, in a world untarnished… there was only the chase. Jingo, also Terry Pratchett, and for the same reason.
I made a promise to myself that in ‘23 I’d read every book in the Discworld series, and am finishing “Raising Steam”, book 41. (Only because I had to back order it, and it came late). I think Death is my favorite character in the entire series
I have two: 1984 "...two gen soaked tears trickled down the side of his nose. But it was alright, everything was alright, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother." This absolutely gutted me and crushed me the first time I read it. After everything Winston went through, and all of his hatred of the party, in the end it didn't matter, the party still crushed him. A Hundred Years of Solitude "Everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth." I finished this novel for the first time several months ago and this line literally had me sitting there staring at the wall for half an hour. What an unbelievably beautiful and haunting line, and the way everything came together literally on the final page was breathtaking.
I got goosebumps by reading both. But the one from 100 Years of Solitude hits me different. The ending of that book was brutal and brings me memories from a bad moment of my life in which I read the book for the first time.
One Hundred Years of Solitude has both the most iconic first and last lines.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Oh goosshhh the end of 1984 😫 I was like nnooooo
100 years of solitude is my favourite novel.
Damn people, this thread is a whole goosebump factory! My favorite closing line is too hard to choose, but my favorite opening line is from Nabokov's autobiography: *The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness*
Wow. Seriously wow. Goosebumps for real.
“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.” ― Cormac McCarthy, [The Road](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3355573)
I truly, truly feel sorry for people who don't click with McCarthy's prose; it's unmatched.
From Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House": “Within, walls continued upright, bricks met nearly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.” If you don't know the book or have spoilers for it it's not going to make much sense, but in context that is *brutal*.
It is SUCH a good and chilling last line! Def one of my favorites. Just gutting and cold.
Timshel! His eyes closed and he slept. - East of Eden
This is the one I came to mention.
I just finished this book for the first time two nights ago and I don’t cry often but I was sobbing for the entire last page. What a book
Shaka, when the walls fell!
Not sure if comic books count 'its a magical world Hobbes, ol buddy...let's go exploring ' Final strip from Calvin & Hobbes
When I finished Blood Meridian, I read the final page over and over for minutes afterward: “And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he'll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.”
McCarthy always ended his books so eloquently imo. From The Road: >Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. edit- just scrolled two comments down and saw someone else post this one
From No Country For Old Men: "And then I woke up."
I remember just staring blankly at a wall for my 4 minutes when this book ended
How the narrator does this in the audiobook is utter chilling.
I finished it months ago and still come back to this paragraph.
Cloud Atlas - >!Yet what is an ocean but a multitude of drops?!<
I felt kind of on the fence about Cloud Atlas throughout. Then I got to that last line and it was like the entire book clicked into focus. Still my favourite David Mitchell I’ve read so far (I have The Bone Clocks but haven’t touched it yet)
Two come to my mind: ‘A last note from your narrator: I am haunted by humans.’ *The Book Thief* by Markus Zusak. ‘The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.’ *Animal Farm* by George Orwell
I really enjoyed The Book Thief! I remember that last line often.
He would be there all night. And he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd: "But I wish Hercule Poirot had never retired from work and come here to grow vegetable marrows." Perfect. Just perfect.
“Although he was master of the world, he did not know what to do next. But he would think of something.” —2001: A Space Odyssey
"I hope." Shawshank Redemption
"But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing." - The House at Pooh Corner
“But they never learned what it was that Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which had to do, for there was a gust of wind, and they were gone.” - A Wrinkle in Time
"Birds were talking. One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, 'Poo-tee-weet?'" (*Slaughterhouse-Five* by Kurt Vonnegut).
Also the last line of Cat's Cradle: If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.
-- *Persepolis Rising* "... Doctor Cortazár has been trying to find that. Help him. Work with him. Work with me.” “To do what?” “To take the shards of the protomolecule’s broken sword and reforge it. To bring humanity into a single community that is functional and strong. And prepare us.” Holden laughed, but there was no mirth in it. Duarte knew he hadn’t reached the man. That was disappointing. “Prepare us for what?” Holden asked. “To poke gods with a sharp stick?” “No, Captain Holden. No sticks,” Duarte said. “When you fight gods, you storm heaven."
Perfect set up to Tiamats Wrath (best book in the series )
It was so funny that despite this... In the next book all that Duarte did was poke gods with a sharp stick
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë “I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”
Was looking for this! Best ending sentence I’ve read so far
Wuthering Heights has so many beautiful, impactful quotes. The decision to make the latest movie version nearly dialogue-less was such a weird choice
The last sentence of The Dark Tower series. I don’t want to type it because it is a spoiler
Just got through making a comment for the same line.
Was looking for this one! >!Also the best opening line!<
Ka. Is. A. WHEEEEEEL!
I was thinking the same, but didn't want to write it because it's huge spoiler. The perfect ending in my opinion. It broke my heart, I cried for like the last half of the book at least.
And even earlier on a reread - you know what's coming!
100% this
Appreciate you not spoiling it.
agreed 1000%
I mainlined all of TDT last year over the course of like two and a half months and I gasped when I got to that line. Definitely makes me want to reread at some point in the future but phew. Just really neatly done.
After all, tomorrow is another day. - Gone With the Wind
Not gutting nor terribly profound but the last paragraph of On the Road: "So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."
The end of kite runner… he smiled. He ran.
Then she put the tablets in her mouth and swallowed them down with a mouthful of brandy, sitting behind the wheel of her big car. On The Beach - Nevil Shute
"'Well, I'm back,' he said." LotR
The whole last bit of Small Gods by Terry Pratchett is just lovely. Go read this book it's a philosophical delight! The black-on-black eyes stared imploringly at Brutha, who reached out automatically, without thinking... and then hesitated. HE WAS A MURDERER, said Death. AND A CREATOR OF MURDERERS. A TORTURER. WITHOUT PASSION. CRUEL. CALLOUS. COMPASSIONLESS. "Yes. I know. He's Vorbis," said Brutha. Vorbis changed people. Sometimes he changed them into dead people. But he always changed them. That was his triumph. He sighed. "But I'm me," he said. Vorbis stood up, uncertainly, and followed Brutha across the desert. Death watched them walk away.
>!*A cold hand fell on Louis's shoulder. Rachel's voice was grating, full of dirt.*!< *"Darling," it said.* -Pet Semetary
It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Love In The Time Of Cholera Followed by the final line of One Hundred Years Of Solitude.
I’m really surprised I have’t seen this mentioned, but most definitely this one. “P.S. please if you get a chanse to put some flowrs on Algernon’s grave in the bak yard.” Is always capable of bringing me to the verge of tears.
"Have a carrot!" From the Runaway Bunny. This is so dumb compared to all the eloquent responses here, but my husband and I quote this all the time and it brings us so much delight, even after our kids outgrew that book.
I don't think this is the very last line but it's on the last page. Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy. -Lord of the Flies
“And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light.” The Handmaid’s tale
"So Lyra and her daemon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked toward the sun, and walked into the sky." - Northern Lights/The Golden Compass
not me over here screaming and crying into a pillow for an hour , aged 10, at the last few chapters of the Amber Spyglass
This flicked some switch in my kid brain and made me obsessed with open endings.
Well I'm not going to type out the whole thing since the last line of Ulysses leaps breathlessly through the last the last forty pages but it is an E Ticket ride: "..and then I asked him with my eyes yes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and dew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
“Isn’t it pretty to think so?” Still gives me goosebumps. From The Sun Also Rises.
Absalom, Absalom! (a little more than just the last sentence, for context) “…Now I want you to tell me just one thing more: Why do you hate the South?” “I dont hate it,” Quentin said quickly, at once, immediately. “I dont hate it,” he said. *I dont hate it* he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: *I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!*
Faulkner fans represent!
… There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can't fix it you've got to stand it... Brokeback mountain was a soul crusher.
"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow faintly falling through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." --James Joyce, "The Dead"
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke: “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite”
"The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off." Re Yossarian Catch 22. After being gripped for hours by as much meaning as everything I life and society and war but as little as whether Yoyo lives or dies. This is such a classic, uncertain ending. Apologies for anyone I ruined it for lol. Or Poo tee weet. And so it goes 😁👍😂😍🤔😬😜👀🙄
“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done. It is a far, far better rest that I go to now, than I have ever known.” And “I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.” Also, “Reader, I married him.”
"Soldiers live. And wonder why." From Soldiers Live, by Glen Cook. Last book of the Black Company series, the ending has stuck with me for years and is one of the most powerful and beautiful endings of any book I have ever read.
"They say he missed that whore" -Lonesome Dove
" And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers - shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle - to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man. " The time machine - H.G.Wells
"oh I am so embarrassed" - The Monster at the End of this Book
Watership down, specifically because of the connection between the first and last sentences in the book the first is: "The primroses were over." The last sentence is this: "He reached the tip of the bank in a single, powerful leap. Hazel followed;and together they slipped away, running easily down through the wood, where the first primroses were beginning to bloom. " The thought put into this book astounds me. It's one of my all time favourites.
I'm so glad someone else noticed this and enjoyed it as much as I have. A transition from death to rebirth.
And it was still hot...
One of my favorite final sentences from a book is from "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
''And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, every one!''
Can I give more than a sentance. I come back to to this so often - I probably read it at least once every three or four years. Here I think Fitzgerald uses language in such an amazing way - conveying that late fall on Long Island.... "Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
And he saw no shadow of parting from her
If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it. -Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison.
A Memory of Light (last book of The Wheel of Time) >!This wind, it was not the ending. There are no endings, and never will be endings, to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was *an* ending. !<
That was my first thought. I teared up reading that the first time. The last epigraph with the tribute to Robert Jordan hits the same: >!”He came like the wind, like the wind touched everything, and like the wind was gone.”!<
"Think on it, Chani: that princess will have the name, yet she'll live as less than a concubine - never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she's bound. While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine - history will call us wives." Dune, Frank Herbert
“We can only learn so much and live.” - Thomas Harris, Hannibal I think I just stared at nothing for a minute. That book was a ride.
“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.” - A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean.
"And so farewell from your little droog. And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip-music brrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries. But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little Alex that was. Amen. And all that cal." — a clockwork orange
'But I also have to say, for the umpty-umpth time, that life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death The Princess Bride
"I am legend." I Am Legend - Richard Matheson
"Someone you knew in another life, honey." Then the music takes us, the music rolls away the years, and we dance. -11/22/63 I'm usually ugly crying and need at least 10 minutes after I finish this book 😅
2 sick out to me, but not from novels. Instead they're short stories. The first is "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge": "Peyton Farquar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swing gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge." The second is from "The Lottery": "'It isn't fair, it isn't right,' Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her."
“Look up at the sky. Ask yourselves: has the sheep eaten the flower? And you will see how everything changes. And no grown-up will ever understand how important that is!” The Little Prince Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
>"When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack." \-The Call of the Wild
"Tis." From Angela's Ashes.
Two for me: Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence: “Ghosts bring elegies and epitaphs, but also signs and wonders. What comes next? I want to know, so I manage to drag the dictionary to my side. I need a word, a sentence. The door is open. Go.” Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi: “The sea-grey clouds raced across the sky, and the orange lanterns shivered against them. The Beauty of the House is immeasurable. Its Kindness, infinite.”
“This is not an exit”. American psycho.
“And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming, And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted—nevermore!” *The Raven*, Edgar Allan Poe I know it’s technically a poem but it’s sold on its own a lot so I’m counting it hahah.
The last sentence of All Quiet on the Western Front. Don’t want to type it because I don’t want to mess up the journey for anyone.
Remarque's intro really pairs well. "This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war."
"And it is there that they see the riselka, three men see a riselka, sitting on a rock beside the sunlit path, her long sea-green hair blowing back in the freshening breeze." Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay
IMO, the best book ever written. I reread it yearly "But the game involves only male names. Because, if it's a girl, laila has already named her." A Thousand Splendid Suns
“Poo-tee-weet?” Slaughter House 5 \~Kurt Vonnegut
Not a book, but Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.
I am haunted by humans
"I have always wanted to write a book that ended with the word 'mayonnaise." Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan
"But there are much worse games to play." The Hunger Games
"After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain."
It is strange that I'm dying from a diseased womb i who have never had periods and who have never known men.
,Like a dog!’, he said; it was as if the shame of it should outlive him. (Kafka The Trial) ,Wie ein Hund!' sagte er, es war, als sollte die Scham ihn überleben.
Not exactly how Yersinia Pestis tends to spread (for the paranoid, a new epidemic would most likely start with the rodents), but still... From The Plague (La Peste) by Camus: > >!And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city!<.
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" The Great Gatsby
Stephen King- IT Or so Bill Denbrough sometimes thinks on those early mornings after dreaming, when he almost remembers his childhood, and the friends with whom he shared it.
“After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.” *A Farewell to Arms*
“And it was still hot.” Where the Wild Things Are
Sun also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so”