Last sentences that blow you away.

Cafe Society
21

If I may hijack slightly to include an episode of a TV show, one of my favorite episodes of Buffy, “Lie To Me”:

Giles: You mean life?
Buffy: Yeah. Does it get easy?
Giles: What do you want me to say?
Buffy: Lie to me.
Giles: Yes, it’s terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and, uh, we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies, and everybody lives happily ever after.
Buffy: Liar.

It’s not so much the line, but rather what happens during this exchange, and the way that Buffy acted like a very sad child, and Giles the comforting parent (which is fundamentally their relationship for much of the show, Buffy the frightened child, and Giles the protective father-figure)

22

You took one of mine!

OK, here’s some other ones-

“He was soon bourne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.”- Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

“…The Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.” - Dante’s Divine Comedy.

" ‘The road is cleared… We are going back to the world.’
He raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space
the sign of the dollar." - You-Know-Who from You-Know-What.

“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all, Amen.” -The Revelation (KJV).

23

The last lines in the last ep are pretty good-

Faith: Gee, Buffy, what are you going to do since you’re not special any more?

Buffy- slow slight smile breaks into a big grin.

24

Indeed, a classic. But…

Did Carton actually say them? Dickens does put this line (and a couple paragraphs preceding it) in quotations, but as I recall before all that it says something like, “If he had spoken, this is what he would have said.” Which sorta annoys me. Dickens seems to say that Carton didn’t speak, but here’s what he might have said if he had chosen to do so.

Sir Rhosis

25

Hell, it was right there on the cover! You didn’t even have to read the damn book!

26

If not the most profound last line ever, certainly the coolest:

“Fuckin’ endings are a bitch.”~~~Elmore Leonard

27

One that I like from a short story called “The Cage,” by A. Bertram Chandler.

“Only intelligent creatures put other creatures in cages.”

Sir Rhosis

28

The last paragraph of Shaara’s Pulitzer-prize-winning The Killer Angels.

The great battle of Gettysburg, the bloodiest conflict to take place upon this continient, has finally ground to its exhausted, shattered end. This is the very end of the book:

[spoiler]The true rain came in a monster wind, and the storm broke in blackness over the hills and the bloody valley; the sky opened along the ridge, and the vast water thundered down, drowning the fires, flooding the red creeks, washing the rocks and the grass and the white bones of the dead, cleansing the earth and soaking it thick and rich with water and wet again with clean cold rainwater, driving the blood deep into the earth, to grow it again with the roots toward Heaven.

It rained all night. The next day was Saturday, the Fourth of July.[/spoiler]

Sailboat

29

…

Wow, that’s a hell of a line.

30

Seconded - or thirded. Great Line…

Brendon

31

“Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

–The Sun Also Rises

This didn’t blow me away when I first read it, but over the years, I’ve come to appreciate everything it means. I guess it was just hard for a high school student to understand.

32

“Not many people know someone who’s a great friend and a great writer. Charlotte was both.”

{First line italicised because it’s a paraphrase.)

33

From “Farewell to the Master,” which would be (significantly tweaked and) filmed as “The Day the Earth Stood Still:”

“You misunderstand,” the mighty robot had said. “I am the master.”

34

’ “He’ll get the Guild over my dead body !”

Years later, she realized it was the wrong thing to say about an immortal." '- A Matter of Oaths
“Her name was Tolly Mune, but in the histories they call her all sorts of things.” - Tuf Voyaging.
“And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.” - Masque of the Red Death
"For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass. " - The Outsider

35

For me, one of the most intensely emotional books I have ever read is Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang. It is about about a gay man, half-Chinese, half-hispanic, in a future world where Chinese communism has taken over, and the United States is a “people’s republic.” And yet, despite all the controversial themes, it is, at heart, a book about something so much simpler: finding your place in life. It sounds boring, and people often complain that the book is about nothing at all. For me, though, I think it very nearly changed my life. The last line makes me burst into tears every time I so much as think about it…

36

One of my favorites, from E. R. Eddison:

[spoiler]…Queen Sophonisba answered and said, “My Lord Juss, blaspheme not the bounty of the blessed Gods, lest They be angry and withdraw it, Who have granted unto you of Demonland from this day forth youth everlasting and unwaning strength and skill in arms, and–but hark!” she said, for a trumpet sounded at the gate, three strident blasts.

At the sound of that trumpet blown, the lords Goldry and Spitfire sprang from their seats, clapping hand to sword. Lord Juss stood like a stag at gaze. Lord Brandoch Daha sat still in his golden chair, scarce changing his pose of easeful grace. But all his frame seemed alight with action near to birth, as the active principle of light pulses and grows in the sky at sunrise. He looked at the Queen, his eyes filled with a wild surmise. A serving man, obedient to Juss’s nod, hastened from the chamber.

No sound was there in that high presence chamber in Galing till in a minute’s space the serving man returned with startled countenance, and, bowing before Lord Juss, said, “Lord, it is an Ambassador from Witchland and his train. He craveth present audience.”[/spoiler]

37

Patrick Suskind, Perfume: “For the first time they had done something out of Love.”

And of course the last line of The Lord of The Rings: ‘“Well, I’m back.”, he said.’

38

“Standing alongside the big man from Florida as they monitored the descent of the nearest skycutter, the sergeant deftly and matter-of-factly clipped the universe back onto his belt.” - Cyber Way by Alan Dean Foster

“The attack on Spica would give humankind a chance to put right the damage caused by the Antares Nova - a fighting chance. Down through the ages, that was all human beings had ever asked for. It was all they had ever needed.” - Antares Passage by Michael McCollum

And a bunch from Larry Niven.

“And picked up the gun off the newspapers, looked at it for a long moment, then dropped it in the drawer. His hands began to shake. On a world line very close to this one . . .
And he picked the gun off the newspapers, put it to his head
and
fired the hammer fell on an empty chamber.
fired. The gun jerked up and blasted a hole in the ceiling.
fired.
the bullet tore a furrow in his scalp.
took off the top of his head.” - All the Myriad Ways

“Eventually he’d look down and see the pentagram. Part of it was in plain sight. But it wouldn’t help him. Spread eagled, he couldn’t reach it to wipe it away. He was trapped for eternity, shrinking toward the infinitesimal, but doomed never to reach it, forever trying to appear inside a pentagram whcih was forever too small. I had drawn it on his bulging belly.” - Convergent Series

“Two empty ships drove furiously towards the edge of the universe, all alone.” - The Ethics of Madness

“Maybe men are the cowards - at the core” - At the Core

“When the manna runs out, I’ll go out like a blown candle flame and civilization will follow. No more magic, no more magic based industries. Then the whole world will be barbarians until men learn a new way to coerce nature, and swordsmen, the damned stupid swordsmen will win after all.” - Not Long Before the End

“Do you like spilled blood ? I lived a bloody life, and it isn’t over yet.” - A Teardrop Falls

39

Because, in the world according to Garp, we are all Terminal Cases.

40

“A dream can be the highest point in a life.”

– Ben Okri, The Famished Road.