Great - now I’m getting misty-eyed just reading this thread.
All the time. The one I used to go back to as a teen when I needed an outlet was Little Women - Beth’s death scene, of course. More recently, various passages in various Discworld books can reliably tear me up. The Grey Havens in ROTK gets me every time as well. Smokey’s fate at the end of Little, Big is a huge tearjerker for me.
What makes me weep in the Chronicles is in Book IV, when
King Caspian dies.
To Kill a Mockingbird–When Scout is standing on the Radley porch after walking Boo home. She is imaging how the street and people looked from Boo’s point of view. She starts with describing herself and brother Jem as “the children,” then as Atticus’s children (A man walked up the street and his children ran to meet him). It ends with “Summer, and he watched his children’s hearts break. Autumn again, and Boo’s children needed him.”
I’m a man, godammit: men don’t cry. But I might have misted over ever so slightly at the end of Brideshead Revisited, where Julia tells Charles she can never love him. After all they’ve been through, they deserved some happiness. It’s a truly, exquisitely deep well of sadness.
I’ve only cried once when reading a book. It was a novel by Geoff Ryman called Was; there are lots of different plots running through it but the theme that connects them all is The Wizard of Oz. The bit that actually made me cry was:
When Dorothy, who has been neglected by her Aunt Em and molested by Uncle Henry so often that she doesn’t even care any more, is being spoken to by Aunt Em. She sits with her whilst Dorothy is lying in the barn where she sleeps, staring at nothing out of sheer lack of will, and strokes her face in a lone moment of empathy and says “What did we do to you, Dorothy?”
I cried to hard that my father and step mother who I was staying with at the time were really worried about me until I stopped sobbing enough to explain it was because of the book.
The entire wrapup of Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain.
Every time and I’ve been reading that book about once a year for 55 years.
And Matthew’s death in Anne of Green Gables.
And a million other books and stories. The last bit of John O’Hara’s short story “Mrs. Stratton of Oak Knoll”, that gets me every time. Every time.
As Gandalf says: “Not all tears are an evil”. “Tears are the very wine of blessedness” Tolkien says, and that makes me cry, too.
Oh lord yes.
After the September 11th attacks, I worked so hard at holding it together when the kids were watching that even if I had some time to myself I couldn’t cry. Finally I realized I was not doing myself any favors and got Kristin Lavransdatter down off the shelf. I read the section where first little Erlend, then Erlend sr, then little Munan all die, one after another…and bawled for half an hour.
I think it did me a lot of good. Sniff.
He made her play and she had almost forgotten how. Life had been so hard and so bitter.–Gone With The Wind
The Two Towers
Boromir opened his eyes and strove to speak. At last slow words came. “I tried to take the ring from Frodo,” he said. “I am sorry. I have paid.” … He paused and his eyes closed wearily. After a moment he spoke again.
“Farewell, Aragorn! Go to Minas Tirith and save my people! I have failed.”
“No!” said Aragorn, taking his hand and kissing his brow. “You have conquered. Few have gained such a victory. Be at peace! Minas Tirith shall not fall!”
Boromir smiled.
“Which way did they go? Was Frodo there?” said Aragorn.
But Boromir did not speak again.
and . . .
Of course, it is likely enough, my friends, that we are going to our doom: the last march of the Ents. But if we stayed at home and did nothing, doom would find us anyway, sooner or later. That thought has long been growing in our hearts; and that is why we are marching now. It was not a hasty resolve. Now at least the last march of the Ents may be worth a song. Aye, we may help the other peoples before we pass away. Still, I should have liked to see the songs come true about the Entwives. I should dearly have liked to see Fimbrethil again. But there, my friends, songs like trees bear fruit only in their own time and their own way: and sometimes they are withered untimely.
There are actually a lot of spots in Lord of the Rings, but not all get me consistantly; these do.
I read “Reader’s Digest” every month and there never fails to be at least one article or story that makes me tear up.
For about the third time in history, Hazle, GET OUTTA MY HEAD. I can still quote the opening lines and I still tear up with the picture they paint – of the story and of the time in my life when I first read them.
Junot Diaz’s book of short stories, Drown, is a peculiar book in this way. Filled with humor, there are passages during which, in the middle of chuckling, I get misty eyed. For some reason this happened to me during the story “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl or Halfie,” which I recommend to anybody.
Another quite poignant tale was the title story. which tells up two friends growing up and growing apart. The main character, in the midst of losing something he values, attempts to hang on to it the best way he can – ensuring he’ll lose it anyway. The absolute pathos conveyed in Diaz’s spare and econcomical writing is pure poetry and the rendering of this time period puts the ache in heartache and I shed a tear – or three – for things that are lost to my youth and moving on.
Annie, you’re just a bit stouter hearted than I: I got all weepy-eyed at the simple line when Atticus introduces the kids’ to their mysterious neighbor; Scout just says “Hi, Boo.” My favorite line in one of my favorite books.
The two that make me cry without fail clearly have that effect on other Dopers too.
A Prayer for Owen Meaney by John Irving- everything has been foreshadowed, and we know it is coming- but damn that is sad.
The Time Traveller’s Wife- the last 25% of that book makes me cry every time I read it. The pregnancies, the up-coming death, the birth, everything.
I cry a lot during movies and in real life, but have only ever cried twice while reading. The first was during Stephen King’s Misery (the part where she does that really bad thing to him as punishment) and the second was a children’s book that I read to all my kids as babies, called “I’ll Love You Forever”, I think.
This. So very this.
I keep going back to Memories of Ice by Stephen Erikson.
Itkovian, sworn to take the pain and suffering of mortal souls and pass them on to a god that has been ousted, has to bear the 300’000 years of suffering of the T’lan Imass. “I am not yet done.”
Hmm, that makes very little sense. Oh well.
One of my favorites, too.
Small nitpick:
She says, “Hey, Boo.” Like a proper southern girl! 
I cry at everything. I haven’t read most of what is here, but just because y’all are teary-eyed, I am too! Sometimes I think I’m too empathetic. 
The next book is called An Echo in the Bone, she’s apparently finished it, and it’s at the publisher’s now.
Not me , I usually concider those scenes to be derigeur for the hero.
What did get me was the scene in Gust Front when
Fredricksburg is the projected landing spot for the posleen and he zooms in on a family that has decided that its time to go away. So they engage the self destruct device and go back to reading peter rabbit to their child.
Declan
There are a few passages in this, my favorite novel, that move me to tears. One in particular involves a description of the young artist using nothing but cigarette ashes to create shadow and depth in a drawing.
Being held in the grasp of a gift beyond one’s ability to fully control it is quite compelling. That story just wrecks me.
What else? Cried like a baby at the end of “The Notebook”.
E.T.A. Time Traveller’s Wife? Yeah. Sniffly in the end. For sure.
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