# The best LAST lines from literature **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [September 20, 2004, 12:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-last-lines-from-literature/265063 "2004-09-20T00:39:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Peter\_Morris](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/peter_morris/32/359_2.png) [@Peter\_Morris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peter_Morris)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2004, 1:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-last-lines-from-literature/265063/61 "2004-09-22T13:09:37Z")
“And so I close the book of my life” _The memoirs of Constantine Dix_ ---
**Author:** ![Spudo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/bbce88/32.png) [@Spudo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spudo)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2004, 1:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-last-lines-from-literature/265063/62 "2004-09-22T13:13:57Z")
The roadway drifts before us, rising to the Courts in the distance. The time has come. We mount and move forward. We are riding now across the blackness on a road that looks like cheesecloth. Enemy citadel, conquered nation, trap, ancestral home… We shall see. There is a faint flickering from battlement and balcony. We may even be in time for a funeral. I straighten my back and I loosen my blade. We will be there before much longer. Good-bye and hello, as always. From _The Courts Of Chaos_, by Roger Zelazny, the 5th and final book in his First Chronicles Of Amber. ---
**Author:** ![Horatio\_Hellpop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e5b9ba/32.png) [@Horatio\_Hellpop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Horatio_Hellpop)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2004, 4:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-last-lines-from-literature/265063/63 "2004-09-22T16:13:22Z")
“I would continue, but I find I am run over by a truck.” –Michael O-Donoghue _How to Write Good_ “In the Parliament of whores, the whores are us.” –PJ O’Rourke _Parliament of Whores_ ---
**Author:** ![kung\_fu\_lola](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/f4b2a3/32.png) [@kung\_fu\_lola](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kung_fu_lola)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2004, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-last-lines-from-literature/265063/64 "2004-09-22T16:40:35Z")
_So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly in to the past._ - **The Great Gatsby** It’s poetry. ---
**Author:** ![kung\_fu\_lola](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/f4b2a3/32.png) [@kung\_fu\_lola](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kung_fu_lola)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2004, 4:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-last-lines-from-literature/265063/65 "2004-09-22T16:45:29Z")
And I just realized it [was on page one all along](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=5274193&postcount=12). Stupid me, I just skimmed for italics or bolding. See? I knew it was famous! ---
**Author:** ![Ogre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/ecb155/32.png) [@Ogre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ogre)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2004, 5:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-last-lines-from-literature/265063/66 "2004-09-22T17:07:21Z")
I can’t believe no one has mentioned this one yet: > [@Jack Kerouac](#): > > 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. ---
**Author:** ![yellowval](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/919ad9/32.png) [@yellowval](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yellowval)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2004, 6:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-last-lines-from-literature/265063/67 "2004-09-22T18:56:14Z")
I was going to, **Ogre** , but alas, I could not find it on the Internet that day. Then I forgot when I got home. Thank you for doing what I neglected to accomplish! That whole last page makes me bawl like a baby. ---
**Author:** ![TPWombat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbce88/32.png) [@TPWombat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TPWombat)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2004, 11:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-last-lines-from-literature/265063/68 "2004-09-22T23:51:27Z")
" Then the Man threw his two boots and his little stone axe (that makes three) at the Cat, and the Cat ran out of the cave and the Dog chased him up a tree, and from that day to this, Best Beloved, three proper Men out of five will always throw things at a Cat whenever they meet him, and all proper Dogs will chase him up a tree. But the Cat keeps his side of the bargain too. He will kill mice and he will be kind to Babies when he is in the house, as long as they do not pull his tail too hard. But when he has done that, and between times, he is the Cat that walks by himself and all places are alike to him, and if you look out at nights you can see him waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone—just the same as before." Rudyard Kipling _The Cat That Walked By Himself_ ---
**Author:** ![pravnik](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/8edcca/32.png) [@pravnik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pravnik)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2004, 1:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-last-lines-from-literature/265063/69 "2004-09-23T01:18:29Z")
“Goodbye Dopes!” I shouted. They turned to me and shouted back, “Goodbye, you big fuckin’ idiot!” Steve Martin, “The Day the Dopes Came Over” ---
**Author:** ![rjk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/ed655f/32.png) [@rjk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rjk)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2004, 2:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-last-lines-from-literature/265063/70 "2004-09-23T02:14:57Z")
Re _Flowers for Algernon_ (the original short story), by Daniel Keyes. > [@Peter Morris](#): > > As it happens, I’ve just read the book (i didn’t know there was a short story) and the book’s last line (spelt as in the book) is : > > **P.S. please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard** Yes, your line is more complete than mine, but I don’t recall the ‘bak yard’. (It’s been a while.) Most of your spelling agrees with what I remember, but the name in this line was certainly “Algeron”. ---
**Author:** ![inquiring\_mind](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e47c2d/32.png) [@inquiring\_mind](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/inquiring_mind)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2004, 3:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-last-lines-from-literature/265063/71 "2004-09-23T03:20:32Z")
I second the lines from Milton, Gatsby, and others. Here’s another… “Thus from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.” Charles Darwin, _The Origin of Species_ ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2004, 3:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-last-lines-from-literature/265063/72 "2004-09-23T03:28:53Z")
“But I do wish that Hercule Poirot hadn’t come to the country to grow vegetable marrows.” – _The Murder of Roger Ackroyd_ - by memory, I’m afraid, so I probably haven’t got it quite right. ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2004, 3:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-last-lines-from-literature/265063/73 "2004-09-23T03:31:43Z")
> [@](#): > > It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised near twenty years of my life, and which, however inadequate to my own wishes, I finally deliver to the curiosity and candour of the public. – Edward Gibbon, _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire._ ---
**Author:** ![riserius1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/7ab992/32.png) [@riserius1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/riserius1)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2004, 4:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-last-lines-from-literature/265063/74 "2004-09-23T04:05:15Z")
“I been away a long time.” –_One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest_, Ken Kesey ---
**Author:** ![The\_Mad\_Hermit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b5ac83/32.png) [@The\_Mad\_Hermit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Mad_Hermit)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2004, 5:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-last-lines-from-literature/265063/75 "2004-09-23T05:16:50Z")
“I was cured all right.” _A Clockwork Orange_ ---
**Author:** ![betenoir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/258eb7/32.png) [@betenoir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/betenoir)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2004, 11:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-last-lines-from-literature/265063/76 "2004-09-23T11:11:08Z")
> [@Steelerphan](#): > > “I was cured all right.” > > _A Clockwork Orange_ I was going to mention that one but I know some pedantic jerk would be along to point out that that isn’t the real last line and spoil everything…oh…er…sorry… ---
**Author:** ![Quercus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/7ab992/32.png) [@Quercus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quercus)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2004, 3:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-last-lines-from-literature/265063/77 "2004-09-23T15:32:25Z")
I can’t remember the beginning of the sentence, but it ends with “…all quiet on the western front.” And since adding any more would be a spoiler, I’ll leave it at that. I assume the book it’s from would be obvious. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Mad\_Hermit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b5ac83/32.png) [@The\_Mad\_Hermit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Mad_Hermit)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2004, 8:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-last-lines-from-literature/265063/78 "2004-09-23T20:57:40Z")
> [@](#): > > I was going to mention that one but I know some pedantic jerk would be along to point out that that isn’t the real last line and spoil everything…oh…er…sorry… Yes, but us provincial 'Merkins don’t know any different. The book ends where the movie does… in the version released here. ---
**Author:** ![waits](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/df788c/32.png) [@waits](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/waits)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2004, 2:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-last-lines-from-literature/265063/79 "2004-09-24T02:43:28Z")
As McTeague rose to his feet, he felt a pull at his right wrist; something held it fast. Looking down, he saw that Marcus in that last struggle had found strength to handcuff their wrists together. Marcus was dead now; McTeague was locked to the body. All about him, vast interminable, stretched the measureless leagues of Death Valley. McTeague remained stupidly looking around him, now at the distant horizon, now at the ground, now at the half-dead canary chittering feebly in its little gilt prison. \*McTeague: A Story of San Francisco \* by Frank Norris ---
**Author:** ![Rilchiam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/2bfe46/32.png) [@Rilchiam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rilchiam)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2004, 8:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-last-lines-from-literature/265063/80 "2004-09-24T08:27:50Z")
> [@](#): > > But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place at the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing. — A. A. Milne, _The House at Pooh Corner_ > [@](#): > > Why did they always make such a fuss? —Charles Jackson, _The Lost Weekend_ Spoiler just in case: Everything that had happened to them had led to this moment, and as they closed together with the knives between them, each gave an equal cry of fear. Ruth Rendell, _The Killing Doll_ [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-last-lines-from-literature/265063.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-last-lines-from-literature/265063.md?page=5)