“Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”
Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
And with the passing of this ship came an end to the Fellowship of the Ring in Middle Earth.
This one has always been a favorite of mine:
“I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, 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.” — Wuthering Heights
I’ve included the last two lines or so. Maybe it’s cheating, but it reads better. Also, spolier boxes in case you don’t want to read them.
"True, Rab had died. Hundreds more would die, but not the thing they died for.
‘So a man can stand up…’ "
- Esther Forbes, “Johnny Tremain”
"Yes, he had been wrong about Shiloh. Shiloh isn’t haunted - men are haunted. Shiloh doesn’t care.’
- Thomas Harris, “Red Dragon”
I’m not sure about this one, but I think it was the last passage:
“God’s choices in inflicting suffering are not satisfactory to us, nor are they understandable, unless innocence offends Him. Clearly He needs some help in directing the blind fury with which He flogs the earth.”
- Thomas Harris, “Hannibal”
‘History will call us wives.’
- Dune
It humanizes what is an essentially de-humanizing story. Of course, that’s completely thrown away in later books. But I really didn’t like those anyway.
(Don’t kill me if this is inaccurate, I’m at work and can’t check)
“To die alone in the rain”
-Hemingway, “A Farewell to Arms”
The last line of 1984 is one of the most chilling sentences in the history of English literature, IMO. That was gonna be mine.
Daniel
“Yes, for the love of God.”
As long as we’re doing Orwell and “the more things change the more they stay the same…”
– Animal Farm
Zev Steinhardt
I’ve never been much into horror, so I don’t read a lot of Stephen King. But the last word of Pet Sematary made me throw the book at the wall. Not because it was bad–it just affected me that much.
If you don’t know how it ended, let me just tell you that we’re waiting for someone to rise from the dead. We aren’t completely sure if she’ll come back the same as she was, or as a homocidal zombie. The main character, his mind unbalanced by recent events, is sitting there. Waiting. He hears the door open behind him. He smells graveyard dirt. She says one word to him, then the book ends.
That word was, “Darling.”
I was very annoyed at the movie, in that it ruined the ambiguity of this final scene.
“Thank you, Samuel. That’s the lovliest story I’ve ever been told.”
God Knows, Joseph Heller
Here is the life and death of Tender Branson and I can just walk away from it.
And the sky is blue and righteous in ever direction.
And the sun is total and burning and just right there, and today is a beautiful day.
Testing, testing, one, two-
Survivor, Chuck Palahniuk
“Please put some flowers on Algeron’s grave.” – Flowers for Algernon (the original short story), by Daniel Keyes.
I haven’t read the book, so I don;t know if he used the same line.
The final lines (IIRC) of A Tale of Two Cities, which, as I don’t have the book in front of me, I can’t quote exactly. The “It is a far far better thing I do now…” speech. Most people don’t know the context for it, which gives it a far deeper meaning: A man sacrificing his life for those he loves.
Also, of course, dang near anything by Poe.
You guys have beaten me to all the good ones. So, here’s an offbeat. Not the just last line, but the last word of Dante’s Inferno:
“stars.”
the Purgitario:
“stars.”
and the Paridiso:
“stars.”
The best last line in my opinion comes from the best short story ever written in English.
“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 falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”–James Joyce’s “The Dead”
I can’t even read that to proof it because I makes me bawl every single time. Gah.
The last line of 1984 is better understood with what goes before it. The last 4 words are just a coda to the despair of the rest of it.
But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
My favourite from amongst many by Hemingway is the end of his short story My Old Man:
**And George Gardner looked at me to see if I’d heard and I had all right and he said, “Don’t you listen to what those bums said, Joe. Your old man was one swell guy.”
But I don’t know. Seems like when they get started they don’t leave a guy nothing.**
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
Sorry, it’s: “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.”
BrotherCadfael. Most translation properly do this. But Louis Biancolli’s blank verse translation has the last line of Inferno as:
“And then we came out to see the stars again.”
It would scan just as well if rendered:
“And then we came out again to see the stars.”
I’m not sure why he did this.
Tis a far far better thing I do than I have ever done before. Tis a far far better
rest I go to than I have ever known
Only suddenly, then, you are out of it - that film, that skin of life - as when you were a kid. And you think: this must’ve been the way it was once in my life, though you didn’t know it then, and don’t really even remember it - a feeling of wind on your cheeks and your arms, of being released, let loose, of being the light-floater. And since that is not how it has been for a long time, you want, this time, to make it last, this glistening one moment, this cool air, this new living, so that you can preserve a feeling of it, inasmuch as when it comes again it may just be too late. You may just be too old. And in truth, of course, this may be the last time you ever feel this way again.
Richard Ford, The Sportswriter