“And so I close the book of my life” The memoirs of Constantine Dix
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.
“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
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly in to the past. - The Great Gatsby
It’s poetry.
And I just realized it was on page one all along.
Stupid me, I just skimmed for italics or bolding. See? I knew it was famous!
I can’t believe no one has mentioned this one yet:
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.
" 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
“Goodbye Dopes!” I shouted.
They turned to me and shouted back, “Goodbye, you big fuckin’ idiot!”
Steve Martin, “The Day the Dopes Came Over”
Re Flowers for Algernon (the original short story), by Daniel Keyes.
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”.
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
“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.
– Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
“I been away a long time.”
–One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
“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…
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.
Yes, but us provincial 'Merkins don’t know any different. The book ends where the movie does… in the version released here.
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
— A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner
—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