I’ve always been touched by one part of A Scanner Darkly:
“But the actual touch of her lingered, inside his heart. That remained. In all the years of his life ahead, the long years without her, with never seeing her or hearing from her or knowing anything about her, if she was alive or happy or dead or what, that touch stayed locked within him, sealed in himself, and never went away. That one touch of her hand.”
The scene in To Kill A Mockingbird, after Scout walks Boo Radley home and she’s standing on his porch, imagining his thoughts as he watches the neighborhood from his window. She goes from “the children,” to “his children” when they run to meet their father. And then the corker:
Summer, and he watched his children’s heart break. Autumn again, and Boo’s children needed him.
It’s even worse (i.e., more devastating) than that. Humbert says he feels as though he is sitting “with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.” Humbert is such a monster precisely because he knows exactly how much damage he is doing to Lolita but continues his abuse of her anyway. As he says, “You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.” Another brilliant, devastating line.
The scene in A Wrinkle In Time when Meg realizes she’s the only one who can rescue Charles Wallace. There’s a haze between me and the monitor right now, just from thinking about it.
Nitpick: “Chief Rabbit,” but yeah, that one always chokes me up too.
The Young Lions, when Whitacre carries Ackerman’s body back and refuses to let anyone else help him.
I’m not an overly sentimental man, God knows, but I do have some weak spots.
All the Weyrs of Pern. Essentially the end of McCaffrey’s Dragon books - at the time, anyway - and the death of Robinton slammed me in the heartstrings. He’d done everything he could, he’d accomplished what could be accomplished and it was slowly killing him. The use of Ecclesisastes 3 - To everything there is a season - was brutal there.
Another one is when Jane Sharp lets Alyce into her cottage at the very end of Karen Cushman’s The Midwife’s Apprentice.
But these tears are happy.
The ending of Of Mice and Men
I’m a huge softy, apparently. Many of these and many more.
On Charlotte’s Web: I omitted that single sentence when I read the book aloud to the Torqueling. It seemed to me enough to know that she died, which was heavily belabored for the whole chapter, without just rubbing it in at the end that she was alone too. That’s just needlessly cruel.
One that hasn’t been mentioned yet, a relatively recent one:
And from the moment the repetition of “you know nothing” started in the text, I knew it would be coming, but it still got me.
Not one many would know, but the short SF story “I am Nothing” by Eric Frank Russell will get you. He sets you up for it and it still will get you. Well, me at least…
In THUD!, when it’s time for Vimes to read the nightly tale. For some reason it gets me every single time. Last couple times I made sure I had hankies handy before grabbing the book, because I hate having to go to the bathroom to get some when I already have problems seeing.
In the same vein, there are multiple instances in McCammon’s Boy’s Life which do it for me, both sad and happy.
“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
You beat me to it. <sniff>
That was going to be mine. Getting kind of misted up just thinking about it.
“I will take the Ring", he said, "though I do not know the way.” (JRR Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring)
I can’t believe I forgot one of the biggest ones for me. “I put Algernon’s body in a cheese box and buried him in the backyard.”
Gah. I can hardly type that.
The fates of Tony and of Cheryl Taggart in ATLAS SHRUGGED.
Except for the fact that he is found by Dagny in my head-canon, I’d add Eddie Willers also.
Might as well jump on the Bujold train and mention the scene early in* The Curse of Chalion*, when Caz tells his story to the Provincara. I guess it’s still my favorite book of all time.