I had forgotten about this one. I had the same reaction. I was stunned when I read this one. For a long time I ignored King, believing his work was pulp, but I have become an ardent fan. The man is just full of surprises.
For me it’s the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, maybe the last four or five paragraphs. I can’t remember the number of times I have been in a bookstore and wandered over to the fiction section to read that last page and a half. It is such a beautiful sentiment about the American Dream tempered with the inevitability of our failure to achieve our dreams in this world. It is perfect prose and it tears me right up…
Many of the things already mentioned, and:
The last paragraph of Joyce’s The Dead, where the snow falls over Ireland.
Anne of Green Gables, when Matthew dies. I would read this over and over again when I was a kid to torture myself. It’s a wonder I didn’t choke on my own snot.
Pretty much the entire way through every book of Elswyth Thane’s Williamsburg novels. High Romance writing. On the down side, many people do not get to be with their one true love, and many people die in wars. On the up side, there are many cases of mistaken identity that keep lovers apart, or they are presumed dead in war, or they get a hangnail or something. All produce copious amounts of tears.
Game of Kings – Christian’s deathbed scene. Sob! Sob! She was blind, you bastards! Also, the part later on in the series, when Lymond realizes/admits/the reader finally figures out who is the object of his heart’s desires.
Any of the “tragic dead animal genre,” including, but not limited to:
Black Beauty
Weep No More My Lady
Bambi (also cry-able for the intense scene where the leaves die and drop off the tree)
Where the Red Fern Grows
The Cat Who Went To Heaven
Anything by Paul Gallico
Twenty Years After – when the four Musketeers meet on the battlefield and have a love in.
The Once And Future King – Many parts, but mostly at the end when everything is going to hell in a handbasket, and Arthur gets a note from Gawain, and it turns out that Gawain has really nice handwriting. This just kills me.
IT – I will never forgive Stephen King for killing Eddie. The first time I read it, I read that paragraph over about six times, because I was convinced I missed the part where they only thought Eddie was dead, but then were actually able to save him.
There’s tons more.
It looks I am going to be the first one to admit crying from Flowers in the Attic, specifically where they find out that their mother poisoned the doughnuts.
Also in David Copperfield where Emily and Steerforth run off together and David is telling about how much he admired Steerforth.
Another vote for Where the Red Fern Grows. Every time I read that book I always set out with “I’m not gonna cry this time”, and every time without fail, I make it until the part where the dogs attack the mountain lion to save their master, and then I fail again spectacularly at the part where (I forget which dog dies first…Old Dan or Little Ann?) dies, and yet again where the second one sits on the grave of the first one until it dies too. I normally have to stop reading for a while because my eyes are too full of tears to be able to see the words.
I’ve also been on the verge of tears at the point in Ender’s Game when he finds out it’s not just a game, and one or two spots in Speaker for the Dead, which I’m just finishing up now for the first time. Excellent books all.
SPOILERS
Is that the one with the kid who has the little animal characters? I remember a rabbit, and a few others. And his bed was their “land”–he had a soda stain that was their pond or something. If it is the one I’m thinking of, I thought it was sad how, I think at one point, one of the animals drown in the pond. Eventually Bradley puts away his animals, which is also sad.
Several books make me sob hysterically:
In particular, the scene where Vivi is getting a massage and she talks about how God gives you one piece of your life story at once, or else you crack wide open, and no one sees. Also, when she reminisces with Teensie about Jack, and says that she would give anything to smell him once more.
Similarly, in Little Alters Everywhere, also by Rebecca Wells, there’s a scene where the black farmhand married to Wiletta (who is Sidda Lee’s nanny) says that he would love to see Shep truly appreciate his children, and then talks about 'Letta and the kids, and how Letta “loves him til ever’thing that ever hurt him falls away like rain.”
The English Patient makes me sob. There’s so much poetry in Ondaajte’s prose (he’s also an incredible poet). The scene where the Count leaves Katherine in the cave is so sad. Also, when she “cannot bear the walls” he builds, and he says, “you built your walls too.” So sad, so tragic.
The Poisenwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver always makes me so sad, especially when Ruth May dies. I love the end, when Ruth May tells her mother to think of the vine that grows from what was once her heart.
These Granite Islands by Sarah Stonich is an incredible first novel - the sex scene is the most beautiful of any I’ve ever read and makes me cry. Also, the ending is painstakingly beautiful and so well-written and full of clarity that I weep uncontrollably.
I agree with The Dreamcatcher, when Duddits dies (but saves the world first). Also, in Insomnia, the part where Ralph remembers his wife dying and “Danke Schoen” playing on the radio as he realizes he is now a widow…page 440 in the hardback version, IIRC. In Hearts of Atlantis, when the little boy has his first kiss with Carol and says “it will be the kiss that he will compare all others to” - very sad.
In the Dean Koontz book Seize the Night (I think it’s the second of that series) - when Christopher Snow’s best buddy dies, but than they save him - breaks my heart.
Both She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much is True, by Wally Lamb, are tearjerkers. The scene in the former when Mr. Pucci dies is so sad (“Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.”), and most of the latter is terribly sad.
The part of Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison where Guitar tells (I forget her name, she’s the cousin and spurned lover of the main character) that she can’t love him more than she loves herself - “You’re giving him your whole life, girl. Your whole life. And if you can just hand it over, give it to him, than how can it matter to him? You can’t own a human being. You can’t lose what you don’t own.” I love that part, but it’s so sad, especially since she dies.
Okay, that’s it for now but I know I can think of a hundred more.
Yeah, that’s the one. The animal that drowned did come back, but that part just made me cry harder. Sob, sob, sob. My brother laughed at me when I brought back his book, dabbing at my eyes. 
jessica
Well, I’m a big softy. I cry at anything. Books, movies, tv, the odd commercial…
But Nacho4Sara’s list reminded me of the one time I remember breaking down into uncontrollable, hysterical sobbing. I made the unfortunate choice of reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved while pregnant with my first. Oh my.
Possible Lymond Chronicles spoilers
delphica! You read Dorothy Dunnett too! Hooray! I agree with you that anyone who doesn’t cry at Christian’s death is heartless. The scene in Ringed Castle where Lymond realises he loves Philippa is just too beautiful - it always makes me bawl. Also Will Scott’s death in Disorderly Knights - I don’t see why she had to kill him off, he was one of my favourite characters!
Some other tear-jerkers: Davita’s Harp by Chaim Potok - various scenes where Davita is mourning her father, he communicates her sense of loss so well. And when I was a kid, Goodnight Mr Tom by Michelle Magorian (sp?), where Zach dies.
** Lonesome Dove ** (twice)
** A Prayer For Owen Meany ** (for half an hour, wailing and keening. Both times I read it.)
** The Power of One **
** Cold Mountain ** (what a fabulous book. Slow to hook up with, but incredibly written, really incredible.)
stoid
Animal Farm - “Boxer has fallen, and he can’t get up!”
Arthur C. Clarke’s immortal classic Childhood’s End, chapter 20. sob!
robinh wrote:
Psssst, hey, robinh! Thought about Barber’s Adagio for Strings lately?
(Heh heh heh. I’m such a meanie!)
Damn…it… I knew I shouldn’t have read this thread… I’m close to the end of Garp (I’m just past Jenny’s death), I didn’t know he died as well. sigh Oh well, now that I’m here… the accident scene gets me - namely the part about Walt and the bathtub.
Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe gets me too…
Outlander - she almost leaves.
Animals You Will Never Forget - a readers digest compilation, highly recommended…has parts from A Ring of Bright Water and a few other animal classics. I cry for darned near every story in that book. 'specially the Doc’s horse Charley.
Darned near any scene where the person loses a spouse, child or pet…
Matthew’s death in Green Gables was a shock… as was Walter’s… and the story about Leslie - augh.
Meg
I cried when Joyce died in Anne’s House Of Dreams.
At the end of Lloyd Alexander’s The High King when Prydain gave up all its magic, my heart broke. Oh yes, and also when Adaon died in The Black Cauldron. I think my parents regretted giving me that series, I spent alot of time crying over them.
Strangely, I never cried at Ender’s Game, but when Ender talked to Valentine on the lake, I felt so empty inside. Does it make me naive to mourn a character’s loss of innocence?
Guy Gavriel Kay is such a mean b*stard. I practically floated away reading The Fionavar Tapestry. Especially at the end, when everyone goes their seperate ways - I didn’t know whether to feel happy or sad. Bittersweetness is always more bitter to me than sweet.
I finishedHarry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stonetoday, and when Hagrid gave Harry the photo album full of pics of his family, I couldn’t stop tears from streaming down my face as I chuckled. I hope no one was watching me, I was sitting on a park bench at the time. I must have looked like I was crazy.
Gee, thanks Satchmo, until this very moment I had completely repressed the memory of my entire 7th grade class mocking me when I burst into loud heaving sobs when the teacher read this line out loud.
Anyone know a good therapist?
Oh my god, I can’t believe I left that one out.
“And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Perfection.
Much of Edith Wharton’s work is incredibly depressing, but there is one novella of hers, False Dawn, which is guaranteed to make me cry every time I read it.
It’s the story of a young man in the 1840’s who has been sent on the Grand Tour and commissioned by his millionaire father to bring back some works of art to start a family collection. While traveling, the boy meets a young John Ruskin and, instead of buying some of the expected popular masterpieces of the day, brings home a collection of pre-Raphaelite paintings–Giotto, della Francesca, and the like–which his father dismisses as worthless rubbish. The boy is disinherited except for the paintings. He marries the girl he loves, who still believes in him, and they open a small art gallery in New York City, then slowly sink into poverty waiting for someone to recognize that the paintings have value. Eventually, the paintings wind up in a relative’s attic and are discovered years later, long after the boy has died and almost been completely forgotten.
I’m usually in tears by this point. The funny thing is that I am not certain why this story moves me the way it does, but it does, every time (I’m even a little misted-up now, after writing the above description).
The ending of Middlemarch can also make me cry: “…there was always something more she might have done, if she had only been better and known better.”
The whole book Night by Ellie Wiesel was one that really made me about lose it. It was his true story account of going through the WWII concentration camps as a boy and seeing what others did to others for survival.