Was asked this in chat today:
(51) j (rh)
klaw-couple weeks ago you answered favorite literary first lines. how bout favorite last lines?
I have to say nothing came to mind right away, but I was reminded of it by the last line of my daughter’s new favorite movie, Mary Poppins, spoken by Bert: “Goodbye, Mary Poppins, don’t stay away too long.”
Anyway, two of my nominees:
Catch-22: The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off.
1984: He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother. (Yes, technically two lines.)
So I’ll open the thread to everyone. Need help? I did, and found this list of 100 “best” last lines.
It’s not the whole sentence but following the last elipsis in American Psycho is “and this is followed by a sigh, then a slight shrug and another sigh, and above one of the doors covered by red velvet drapes in Harry’s is a sign and on the sign in letters that match the drapes’ color are the words THIS IS NOT AN EXIT.”
“I been away a long time.” -One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
VLADIMIR: Well? Shall we go?
ESTRAGON: Yes, let’s go.
[They do not move.]
Samuel Beckett – “Waiting for Godot”
The one that immediately came to mind:
“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.”
-Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities
And my personal favorite:
“Well, I’m back.”
-Sam Gamgee at the end of The Lord of the Rings
“We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long.”
Stephen King – “The Green Mile”
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”
Fitzgerald – Gatsby
This is one of the weirdest, yet oddly captivating, questions I’ve ever heard/read. I am absolutely horrible with individual quotes from books and movies – within a minute of an individual line from a movie (unless its “I’ll be back” short), or maybe a day for a book – I’ll screw it up…seriously, I’m that bad. I am great at remembering the “arc” of the story, and even important story details, but individual lines might as well be unmemorable…(does that mean I read too fast?)
Anyways, seeing some of the ones put in the link, I ended up “remembering” how those lines affected me when I read them (not that I could repeat them vocally), and I go with the following three in no particular order – “Cat’s Cradle”, “Catch-22”, and “Tale of Two Cities” – the last one being the first book I had to read “critically” in my life, so maybe that made it seem more important somehow…
FWIW, “Heart of Darkness” ends on a great line, and I did have to read it “critically”, but it just didn’t surprise me when I read it…
“He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest.”
That’s the last line to For Whom the Bell Tolls. It’s a good line, particularly because it recalls the first line (not counting the Donne poetry that is quoted):
“He lay on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.”
Thought of a better one:
“And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?”
Roth, American Pastoral
Amen.
– The Bible
And the “Tale of Two Cities” line is fantastic.
“Instead of being a terrible monster, he would become a wonderful friend.”
-Leonardo, the Terrible Monster by Mo Willems
Might not hold up against books in the KLAW 100, but it gets my class everytime.
Grant,
Sounds like you teach Lit at Ohio State.
So, what do you really think the deal is with 1984?
I teach first grade in Georgia, same thing?
Nah, your kids probably at least have to show up for class…
Another Orwell line, this one from Animal Farm- “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
“Tale of Two Cities” is pretty danged iconic.
And if I can die having brought any light, having exposed any meaningful truth that will help destroy the racist cancer that is malignant in the body of America then, all of the credit is due to Allah. Only the mistakes have been mine. – Malcolm X
Also two lines, but I love the humble nature of that last sentence.
I like first lines much better than last lines when it comes to exercises like this mostly because out of context last lines are not as powerful. I love Orwell and I understand the chilling effect of the knowledge that he loved Big Brother but out of context it’s just not as powerful as an iconic first line which hooks you on the story and gets you to that last line. If I had to pick favorite I’d go with Nineteen Eighty-Four but I’d rather pick best last songs on an album instead.
Awful as a “literary” line, I know, but in the context of the book HP’s “All was well.” was certainly comforting.
PS – Animal Farm obviously rocks as well.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from
pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
They may not be the best ever, but these are my two personal favorites:
Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.
– Catcher in the Rye
and
ETC.
– Breakfast of Champions
“He looked a long time.” – Ender’s Game
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
I have to add:
P.S.Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonnaise.-Trout Fishing in America, Richard Brautigan
One of my favorite books that never gets discussed though completely innovative. Klaw you would hate it since it has no plot.
Also, from the non-novel division:
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown till human voices wake us, and we drown. – The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot
No John Irving love?
I feel like this one is really famous (somewhat surprised not to see it on the list):
“…in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.”
And wherever the mist settled, its radiance sparked and then faded, and the land turned to living green.
–Laura Kinsale, Uncertain Magic
“Oedipa settled back, to await the crying of Lot 49.”
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
I agree wholeheartedly with Adam; if you haven’t read the book, that line just sums up the whole story perfectly. If you have read it, I would imagine that you would agree that there could have been no better line to end the book.
Where’d you go to school, Jay
I’m guessing you weren’t talking about me, Jay (I’m the Grant who isn’t Grant K.), but if you were: nah. I guess quoting two books by misogynist (Hemingway very, Roth probably but hard to say) authors might make me seem a bit lame or something.
I dunno. They’re good books.
She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously.
Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
– Invisible Man
“Shut up, Bobby Lee,” The Misfit said. “It’s no real pleasure in life.”
– A Good Man Is Hard To Find (O’Connor)
Of course, to my mind the best ‘last line’ I know is that one good passage from Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, which appears in the middle, in which Thompson pretty much expresses his point, once and for all. The rest of his career, before and after, is decoration. Superlative decoration if like me sometimes you like watching things smash together, but decoration.
From Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy:
“And now when I try to know his will, his kindness floods me, his great love overwhelms me, and I hear him whisper, Surprise me.”
And how in the world did Crime and Punishment make that list? It’s a great book, but not even a good last line.
It’s not a book, but the end of a song, and the end of a band, and the end of an era:
And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to the love you make.
“Afterall, tomorrow is another day.”
Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind.
“All was quiet on the western front,” All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque.
On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.
Norman Maclean – A River Runs Through It
I do so like green eggs and ham! Thank you, thank you, Sam I Am!
One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, “Poo-tee-weet?”
Slaughterhouse-Five
Keith, I am shocked that this last line did not make your list:
“His bruised memory has subsided again and until the next full moon no one will trouble the professor–neither the noseless man who killed Hestas nor the cruel Procurator of Judaea, fifth in that office, the knight Pontius Pilate.”
Interesting side note is that the original text has a different structure – the translator combined the last two sentences in Russian into one… not sure whether that makes it better or not though..
Vlad: what translation did you read? I read the Burgin & O’Connor one, which came out in the mid-90s. Reading your version of the last sentence reminded me of how different translations can be (especially of Russian novels).
I know Keith said he didn’t remember which translation he read, so I highly recommend the Burgin & O’Connor (who, incidentally, was a professor mine at college who also pushed me to read M&M) one, since the prose is very accessible and the commentary for each chapter and the afterword were very interesting and helpful as well.
I read the book in 1992, so it probably wasn’t the one Malcolm’s citing.
Malcolm,
I just checked and I read Mirra Ginsburg’s translation (http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Master-and-Margarita/Mikhail-Bulgakov/e/9780802130112/?itm=3).
In all honesty, I did not like it too much, but I have had a few examples of reading English translation of a Russian novel which IMHO did not measure up to the original (conversely, when I learned English enough to be able to read lit-re I was in shock how poor some Russian translations were)…
You are absolutely right, the translations are always different. It is even more pronounced when you compare, for example, an English and a Russian translation of the same book. I can’t stand Russian translations of Murakami, on the other hand I can’t read English translations of Remarque… Though I obviously do not know which ones are closer to the original… at the same time, I like both translations of Marquez – though reading Hundred Years of Solitude (in English and in Russian) gave me two very different perceptions on the novel…
Out of curiosity, if you have it handy, how did Burgin and O’Connor translate the last paragraph of M&M?
Vlad: I loaned my copy to a friend to read, but if you go to Amazon, you can read an excerpt from the first chapter when Bezdomny and Berlioz are at Patriach’s Ponds.
Patriach’s = Patriarch’s…
That reminds me… do you know of a good translation for Anna Karenina? I read the first couple of chapters of a translation I borrowed from my sister and just had to put it down because it was so terrible. I’m pretty sure I read the Constance Garnett version of War & Peace, and I loved that, so I’m looking for similar prose.
The last paragraph of Burgin and O’Connor is as follows, “Thus spoke Margarita as she walked with the Master toward their eternal home, and it seemed to the Master that Margarita’s words flowed like the stream they had left behind, flowed and whispered, and the Master’s anxious, needle-pricked memory began to fade. Someone was releasing the Master into freedom, as he himself had released the hero he created. That hero, who was absolved on Sunday morning, had departed into the abyss, never to return, the son of an astrologer-king, the cruel fifth procurator of Judea, the knight Pontius Pilate.”
and the last paragraph of the epilogue…
“The next morning he wakes up silent, but completely calm and well. His ravaged memory quiets down, and no one will trouble the professor until the next full moon: neither the noseless murderer of Gestas, nor the cruel fifth procurator of Judea, the knight Pontius Pilate.”
I was leaning towards buying the Burgin/O’Connor version because of my connection to one of the translators, but I also did compare the first page to one or two other translations, and now comparing Vlad’s last paragraph to the one Michael posted, I’m pretty content with my choice.
Malcolm,
I never read Anna Karenina in translation, so I would not be the right person to make any recommendations. Do agree with you on the Garnett translation of War and Peace though.
Micheal,
Thank you for the quote. I do like Burgin and O’Connor translation more…
Interestingly, I finally figured out what was bothering me about the last lines in the translation (and it goes for both versions above). In English, Pilate is referred as “the knight,” in the original Bulgakov uses the word “вÑадник” which could be translated as both “knight” (titular) or “horseman.” I think that “horseman” works better because of the allusion to the Revelations….