The End

[coalescent]

grahamsleight points to an article about last lines:

One of the favourite games of literary people is that of best first lines. Everyone enjoys reciting them; the bizarre (Earthly Powers), the haunting (Rebecca), the august (Anna Karenina), the casual (Howards End) or the strangely anonymous (Jane Eyre). First lines are great fun. But they aren't really as important to a novel as the last lines. From a terrible first line, a novel may recover; the last line is what it leaves a reader with.

And, you know, it's not wrong. Obviously last lines only really have their full impact if you've read the rest of the story, and very often it's about the last paragraph not just the last line but still, it's not wrong. We should talk about last lines more. There was even a conversation about last lines on this very journal a couple of days ago. So let's have those, and some more:

Pacific Edge by Kim Stanley Robinson:
When he was done he put down his tools. Behind him Orange County pulsed green and amber, jumping with his heart, glossy, intense, vibrant, awake, alive. His world and the wind pouring through it. His hands came together and made their half swing. If only Hank hadn't caught that last one. If only Ramona, if only Tom, if only all the world, all in him at once, with the sharp stab of our unavoidable grief; and it seemed to him then that he was without a doubt the unhappiest person in the whole world.

And at that thought (thinking about it) he began to laugh.

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi:
It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one.

'The Girl Detective' by Kelly Link:
She came down and stood under the tree. She looked a lot like my mother. Get down out of the tree this instant! she said. Don't you know it's time for dinner?

'Hell is the Absence of God' by Ted Chiang:
And though it's been many years that he has been in Hell, beyond the awareness of God, he loves Him still. That is the measure of true devotion.

Voyage by Stephen Baxter:
By God, she thought, we're here. We came for all the wrong reasons, and by all the wrong methods, but we're here, and that's all that matters. And we've found soil, and sunlight, and air, and water.

She said: "I'm home."

A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell:
One hollow, hateful little man. One last awful thought: all the harm he ever did was done for him by others.

Many, many more here. But what are your favourites? (And I don't just want 'The Nine Billion Names of God' and Lord of the Rings; be creative!)

Comments

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

I could always claim my favourite was the last sentence of Excession... not that I have time to type it out, mind you...

The last line of Washington Square's pretty good.

Catherine, meanwhile, in the parlour, picking up her morsel of fancy-work, had seated herself with it again - for life, as it were.

-Henry James, 1880

And if we're allowed lines rather than a single sentence:

You can feel in the surve of the cranium she's female, that shows from the first day. Through all this she has pushed to be here, in his lap, his hands, a real presence hardly weighing anything but alive. Fortune's hostage, heart's desire, a granddaughter. Another nail in the coffin. His.

-John Updike, Rabbit is Rich, 1981

And since we've passed two, I've always loved this:

Well known, alas, is the case of the poor German who was very fond of three and who made each aspect of his life a thing of triads. He went home one evening and drank three cups of tea with three lumps of sugar in each, cut his jugular with a razor three times and scrawled with a dying hand on a picture of his wife good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.

-Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds, 1939

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

There's something about repetition, isn't they? Ulysses as well, obviously, but also the other KSR that competes with Pacific Edge for best ending:

She lifted her eyes to the hills west of the sea, black under the sun. The bones of things stuck out everywhere. Waves broke in swift lines on the beach, and she walked over the sand toward her friends, in the wind, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars.

-- Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

[frogworth.livejournal.com]

Oh wow!
I haven't even read it, and... wow.

Got my brother (who works quite high up at Greenpeace Australia) into KSR recently, and must actually get myself reading him soon.

I will have to go home and check on last lines for my own preferences though.