Doorbells_002_small
Reputation: 896

What is the best closing line in a book you've read?

We've already asked which book has the best opening line. Now, let's follow up with the best closing line.

I have two suggestions:
For best short story, I love the tag line of the Lawrence Watt-Even's short story "Why I left Harry's All Night Hamburger Stand".... "So, what brings you to Betelgeuse?"

But the best, most powerful line has to be the last line from "A is for Alibi" first in the Kinsey Milhoun mystery series by Sue Grafton... "I blew him away."

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12 Answers

  • 30_rock_judah_small
    Reputation: 624

    Douglas Coupland's Shampoo Planet has always spoken to me and the ending is wonderful:

    I gently shake Anna-Louise fully awake. "Anna-Louise, wake up," I say. "Wake up-the world is alive."

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  • Hey_girl_hey_small
    Reputation: 1383

    More of a passage than a line but my favorite is from Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises:"

    "Oh, Jake," Brett said, "we could have had such a damned good time together."
    Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing trffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.
    "Yes," I said, "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

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  • Sacri_ordines_by_charism_small
    Reputation: 3723

    "i was losing consciousness. the sun had risen above."

    -the vampire lestat

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  • Words_small
    Reputation: 755

    "He loved big brother." Orwell, 1984.

    Though his Animal Farm ending line was good too:
    "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."

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  • Lookalikes_small
    Reputation: 2589

    Well, there's always this:

    'Now, Kitty, let's consider who it was that dreamed it all. This is a serious question, my dear, and you should NOT go on licking your paw like that—as if Dinah hadn't washed you this morning! You see, Kitty, it MUST have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course—but then I was part of his dream, too! WAS it the Red King, Kitty? You were his wife, my dear, so you ought to know—Oh, Kitty, DO help to settle it! I'm sure your paw can wait!' But the provoking kitten only began on the other paw, and pretended it hadn't heard the question.

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  • N815394_32920449_260_small
    Reputation: 576

    not quite the last line but close enough: "What I heard then was the melody of children at play, nothing but that. And I knew that the most hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that chorus."

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  • Spaceship_small
    Reputation: 1812

    Cagey,
    I agree that's a powerful line, but I think you may have given a critical plot point away. Don't you think you should have posted a "spoiler alert"????

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  • Img_0304_small
    Reputation: 52

    I don't know why I would ever compete with Joyce, nor Fnarf, for that matter, but although nobody likes Fitzgerald anymore, how about this?: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

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  • Veronica-lake-by-rosejuvenal_small
    Reputation: 480

    My two favourites:

    "The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky--seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness."

    Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

    "...I can't go on, I'll go on."

    Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

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  • P1000261_small
    Reputation: 51

    Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.

    Gabriel García Márquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude

    I've read that book a few times and that always gives me chills.

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  • Gold-head_small
    Reputation: 6000

    "So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair! If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like he'd come from Arkangels, I sink I'd die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup. Yes, tid. There's where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the"

    [Which then carries around back to the first sentence, "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's [...]"

    Nothing beats hearing Joyce himself read this stuff, "the hitherandthithering waters of". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtOQi7xspRc

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  • Dinolock_small
    Reputation: 976

    I really hope the last line of one of those Vonnegut novels is "So it goes." but it's too early to go check them and I'm kind of thinking it isn't a last line even though it'd be perfect.

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