Goodbyes

What are your favourite final sentences from books? Is there a book that you liked specially because of its last sentence? Or a book, perhaps that you didn’t like but still remember simply because of the last line?

I read this question and realized, while I do have favorite endings I don't actually know the final sentence of any book except Virginia Woolf's The Waves:

"...Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!"

The waves broke on the shore.

Not bad, huh?


There was only one other ending I remembered by heart. That's not a sentence at all, but the sounding of an axe chopping down the tree in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. I'll give you the last sentence in the context of the entire last line of Firs, the old servant, and the stage directions that follow.

Firs: (goes up to the door and touches the handle) Locked. They've gone away... They forgot me...It's nothing...I'll sit here a while...And Leonid Andreich didn't put on his fur coat. I suppose, he must have gone away in his light one...(Sighs anxiously.) I just didn't look after it...Oh, these green young things - they never learn! (Mumbles something that cannot be understood.) Life just slipped by as if I'd never even lived... I'll lie down for a while... You just don't have any strength, none, nothing's lieft. nothing at all...Oh, you...silly galoot, you!...

He lies motionless. A sound is heard far off in the distance, as if coming from the sky. It is the sound of a string breaking that dies away sadly. A stillness falls, and nothing is heard but the sound of an axe striking a tree far away in the orchard.

"Oh, you silly galoot" or sometimes "Oh you bungler" chop, chop, chop. Chekhov really knew what he was doing.

But having gone and checked, there are a few other memorable ones. I'll present some of them in the context of their few last lines.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein:

About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it.

That book is a howl.


The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger:

Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

Breath the new novel by Tim Winton (I am just crazy about this book):

They probably don't understand this, but it's important for me to show them that their father is a man who dances - who saves lives and carries the wounded, yes, but who also does something completely pointless and beautiful., and in this at least he should need no explanation.

I could be mean and post the ending of Anna Karenina, but in case you haven't read it, I won't. Someone told me the ending as I sat in a movie theater and Citizen Kane was about to start in my senior year in college. I was still reading it and I wanted to kill them.