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Matt Yglesias has a link to the 100 Best Last Lines from Novels(pdf), and like a few of his commenters, who piped up later in comments, I was surprised to see that the closing of Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It was egregiously omitted. Say what?
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.
Since Sunday is a day of contemplation, lazy late morning coffee and book review sections, you may leave your suggestions for best final lines from short stories in the comments. Dig out your Poe, Carver, O’Connor, Cheever, Dahl, Seuss, Wolff (Tobias) & Woolf (Virginia) etc.
I’ll start you off with the most obvious one:
“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.
As well as a personal favorite of mine from Ethan Canin’s Batorsag and Szerelem:
Now at last, as I bowed my head, I recognized it, deep in my own character, as the fleeting ghostly shape of a wish; and, for this, fifteen years later, in a stifling room at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, where the doctors told me I had better come on a late-night flight to say goodbye to my brother, I wept and wept and wept.
Have at it…
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The 100 smell of lit snobbery.
The best ending of all time comes from Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty: “Fucking endings, man, they weren’t as easy as they looked.”
I also like John Sandford’s Rough Country: “Joe came back.”
“It’s a cookbook.” from “To Serve Man” by Damon Knight.
Can’t remember the specific lines, but I’ve always liked the last lines of “Darkness at Noon” by Arthur Koestler. One of my all-time favorites.
I dunno, “Best” lists always strike me as generally kind of arbitrary and pointless (Beethoven’s or Mahler’s Ninth — quick, which is da bestest?), and the ABR list is no exception. For one thing, no one ever defines “best.” Some of these lines are great by themselves, some only make sense in the context of the novel, and some are not very good lines that happen to end great novels.
That said, one of my favorite last lines for a short story (almost identical to the novel version) is this one, not because it’s profound in and of itself, but because it’s simply a perfect last line for the story that came before it:
p.p.s. please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on algernons grave in thebakyard…
Reader, I married him.
I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.
Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
I was cured, all right! Anthony Burgess, “A Clockwork Orange” (American edition).
“And darkness and decay and the red death held illimitable dominion over all.”
He would be in Jem’s room all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning. Harper Lee, “To Kill a Mockingbird”.
“They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseperable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar.”
Little Dorrit
That gave me chills, 35 years after I last read it.
“So [said the doctor]. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?”
Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint
Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.
“Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.” Arthur C. Clarke, The Nine Billion Names of God
Now get out of my sight before I do something we both regret.
David Sedaris SantaLand Diaries
And a bonus last line for the teabaggers:
ADOLPH HITLER.
Souvenir by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
To Nurse Edna, who was in love, and to Nurse Angela, who wasnt (but who in her wisdom named both Homer Wells and Fuzzy Stone), there was no fault to be found in the hearts of either Dr. Stone or Dr. Larch who were- if there ever were- Princes of Maine, Kings of New England.
Cant think of any from short stories, but always very much liked the last few pages of “Cider House Rules” culminating in this sentence.
“Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, or 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 for ever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Perhaps only powerful in context – you be the judge. It was a slog of a book in a many ways – easy to lose your way in it – but that last line wouldn’t have had meaning without the slog to get to it. I remember when I first read the book…I read that line, and immediately thought, oh, so that’s why he won the Nobel.
“he lay back, spent, and smiled”
“Summer Camp Cheerleaders” by Anonymous
Po-tee-weet?
From “How to Live with a Neurotic Dog” by Stephen Baker:
Chapter 11: Can the Neurotic Dog Be Cured?
No.
THE END
Just this then,to make every world the New World, to approach it with an explorers sense of wonder. Bill Barich, “Laughing in the Hills”.
Love the ending sentence to George Suanders’s “CommComm” (one of my favorite short stories of the decade). I don’t know how it holds out of context, but as a part of the rush to the finish of the story, it’s pretty great:
“I was wrong in life, limited, shrank everything down to my size, and yet, in the end, there was something light-craving within me, which sent me back, and saved me.”
…suddenly I am run over by a truck.
-the end-
from the National Lampoon article “How to Write Good” by Michael O’Donoghue
Or, for an actual short story: “In the early morning on the lake,sitting in the stern with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.” Ernest Hemingway, The Nick Adams Stories.
The list seems to be made by the English Major equivalent of Ben Shapiro.
This should be the #1 best last line in the history of literature:
“Poo-tee-weet?”
From Dostoyevsky’s “Notes From Underground”: “Actually the notes of this lover of paradoxes do not end here. He couldn’t resist and went on writing. But we are of the opinion that one might just as well stop here.”
Arthur C. Clarke wrote this ending to the story Reunion and I’ve remembered since I was 13:
If any of you are still white, we can cure you.
Well it is not a short story, instead it is ‘An Agony in Nine Fits’ but no last line really is as explanatory as this one from ‘The Hunting of the Snark’:
“For the Snark was a Boojum, you see”.
Yep that tied up all the loose ends.
A boy loves his dog.
“A Boy and His Dog”, Harlan Ellison.
The Moon and Sixpence
W. Somerset Maugham
LINK
“And it was still warm.”
Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are
Now all we have left to look up to is Derek Jeter.
Maureen Dowd, The Lady and the Tiger
Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the
houses with yellow- lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the
fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They
go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they
do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less
imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe
it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to
know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
– The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas — Ursula K LeGuin
“Romance at short notice was her speciality.”
The Open Window — Saki
“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
“Some fun!” Bobby Lee said.
“Shut up, Bobby Lee,” The Misfit said. “It’s no real pleasure in life.”
from A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor
When the kid found out we were going to leave him at home he started up a howl like a calliope and fastened himself as tight as a leech to Bill’s leg. His father peeled him away gradually, like a porous plaster.
“How long can you hold him?” asks Bill.
“I’m not as strong as I used to be,” says old Dorset, “but I think I can promise you ten minutes.”
“Enough,” says Bill. “In ten minutes I shall cross the Central, Southern and Middle Western States, and be legging it trippingly for the Canadian border.”
And, as dark as it was, and as fat as Bill was, and as good a runner as I am, he was a good mile and a half out of Summit before I could catch up with him.
“The Ransom of Red Chief” by O. Henry
(p.678) The preordained frangibility of the hymen:…. (p.728) I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
Ulysses – James Joyce
Also.. in the Best First Lines category,
I am a sick man…. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.”
From the aforementioned “Notes from Underground” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I never click on PDF’s. Four/100 for Joyce!
“Thou are God,” Digby responded.
Foster said, “Skip the formalities, please. I’ve left you a load of work and you don’t have all eternity to fiddle with it. Certainly ‘Thou are God’ – but who isn’t?”
He left, and Mike pushed back his halo and got to work. He could see a lot of changes he wanted to make –
Stranger in a Strange Land, R A Heinlein
“Why,” said Ferguson, ” there was a scalper’s railroad ticket as far as Kansas City and two pairs of Mr. Vancross’s old pants.” The Girl and the Graft, O. Henry
“I personally believe the U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some, uh…people out there in our nation don’t have maps, and, uh, I believe that our education, like such as, South Africa and, uh, the Iraq everywhere like, such as, and…I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., err, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future for our…”
So I’m sitting at a cybercafe, just asked aloud for a response on last lines. Some one suggested I look this one up:
“I mean it, Yossarian. You’ll have to keep on your toes every minute of every day. They’ll bend heaven and earth to catch you.”
“I’ll keep on my toes every minute.”
“You’ll have to jump.”
“I’ll jump.”
“Jump!” Major Danby cried.
Yossarian jumped. Nately’s whore was hiding just outside the door. The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off.
Three sentence short story from “Close Range”, by Annie Proulx
“55 Miles to the Gas Pump”
Rancher Croom in handmade boots and filthy hat, that walleyed cattleman, stray hairs like curling fiddle string ends, that warm-handed, quick-foot dancer on splintery boards or down the cellar stairs to a rack of bottles of his own strange brew, yeasty, cloudy, bursting out in garlands of foam, Rancher Croom at night galloping drunk over the dark plain, turning off at a place he knows to arrive at a canyon brink where he dismounts and looks down on tumbled rock, waits, then steps out, parting the air with his last roar, sleeves surging up windmill arm, jeans riding over boot tops, but before he hits he rises again to the top of the cliff like a cork in a bucket of milk.
Mrs. Croom on the roof with a saw cutting a hole into the attic where she has not been for twelve years thanks to old Croom’s padlocks and warnings, whets to her desire, and the sweat flies as she exchanges the saw for a chisel and hammer until a ragged slab of peak is free and she can see inside: just as she thought: the corpses of Mr. Croom’s paramours–she recognizes them from their photographs in the paper: MISSING WOMAN–some desicated as jerky and much the same color, some moldy from lying beneath roof leaks, and all of them used hard, covered with tarry handprints, the marks of boot heels, some bright blue with the remnants of paint used on the shutters years ago, one wrapped in newspapar nipple to knee.
When you live a long way out you make your own fun.
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
Joyce’s “The Dead”.
Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.
Araby, James Joyce 1914
“Villains!” I shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the deed! –tear up the planks! here, here! –It is the beating of his hideous heart!”
Tell Tale Heart – Poe
“The grass of many years has sprung up and withered on that grave, the burial stone is moss-grown, and good Mr. Hooper’s face is dust; but awful is still the thought that it moldered beneath the Black Veil!”
The Minister’s Black Veil – Hawthorne
“Convinced that these unhappy events closed to me every avenue to an honorable career in that town, I removed to the famous city of Otumwee, where these memoirs are written with a heart full of remorse for a heedless act entailing so dismal a commercial disaster.”
Ambrose Bierce’s Oil of Dog
I’m with Kenosha Kid. (Have no choice in the matter, as KK has posted my fave before I got here.)
“A scholar’s idea of happy endings” by Gianni Celati:
“His very last piece of work, however, consisted of the strip of paper he had in his fingers and which, on the point of starvation, he was sticking onto the French translation of a Russian novel. This was possibly his masterpiece; by changing just three words, he transformed a tragedy into a satisfactory resolution of life’s problems.”
In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.
Flannery O’Connor, “Revelation”
Maybe not the best ending line (I’ve always been partial to Gatsby‘s for a novel, and “The Nine Billion Names of God”‘s for a short story, but this O’Connor line ends a pretty damn good story.
It’s all about context, innit?
There are plenty of great last lines in sci-fi short stories. Spoilers in both of these, (and the second one may be inexact):
“Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates:
“I am the master.”
“The Cage” by A. Bertram Chandler:
“Only rational beings put other beings in cages.”
I’m simply afraid that on taking one between my fingers, I’ll somehow snap to and remember, with clarity, just how good a cigarette would taste right now.
David Sedaris, Smoking Section, in When You Are Engulfed in Flames
Political language-and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists–is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase–some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse–into the dustbin where it belongs.
Politics and the English Language – Orwell
“But Mr. Gilt, I notice, is not here…”
Vetinari sighed. “You have to to admire a man who really believes in freedom of choice,” he said, looking at the open doorway. “Sadly, he did not believe in angels.”
Going Postal, Terry Pratchett
In the regards to the PDF — no love for “Vietnam, hot damn”?
Say what you want about Norman Mailer, but that was a kick-ass last line.
“Oh, now and then you will hear grown-ups say, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the Leopard his spots?” I don’t think even grown-ups would keep on saying such a silly thing if the Leopard and the Ethiopian hadn’t done it once do you? But they will never do it again, Best Beloved. They are quite contented as they are.”
How the Leopard Got His Spots – Kipling
Lying twisted and broken under the acceleration, Barlow realized that some things had not changed, that Jack Ketch was never asked to dinner however many shillings you paid him to do your dirty work, that murder will out, that crime pays only temporarily. The last thing he learned was that death is the end of pain.
–”The Marching Morons”, C.M.Kornbluth
Yeah, I know it’s actually two lines, so shoot me– into space.
“Only a madman would give a loaded revolver to an idiot”.
–”The Weapon”, Fredric Brown
This one has got “It’s a cookbook!” beat all hollow, as the classic SF short story payoff. Unfortunately, I’ve just ruined it for anyone unfamiliar with the story.
The Ramans do everything in threes.
-Arthur C. Clarke, RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
-Arthur C. Clarke, THE NINE BILLION NAMES OF GOD
He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
-George Orwell, 1984
“Iva is here.”
Spade, looking down at his desk, nodded almost imperceptibly. “Yes,” he said, and shivered. “Well, send her in.”
-Dashiell Hammett, THE MALTESE FALCON
The city clocks began to strike 12; the Bread Line moved forward slowly, its leathern feet sliding on the stones with the sound of a hissing serpent, as they who had lived according to their lights closed up in the rear.
According To Their Lights – O Henry
Tis.
Another cheat (it’s a novel, not a short story) but memorable to anyone who read the book:
“Kalle Bastard Blomkvist”
Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger
With her yellowed love letter clasped to her heart, and a raptured shining in her eyes, Miss Sally went out of the room.
Miss Sally’s Letter – Lucy Maud Montgomery
If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you I would let you know.
-R.D. Laing The Politics of Experience
Not a short story, rather a long one, but still the best closer of all time.
“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.”
“From here on in I rag nobody.” Bang the Drum Slowly – Mark Harris
“I don’t know. Maybe it was Utah.” – Raising Arizona
The Open Window
If, at least, there were granted me time enough to complete my work, I would not fail to stamp it with the seal of that Time the understanding of which was this day so forcibly impressing itself upon me, and I would therein describe men — even should that give them the semblance of monstrous creatures — as occupying in Time a place far more considerable than the so restricted one alloted them in space, a place, on the contrary, extending boundlessly since, giant-like, reaching far back into the years, they touch simultaneously epochs of their lives — with countless intervening days between — so widely separated from one another in Time.
(Blossom translation)
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
-The Great Gatsby
“Oh! hang Smiley and his afflicted cow!” I muttered, good-naturedly, and bidding the old gentleman good-day, I departed.
Mark Twain, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
“For the next decade—what am I saying?—for the next century we’ve got to put together what we so carelessly tore apart with so little concern for those who were going to follow us. This sounds preachy and that’s exactly what it is. I’m a preacher and I make no apologies. You’ve got to sound off. The older you are, the freer you are, as long as you last.
Studs Terkel, from My American Century
“He loved Big Brother.”
1984.
Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang “Cherry Ripe,” and another uncle sang “Drake’s Drum.” It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird’s Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.
A Child’s Christmas in Wales – Dylan Thomas
(And there is nothing that matches the parsnip wine.)
The cowboy, injured and rebellious, cried out blindly into this fog of mysterious theory:
“Well, I didn’t do anythin’, did I?”
The Blue Hotel, Stephen Crane
I don’t remember ever reading that. Excellent.
Spade said tenderly: “You angel! Well, if you get a good break you’ll be out of San Quentin in twenty years and you can come back to me then.”
The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett.
Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (1946)
He saw the dog then. He understood he had been looking at it for a time. The dog moved slowly, nosing the grass along a fence. Al got out of the car, started across the lawn, crouching forward as he walked, calling, “Suzy, Suzy, Suzy.”
The dog stopped when she saw him. She raised her head. He sat down on his heels, reached out his arm, waiting. They looked at each other. She moved her tail in greeting. She lay down with her head between her front legs and regarded him. He waited. She got up. She went around the fence and out of sight.
He sat there. He thought he didn’t feel so bad, all things considered. The world was full of dogs. There were dogs and there were dogs. Some dogs you just couldn’t do anything with.
Jerry and Molly and Sam – Raymond Carver
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle (1963)
@mack
Thanks!
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
This is addictive. Now I want to hole up and try writing a novel. thanks for this.
de nada – all in the public domain now
i picked up a complete set of saki at an estate sale in kcmo some 25 years ago
a perenial favorite
thank YOU for the reminder that i should introduce little mack to this story
it will appeal greatly to her sense of humour
– Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
Permit me to name this apple, with some pomposity, the Golden Apple of Eternal Desire.
@mack
It was assigned reading somewhere in junior high, and it was really the first time I found out that short stories could, well, be clever and interesting. Stuck with me ever since.
whoops. that was from milan kundera’s the golden apple of eternal desire.
uno mas:
“Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!”
-from herman melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener
“Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. 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.”
~~Animal Farm, more George Orwell
James Joyce, The Dead in Dubliners (1914)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
That was my first thought but someone got there first.
.
..”The Small Good Thing”
– Raymond Carver, but you must read the entire story to get the impact.
I’d quote Grace Paley from one of her wonderful “Faith” stories but I have to track down the quote. It doesn’t seem to be available via the internet.
Every Monday, THE M.O.P. marches into Awreetus Country and lines up outside the main metropolitan area. By means of a small-but-powerful portable transmitter, the combined forces of MEDIOCRATES proceed to croon, strut, blither, and bloop a suspiciously accessible barrage of DITTIES into the airwaves in an attempt to anaesthetize the decent townspeople into drooling submission.
CLETUS ‘n the Army Awreetus defend their turf by marching to a nearby hummock and playing a shuffle.
The Legend of Cleetus Awreetus-Awrightus & The Grand Wazoo – Frank Zappa
My link so did not work..sorry.
“But where I itty now, O my brothers, is all on my oddy knocky, where you cannot go. Tomorrow is all like sweet flowers and the turning vonny earth and the stars and the old Luna up there and your old droog Alex all on his oddy knocky seeking like a mate. And all that cal. A terrible grazhny vonny world, really, O my brothers. And so farewell from your little droog. And to all others in this story profound shooms of lipmusic brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries. But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little Alex that was. Amen. And all that cal.”
~~A Clockwork Orange
.
“Uh, excuse me, sir, I, uh, don’t know how to uh, to tell you this, but you were three minutes late. The schedule is a little, uh, bit off.”
He grinned sheepishly.
“That’s ridiculous!” murmured the Ticktockman behind his mask. “Check your watch.” And then he went into his office, going mrmee, mrmee, mrmee, mrmee.
“REPENT, HARLEQUIN!”SAID THE TICKTOCKMAN
by Harlan Ellison
He is asleep. Though his mettle was sorely tried,
He lived, and when he lost his angel, died.
It happened calmly, on its own.
The way night comes when day is done.
LES MISERABLES, Victor Hugo
– Douglas Adams at the end of Dirk_Gently’s_Holistic_Detective_Agency
“Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned toward the right; north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then paused, and after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left. South-south-west, south, south-east, east. . . .” — Aldous Huxley at the end of Brave_New_World
“And so on.” — Vonnegut at the end of Slapstick
[ no profundities here, but neat lines I liked quite well. ]
And while they debated the matter among themselves, Conradin made himself another piece of toast.
Sredni Vashtar, H. H. Munro (Saki)
A novel, not short story, but anyway -
“That night he and Beatrice pretended to be two little children and had their bath together. Two little children sitting at opposite ends of the big old-fashioned bath. And what a romp they had! The bathroom was drenched with their splashings. Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Point Counterpoint, Aldous Huxley
Nicely done, Mr Bogg, very nicely done of a Sunday.
“We shook hands and I watched him quickly walk away, tall, lean, bent forward with eagerness and hungry for the future, his metal capped shoes tapping against the sidewalk. Then he turned into Lee Avenue and was gone.”
Chaim Potok “The Chosen”
“In this manner, the issue was decided.”
Raymond Carver, “Popular Mechanics” 1981
The Charnel God
Clark Ashton Smith
H. P. Lovecraft
The Dunwich Horror
I finally found two short story endings I like enough to put here. Not too oddly, they are from a large collection of Philip K. Dick books someone left me:
Lehrer rubbed his chin. Bristles. He frowned.
“Miss Tomsen,” he said into the intercom, “will you step in here and tell me whether or not I need a shave?”
He had a feeling that he did. And soon.
Probably within the previous half hour.
- Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday
Obviously he desperately wanted to believe that a remnant, even though no more than rubble, endures. But it’s typical of the Terran mind to fasten onto phantoms. That might help explain their defeat in the conflict; they were simply not realists.
“This cat,” Milt Biskle said, “is going to be a mighty hunter of Martian sneak-mice.”
“Right,” Dr. DeWinter agreed, and thought, as long as its batteries don’t run down. He, too, patted the kitten.
A switch closed and the kitten purred louder.
- Precious Artifact
“Everything he hated was here.”
Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater
Raymond Chandler:
From Red Wind, which also has one of the best opening passages ever.
Not an ending, but one of my favorite (translated) lines for Jorge Luis Borges:
“Mirrors and copulation are abhorrent, as they multiply mankind.”
Borges has lots of great closing lines. For example:
And of course the ever-popular:
So, two competing ending lines for the Maltese Falcon? (“Send her in.” is the right one). But perhaps the screenplay deserves consideration: “The stuff that dreams are made of.”
“So Joseph died, being an hundred and ten years old; and they embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt.”
For pure understated elegance, nothing beats Genesis 50:26.
See also previous thread.
Never! We have Albert Pujols!
“In the meantime, Hadass had recovered, and Reb Alter Vishkower let it be known that a marriage contract was being drawn up. Hadass was to marry Avigdor. The town was agog. A marriage between a man and a woman who had once been engaged and their betrothal broken off was unheard of. The wedding was held on the first Sabbath after Tisha B’Av, and included all that is customary at the marriage of a virgin: the banquet for the poor, the canopy before the synagogue, the musicians, the wedding jester, the virtue dance. Only one thing was lacking: joy. The bridegroom stood before the marriage canopy, a figure of desolation. The bride had recovered from her sickness, but had remained pale, and her tears fell into the golden chicken broth. From all eyes the same question looked out: why had Anshel done it?
After Avigdor’s marriage to Hadass, Peshe spread the rumor that Anshel had sold his wife to Avigdor for a price, and that the money had been supplied by Alter Vishkower. One young man pondered the riddle at great length until he finally arrived at the conclusion that Anshel had lost his beloved wife to Avigdor at cards, or even on a spin of the Hanukkah dreidl. It is a general rule that when the grain of truth cannot be found, men will swallow great helpings of falsehood. Truth itself is often concealed in such a way that the harder you look for it, the harder it is to find.
Not long after the wedding, Hadass became pregnant. The child was a boy and those assembled at the circumcision could scarcely believe their ears when they heard the father name his son Anshel.”
The Spinoza of Market Street was runner-up. The quote above is an absolute kicker of an ending.
FOOTNOTE: I assume the wedding was on Saturday night. The first Shabbos after Tisha B’Av is called Shabbos Nachamu and is the beginning of seven Sabbaths of Consolation until Rosh Hashanah, and for all I know it is Shabbos Nachamu in the original Yiddish.
“Gimpel The Fool” is second runner-up. Suffers from having been translated by Saul Bellow and not the author.
Good choice.
Yes!
And reading the above, you realize the enormity of what Sara Schnirer did. Almost certainly no girls’ school in that town of any sort to have a person speak about the portion at a shabbos kallah. That is taken for granted where I live.