2008: Booking Thru Thursday – Endings

This week’s topic…

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?

As bad as I am with first sentences, I think I may be worst with last ones! I can’t remember a single one. However, someone (I wish I could remember who, but I clicked too many times and lost the page!) linked to the 100 Best Last Lines from Novels from the American Book Review, and I thought I’d look through that and pull out the ones I have read.

• So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. –F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
• He loved Big Brother. –George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
• ‘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.’ –Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
• He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance. –Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
• 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. –George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945)
• Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody. –J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
• The old man was dreaming about the lions. –Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
• “Tomorrow, I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.” –Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (1936)

I think the only one of those that really resonates with me is Gone with the Wind.