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Last Lines Quotes

Quotes tagged as "last-lines" Showing 1-30 of 60
John Gardner
“They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction.

'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all.”
John Champlin Gardner, Grendel

Hanya Yanagihara
“It's a good story,' he said. He even grinned at me. 'I'll tell you.'

'Please,' I said.

And then he did.”
Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“God, there must be a meaning. Fiercely he was certain that there must be a meaning.
Surely, while we live we are not lost.
Oh Janos, Janos my brother!
Surely we are not lost--while we live.”
John Hepworth

Richard  Adams
“Underground, the story continued.”
Richard Adams, Watership Down

Roald Dahl
“Give us strength, oh Lord, to let our children starve.”
Roald Dahl, The Great Automatic Grammatizator And Other Stories

Peter Matthiessen
“This world is painted on a wild dark metal”
Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country

Sarah Weeks
“And I walked across the room past all that was missing, through the door, and into the light that shone like a sweet wide smile over all that was actually there.”
Sarah Weeks, So B. It

Diana Wynne Jones
“Polaris often remarks to Sol that Sirius loses his temper much less often these days. But the one sure way to send him into a flaming rage is to suggest that he finds a new Companion. Sirius will not hear of it. The small white sphere circling his goes untenanted, because he hopes that what Miss Smith said is true.”
Diana Wynne Jones, Dogsbody

Jules Verne
“However strange his destiny may be, it is also sublime! I myself have understood that much. Did I not also live this unnatural life for ten months? Thus, to that question asked six thousand years ago by Ecclesiastes, 'That which is far off, and exceedingly deep, who can find it out?' only two men now have the right to answer: Captain Nemo and myself.”
Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

“We're almost a whole shadow now from far away.”
Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems

Dorothea Lasky
“It is as if I had made you believe
In me once again
It is as if you knew I was your true love
It was as if I didn't have to know

In this life
All you were to me
Was that flower”
Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“I'm a nice guy, I swear to fucking God.”
Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

Mary Renault
“Quietly, as night shuts down the uncertain prospect of the road ahead, the wheels sink to stillness in the dust of the halting-place, and the reins drop from the driver’s loosened hands. Staying each his hunger on what pasture the place affords them, neither the white horse nor the black reproaches his fellow for drawing their master out of the way. They are far, both of them, from home and lonely, and lengthened by their strife the way has been hard. Now their heads droop side by side till their long manes mingle, and when the voice of the charioteer falls silent they are reconciled for a night in sleep.”
Mary Renault, The Charioteer

John Cowper Powys
“   "Time was," it said. "Time is," it said. "And time will—"
   But the burning meteor then fell upon it, and neither it nor what destroyed it was ever seen again.”
John Cowper Powys, The Brazen Head

Iris Murdoch
“Art is not cosy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.”
Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

Henry James
“I'll marry you, mind you, in an hour."

"As we were?"

"As we were."

But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. "We shall never be again as we were!”
Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

Herman Melville
“But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying billows they almost touched;--at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, the Whale

Amanda Foody
“And no tale was ever heard of him again.”
Amanda Foody, All of Our Demise

Helen Oyeyemi
“I almost forgot to mention another fox I know of—a very wicked fox indeed. But you are tired of hearing about foxes now, so I won't go on.”
Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox

Helen Oyeyemi
“Three creaks. She stepped three times.

What is the meaning of it? Three creaks, three weeks? If she comes back for her shoes in three days, then I only need to empty them another three times. If it really is three weeks that were meant, what then. If three months, what then. Three years. That's why I had to write it down now. By then I may no longer believe I heard anything in Miri's room.”
Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching

Danielle  Paige
“No matter how long it took - no matter who I had to destroy first - Dorothy was going to die.”
Danielle Paige, Dorothy Must Die

Terry Pratchett
“The magic was already there”
Terry Pratchett, The Shepherd's Crown

Franny Choi
“stimulus: relevant cry
(if then therefore)
say: cry.

say:
knife o knife o knife
Franny Choi, Soft Science

Bohumil Hrabal
“I have a habit, before leaving my flat in Prague, of checking three times to make sure I’ve shut off the gas stove, that I’ve turned off the lights in the bathroom and the water closet, and that I’ve locked the door, and then I go back once more to check on everything a fourth time, and so now, though I knew that nothing but my swan could possibly be lying there under the snow, I still brushed the snow away with trembling hands and saw the curve of her wing, and I went on brushing the snow away and yes, there was her neck, then I elbowed my way back like a sloth, and now nothing ached anymore but my heart, and so I crawled back from the riverbank to the swan again, and then again, trying to brush away more and more snow from that beautiful snowbound creature who, perhaps for my sake alone, had arranged herself in my sight so that I cried out into the dark morning and realized, bitterly, that the king of Czech comedians could go to claim his advance for this story, not to the Writers’ Publishing House, but to the very center, not of death, but of hell itself, where I will suffer pangs of guilt and remorse and shame that will pursue me into eternity, into the very heart of incalculable consequences.”
Bohumil Hrabal, All My Cats

Marianne Boruch
“And the door, what of

the hinge, little cry that won't uncry itself.”
Marianne Boruch, Cadaver, Speak

J.R.R. Tolkien
“In the twilight of autumn it sailed out of Mithlond, until the seas of the Bent World fell away beneath it, and the winds of the round sky troubled it no more, and borne upon the high airs above the mists of the world it passed into the Ancient West, and an end was come for the Eldar of story and of song.”
J.R.R. Tolkien

J.R.R. Tolkien
“The sun went down, and Morwen sighed and clasped his hand and was still; and Hurin knew that she had died.”
JRR Tolkien

K.A. Merikan
“We're gonna be the best ferret daddies!”
K.A. Merikan, Not Like Other Boys

Allie Ray
“JIM. Still, it was a dreadful shame about old Cary, wasn't it?

NIGEL. Terrible shame; he missed the only good party Margaret ever threw.”
Allie Ray, The Last Will and Testament

Allie Ray
“Even them that knew better what say those things, just the same; rebuilt his story like a shabby house with good bones. A bit of plaster, a splash of paint; the crags and breaks are filled---the shadows have no hollow place to fall. That's how it goes. The good fills in the cracks. And from a distance it's all new and light and promise.”
Allie Ray, Holler

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