I blogged about opening lines of novels a while back, but the endings are just as interesting, if not more
so. The Huffington Post recently gathered together some of their favourites, and
it’s an article worth a look.
There are some fantastic last lines, I think my favourites from this list would have to be
either from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; "So we beat on, boats
against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Or from George
Orwell’s Big Brother; "He loved Big Brother". The latter is so wonderfully
bleak – something that contemporary film studios could learn from – whatever
happened to the brutal, unhappy endings?
Another that pushes
those two close is this one; “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.” Where else could that come from but The Heart of Darkness by Joseph
Conrad?
What about you, any favourite last lines?
This is also a good moment to fess up to a guilty secret. I lifted the last line of my first
novel, The Defector, from my favourite book. It fitted perfectly - ‘Sometimes you
just know these things’ - and it seemed like a suitable tribute to pay to a book
that kinda changed the path of my life. So can anyone out there guess which book it
comes from, and does anyone have a copy on their real or virtual shelf?