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Author Message   richard morgan Posted on Thursday, August 10, 2006 - 02:15 pm:    Okay, for those who wondered - that's the end of The Wasteland by TS Eliot, who Steph Swainston and I have just been beating up on a parallel thread. (Well, he's dead - what's he going to do about it, huh?) THIS is a thread about great last lines in novels. I'm going to set the ball rolling with Jim Thompson, who (at least twice to my knowledge) manages to end first person narrated novels with the death of the protagonist: Savage Night: "Death was there. And he smelled good." After Dark, My Sweet: "I just kind of stopped all over."   Spencer Pate Posted on Thursday, August 10, 2006 - 03:52 pm:    My favorite last lines: "The Dead" by James Joyce "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." A FAREWELL TO ARMS by Ernest Hemingway "After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain." "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" by Ernest Hemingway "After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it." BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy "He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die." LITTLE, BIG by John Crowley "One by one the bulbs burned out, like long lives come to their expected ends. Then there was a dark house made once of time, made now of weather, and harder to find; impossible to find and not even as easy to dream of as when it was alight. Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories. It was anyway all a long time ago; the world, we know now, is as it is and not different; if there was ever a time when there were passages, doors, the borders open and many crossing, that time is not now. The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn't as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were." "Snow" by John Crowley "There is no access to Georgie, except that now and then, unpredictably, when I'm sitting on the porch or pushing a grocery cart or standing at the sink, a memory of that kind will visit me, vivid and startling, like a hypnotist's snap of fingers. Or like that funny experience you sometimes have, on the point of sleep, of hearing your name called softly and distinctly by someone who is not there." "Stone Animals" by Kelly Link "They've been waiting for a long time, but the waiting is almost over. In a little while, the dinner party will be over and the war will begin." THE KING OF ELFLAND'S DAUGHTER by Lord Dunsany "For the twelve that were of the parliament of Ed looked through the window of that inner room, wherein they planned their plans by the forge of Narl, and, gazing over their familiar lands, perceived that they were no longer the fields we know." THE CHAIRWOMAN'S SHADOW by Lord Dunsany "And now for him, and the creatures that followed after, the gates were wide that led through the earthward rampart of the Country Beyond Moon's Rising. He limped towards it with all his magical following. He went therein, and the Golden Age was over." THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY by Michael Chabon "When Rosa and Joe picked it up they saw that Sammy had taken a pen and, bearing down, crossed out the name of the never-more-than-theoretical family that was printed above the address, and in its place written, sealed in a neat black rectangle, knotted by the stout cord of an ampersand, the words KAVALIER & CLAY." CLOUD ATLAS by David Mitchell "Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?" FAMISHED ROAD by Ben Okri "A dream can be the highest point of a life." "The Delicate Prey" by Paul Bowles "When they had gone the Moungari fell silent, to wait through the cold hours for the sun that would bring first warmth, then heat, thirst, fire, visions. The next night he did not know where he was, did not feel the cold. The wind blew dust along the ground into his mouth as he sang." THE BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DEAD by Kevin Brockmeier "They would listen to each other's voices, and they would breathe each other's breath. And they would wait for that power that would pull them like a chain into whatever came next, into that distant world where broken souls are wrenched out of their histories." LIGHT by M. John Harrison "Then the sky began to change colour, subtly and slowly at first, then faster and wilder than anyone could dream." And now everyone can tell that I have waaayyy too much free time.   Spencer Pate Posted on Thursday, August 10, 2006 - 05:41 pm:    More of my favorite last lines: ULYSSES by James Joyce "then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first 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." HOUSE OF LEAVES by Mark Z. Danielewski "Navidson does not close with the caramel covered face of a Casper the friendly ghost. He ends instead on what he knows is true and always will be true. Letting the parade pass from sight, he focuses on the empty road beyond, a pale curve vanishing into the woods where nothing moves and a street lamp flickers on and off until at last it flickers out and darkness sweeps in like a hand." MOONWISE by Greer Gilman "The music began again; the dancers and their shadows moved. Ariane walked slowly down through the long midsummer grass, carrying stone and soul and thorn within her, the green wood and the starry heavens, toward the dance." LINT by Steve Aylett "Fellow synesthetes understood Lint when he said he'd seen a new color at the point where green turns into orange, and that it felt like the vinegar-flavored singing itch he got in his arm marrow sometimes. There were reverse acidic blue golds, green golds, and purple golds that show up in music and certain suburban garage doors at twilight. There were chemicals essential for the operation of time, words redefined to permit atrocity, atrophy speeded up and termed employment, unrecorded love under asphalt, slavery too close for the eye's focus, whole lives impaled on society like carousel horses, and the hook throne of approval. To those who value these truths, Lint remains the child who tried to unearth the bruises underground." Two novels with circular structures, whose first line and last line are part of the same sentence: FINNEGANS WAKE by James Joyce "End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousandsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs." DHALGREN by Samuel R. Delany "Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland and into the hills, I have come to wound the autumnal city."   richard morgan Posted on Friday, August 11, 2006 - 02:29 am:    you have waaayyy too much free time, Spencer...... Makes me think I may have to give Dahlgren a try. Also makes me think I probably WON"T go back and try Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake again. Arundhati Roy - God of Small Things: "Tomorrow."   Spencer Pate Posted on Friday, August 11, 2006 - 08:53 am:    DHALGREN is definitely worth reading. The first few pages of that novel contain some of the most beautiful writing I have ever read. Here are some interesting articles about DHALGREN: http://www.sfsite.com/02b/dh122.htm http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2002/eh0202.htm http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue216/classic.html http://www.reason.com/hod/bb091305.shtml   Spencer Pate Posted on Friday, August 11, 2006 - 12:27 pm:    This will be my last post of favorite last lines, I swear! "The Voices of Time" by J.G. Ballard "Kaldren returned to his seat and lay back quietly, his eyes gazing across the lines of exhibits. Half-asleep, periodically he leaned up and adjusted the flow of light through the shutter, thinking to himself, as he would do through the coming months, of Powers and his strange mandala, and of the Seven and their journey to the white gardens of the moon, and the blue people who had come from Orion and spoken in poetry to them of ancient beautiful worlds beneath golden suns in the island galaxies, vanished forever now in the myriad deaths of the cosmos." ALL THE PRETTY HORSES by Cormac McCarthy "The desert he rode was red and red the dust he raised, the small dust that powdered the legs of the horse he rode, the horse he led. In the evening a wind came up and reddened all the sky before him. There were few cattle in that country because it was barren country indeed yet he came at evening upon a solitary bull rolling in the dust against the bloodred sunset like an animal in sacrificial torment. The bloodred dust blew down out of the sun. He touched the horse with his heels and rode on. He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land the small desert birds flew chittering among the dry bracken and horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come." PERDIDO STREET STATION by China Miéville "I turn away, stepping off into the dim lamplight to the east, towards the university campus and Ludmead Station, through my world of bricks and mortar and tar, bazaars and markets, sulphur-lit streets. It is night and I must hurry to my bed, to find my bed, to find a bed in this my city where I can live my foresquare life. I turn away from him and step into the vastness of New Crobuzon, this towering edifice of architecture and history, this complexitude of money and slum, this profane steam-powered god. I turn and walk into the city my home, not bird or garuda, not miserable crossbreed. I turn and walk into my home, the city, a man." GORMENGHAST by Mervyn Peake "And so, exulting as the moonlit rocks fled by him, exulting as the tears streamed over his face – with his eyes fixed excitedly upon the blurred horizon – and the battering of the hoof-beats loud in his ears, Titus rode out of his world." BLUE MARS by Kim Stanley Robinson "She lifted her eyes to the hills west of the sea, black under the sun. The bones of things stuck out everywhere. Waves broke in swift lines on the beach, and she walked over the sand toward her friends, in the wind, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars."   Steph Swainston Posted on Saturday, January 27, 2007 - 10:07 am:    Well, those are endings. Some are stodgier than others. It does remind me how pompous a lot of Perdido Street Station is. A plucked garuda will look like a plucked garuda, not like a man. The poor old big bird will probably end up even more marginalised. More good endings: 1. ‘Not any more. Nothing any more.’ – Rosemary Sutcliffe, Song for a Dark Queen. Good ending in a children’s book when the narrator dies. 2. Take up the bodies: such a sight as this Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss. Go, bid the soldiers shoot. - Hamlet More good first lines: 1. His name was Monty, and he was eating ants – Theodore Sturgeon, More than Human 2. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times – Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities 3. Granted, I am the inmate of a lunatic asylum – Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum I find endings harder to remember than first lines, apart from Shakespeare’s endings. Last lines of films seem easier to remember than those of books.   richard morgan Posted on Sunday, January 28, 2007 - 10:33 am:    Gorky Park starts like this: "All nights should be so dark, all winters so warm, all headlights so dazzling" and ends like this: "black on white, black on white, black on white and then gone." Beautiful novel, stands out in the international thriller/crime genre like a racehorse in a bunch of camels.   richard morgan Posted on Sunday, January 28, 2007 - 10:39 am:    And here are a few SF beginnings from that old master, Bob Shaw: "In spite of all his efforts, Tavernor was unable to remain indoors when it was time for the sky to catch fire." - the Palace of Eternity "I think I can be of service to you," the pale stranger said. "I want to commit suicide." - Waltz of the Bodysnatchers "It was a trivial thing - a cigarette lighter - that finally wrecked Philip Connor's peace of mind." - a Full Member of the Club and a hokey old golden age standard given a twist: "Candar waited seven thousand years before he saw his second spaceship." - Ship of Strangers   Steph Swainston Posted on Tuesday, January 30, 2007 - 02:31 pm:    Gorky Park, what a brilliant first line. Now I want to read it. And thanks, by the way, for recommending SNOW - Orhan Pamuk. In the three opening pages I actually shed a tear (now that is not like me), because I wanted to be able to write like that. Not envy, not at all; recognition of how very, very good he is. It is a calm, warm feeling, that recognition of genius. You feel like you've known the words all the time. You feel like you've come home. I last had that feeling with 'Smilla's feeling for snow', 'Perfume', 'Light', some others which were equally smooth. I'm now collecting all Pamuk but if I used the word 'genius', I mean genius in the piece of work, not in the man: his 'White Castle' is his first book and not up to scratch (could be marred by translation). Bob Shaw - great stuff. from Ragged Astronauts: 'It had become obvious to Toller Maraquine and some others watching on the ground that the airship was heading into danger.' WORST first lines: 1. Dune. 'A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.' Ack! 2. 2001. 'The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended.' 3. Satanic Verses. ' "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die." ' 4. Paul Clifford, by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton: 'It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.'   Spencer Pate Posted on Tuesday, January 30, 2007 - 04:04 pm:    Agreed about the first line of DUNE. Of course, that's only one of the countless risible, pretentious aphorisms in the DUNE series...   richard morgan Posted on Tuesday, January 30, 2007 - 05:23 pm:    Wow, those really ARE bad........... Yes, Snow - I'd be interested to know if (for you) the rest of the book stood up to the expectations generated by those first three pages. I thought they were quite brilliant too - but I later found the book quite frustrating in quite a lot of places. How much of that is down to the translation, I don't know - Turkish must be a pig of a language to render into an Indo-European tongue. I learnt to speak it up to a low intermediate level while I lived there, and it's the widest base concept gap I've ever had to deal with in language terms, so I don't envy whoever had to freight Pamuk's rather elliptical and complex thought from there to here.   Jesse Jordan Posted on Sunday, June 24, 2007 - 07:10 pm:    New to the board here. Just finished re-reading the Kovacs novels (in the span of about 4 days!) and want to thank Richard for the best reads I've had in a long time. I'm breaking the rules of this thread by quoting not a last line, nor an opening line, but an opening passage from Alan Moore's "Watchmen": Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire thread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout "Save us!"... ... and I'll look down, and whisper "No."   Kiran Patel Posted on Monday, July 02, 2007 - 03:36 am:    Not trying to suck up to the thread starter or anything, but these have been my favourite two last lines for a few years now: In close second, from some book or other: "This after life shit is overrated." But the best, just for the impact to the story, has got to be from Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks: "Thi starz 1/2 movd" Seriously, the scope of those four words still gives me goosebumps.   richard morgan Posted on Monday, July 02, 2007 - 06:36 am:    Thanks Kiran - I'll take close second to Banks any day and twice on Sunday - he's one of my favourite authors (though personally I don't think Feersum Endjinn was one of his finest) Broken Angels - yeah, I think it was part way through that book that I suddenly started to be really afraid of Kovacs. In the planetary war setting, the return from the dead theme I'd touched on in Altered Carbon suddenly took on all its zombie/demonic implications for me. The idea of someone who gets to go to paradise, but just doesn't rate it much and would really rather get back to the hellish realities of life in a profession of violence - that ethos was very appealing, and at the same time very scary. It's that sense of elemental unstoppability, of something you thought was dead or at least at rest, waking up and coming at you once again. Also, of course, it's an ending that points up the fact that the various fictive paradises that religion has dreamed up for us would in fact very quickly become boring for anybody with any trace of a human spark - truth is, we just aren't designed for long term bliss. Which fact can also be a bit scary, if you stare into it for long enough.......   Kiran Patel Posted on Monday, July 02, 2007 - 07:20 am:    Strange. Feersum endjinn is one of my favourites along with Use of Weapons, which also has a top class ending. Not a last line, but nearly: “He pressed the gun hard against his temple and pulled the trigger. “The besieged forces round the [battleship] broke out within the hour while the surgeons were still fighting for his life. It was a good battle, and they nearly won.” I had the timely fortune of reading Broken Angels at the start of March, 2003. A world preparing for war over resources that the populace neither endorsed nor supported. As far as favourite character names go, Djoko Roespinoedji is a clear winner. Asuming, that is, that I’m pronouncing it correctly: JOKE-Oh Rows-pin-OH-gee ?   richard morgan Posted on Monday, July 02, 2007 - 12:16 pm:    Ah - Use of Weapons - now you're talking...... Djoko Roespinoedji, yeah, that sounds about right, though it's hard to recall now - like an awful lot of the names in Broken Angels, this one was borrowed from a list of the overseas students I taught on a pre-sessional English course in the summer of 2001, so it's years since I heard the name uttered by someone who knows. The real Djoko wasn't, of course, anything like the character in the book - although, now I come to think of it, like an awful lot of the students who'd come to do postgrad studies in Marketing, he was a rabidly neoliberal little guy......so maybe there was a trace of inspiration there....   Kiran Patel Posted on Monday, July 02, 2007 - 01:30 pm:    Its just one of those incongruities: initially - when you see the name Djoko Roespinoedji - you get kind of jarred behind the eyes. You can't scan any further until you've audibly reconciled the seemingly bizarre visual arrangement of letters into something sensible. Its really nice when that something turns out to be not just sensible, but effortlessly mellifluous, and from then on every time you see the name your ears read it for you. It also fits into my head as part of a song: Good King Wenceslas looked out... Djoko Roespinoedji. Don't ask me why. As for long term bliss, I don't think we're designed for long-term anything. We have the ability to auto-normalise any persistent situation, to reset the benchmark. It implies that everything is comparative, and also points to the reason why its good to leave the comfort zone once in a while - go camping in the rain for a week and tell me if you don't notice your ceiling when you get home. This living-in-a-house shit is overrated.   richard morgan Posted on Monday, July 02, 2007 - 06:13 pm:      Franjo Franjkovic Posted on Sunday, July 29, 2007 - 06:08 am:    My favourite last line ever. Mike Hammer after he shot Charlotte in the end of "I, the Jury" and she is dying right in front of him, asking how he could kill her: "It was easy," I said. That's the best ending Spillane ever wrote and the most badass line, any noir-character ever said.   Anna Feruglio Dal Dan Posted on Saturday, September 22, 2007 - 07:40 pm:    I agree that the final page of Ulysses is probably the greatest page of literature of the past century, and oh boy would I like to be able to read the rest. Me, I wish I could say that the close of the Disposessed is great, but going back and reading it, it strikes me as a bit simplistic: "His hands were empty, as they were always been." For my money, my best ever endings are Italo Calvino's The Invisible Cities and Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, respectively: And Polo said: "The hell of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the hell where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept hell and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of hell, are not hell, and make them endure, and give them space"* It is cold in the scriptorium, my thumb aches. I leave this writ, I do not know for whom, I do not know about what: Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.** * William Weaver's translation, modified where I just flat can't stand it. Weaver translated "hell" as "inferno". Inferno is the Italian word for hell and is in the original, but in English it means "a great fire". Probably Weaver wanted to maintain a connection that he thought existed with Dante, but even granting that such a connection existed, in so doing turned a living, vivid, relevant connection with a very physical image of suffering very well known to any Italian pupil (Dante is studied universally), to an obscure learned hommage. In so doing he turned an incredibly affection statement of personal morality and even politics into a literaly in-joke. Of course you don't need to know anything about Dante to know what "inverno" means in Italian, it is a very common word. Bah. And don't get me started on "apprehension". ** My translation, I have a copy of The Rose in English but can't find it. Stat rose pristina nomine etc means something like: The primordial rose stays with its name, we only hold the naked names, but the obscurity of the passage is part of the point of the book. "nomina nuda tenemus" I guess is the whole point. I think.   Kiran Patel Posted on Monday, November 12, 2007 - 04:00 am:    Just to refer back to the title of the thread, I noticed last week that the name of the virus in Heroes is the Shantih virus. Now i've not read The Wasteland (but i have seen Children of Men and read Consider Phlebas & Look to Windward (!) ) but was wondering why a virus that affects super-powered people would be named suchly. Any shouts as to relevance, anyone? Or is it just a standard label for the end of the world?