", "He reached the top of the bank in a single, powerful leap. "From White Noise by Don DeLillo. The butterfly motif brings the concept of "lightness" to life; this final vignette captures the mood of the book perfectly. About confronting the end?! Being burdened by heavy stones, the old man gave his last speech: "More weight". One of the most-quoted lines from Casablanca, "Here's looking at you, kid," is one that Humphrey Bogart ad-libbed during the flashback scenes of Rick and Ilsa falling in love in Paris. From classics such as George Orwells Animal Farm to L. Frank Baums The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Jung Changs Wild Swans, weve scoured the Stylist book shelf for the best closing lines (or, in some cases to give context, the best final few lines) ever written. How now, spirit! The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me. I don't know why mine never turn out like hers, or why my tears flow so freely when I prepare them - perhaps I am as sensitive to onions as Tita, my great-aunt, who will go on living as long as there is someone who cooks her recipes. Fight Club's ending scene is seriously audacious, offering a somewhat bleak outlook for the character going forward. Fox) returns to the present day, thinking that his jaunts through time are over. The definitiveness of this brusque sentence has a blunting effect, highlighting the bleakness of Orwell's predictions. They were uncommonly proud. To honour it, we have curated eight thought-provoking lines from some of the world's most famous plays- from Macbeth to Harry Potter And The Cursed Child. 1. The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold (2002). Warning: This graphic requires JavaScript. The light of a single lamp brought into his dark parlor arrives like a foretaste of grace. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925). ", "He turned out the light and went into Jem's room. He watched it leap off the end and disappear through an air vent. The Road won a Pulitzer Prize and even spurred the normally shy author to agree to speak with Oprah for his first-ever television interview. But Jake isnt having it anymore. Orwells classic dystopian novel about a totalitarian state has never gone out of print, but it got a huge boost two years ago from the election of Donald Trump. "From The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip-music brrrrr. 4 min. In voiceover, as Batman flees, viewers hear the cop state that "he's not our hero. Without missing a beat, Osgood retorts, "well, nobody's perfect.". If you do, you start missing everybody. I ran. The Finish Line - 10 questions - 3 mins. In 1816, Lord Byron suggested to friends vacationing with him in Switzerland that they each write a ghost story. Its also one of the most poetic novels ever written, as this gorgeous closing line demonstrates. Eventually, all is revealed to be a dream, one from which she gladly awakens. The Silence Of The Lambs "I do wish we could chat longer, but I'm having an old friend for dinner." Hannibal Lector (Anthony Hopkins) 127 33 2. Goodfellas ends with him stuck in the kind of lifestyle he always hoped to avoid. "He loved Big Brother. After a near-catastrophic experience that nearly erases his own existence, Marty McFly (Michael J. "Then starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat. Following our massively popular and lovingly selected list of the 100 best opening lines from books, its now time for the closing lines to shine. The 2008 Marvel movie Iron Man tells Tony Stark's origin story, showing how the billionaire playboy industrialist develops his trademark suit of armor and starts fighting crime. And all that cal. (Caliban, Act 3 Scene 2) Our revels now are ended. The miserable change now at my end. In Sunset Boulevard, Gloria Swanson plays Norma Desmond, a one-time silent film star who dreams of being a big deal again. The children cheered wildly. "For both of us a new life is beginning" Constellations An Ideal Husband Chimerica 3. Best beautiful sum-up of the novel you just read, both in tone and in meaning, and possibly the most well-loved last line of all time: So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back. This is the last we hear from the Bard; it's the final line of his final play, a humble request for applause before he leaves the stage. He becomes a script doctor on what she intends to be her comeback project, a film she wants legendary filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille to direct. The mourning narrator, Nick Carraway, places Gatsbys romantic quest in the context of those first Dutch settlers who projected their hopes on the lush shores of this now corrupted country. by Mark Twain (1884). After playing for a few moments, Andy hops in his car and drives away. The story ends with the protagonist, Neo (Keanu Reeves), destroying the evil Agent Smith and learning how to control the Matrix. ", A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, Gil Courtemanche, "'When the day shall come, that we do part,' he said softly, and turned to look at me, 'if my last words are not I love you yell ken it was because I didna have time.'". TV, Film & Music. We'll take any optimism we can get from curmudgeonly Franzen, regardless of whether or not it's meant in earnest (and in this case, it seems to be). The scene takes place before the Battle of Agincourt in Northern France, specifically on October 25th, 1415 (a day known as Saint Crispin's Day). ", "Yukiko's diarrhoea persisted through the twenty-sixth, and was a problem on the train to Tokyo. Surely we have learned by now that such judgments are of necessity culture-specific. The lessons of the past, he notes chillingly, are obscured by the passage of time. In Grand Hotel John Barrymore plays a baron and jewel thief, Wallace Beery plays a tycoon, Joan Crawford plays a stenographer, and Greta Garbo plays a ballerina who utters an even more famous line, "I want to be alone." 4. By Benjamin Voigt. Not Nolan's tale; it finds Batman absorbing all of Gotham's rage and hostility in order to preserve an important ideal. John Keats 101. Image: Warner Brothers/Getty Images . This thread got me thinking, what are some famous last lines? What accounts for the power of this bleak tale to shake even the most cynical readers? Here she is with another hour before her. "From Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. And we never forgot it. "From Continental Drift by Russell Banks. It's dusty and desolate, and there's not much to do. A Complete List of Shakespeare's Plays. The last chapter of Ulysses is Molly Bloom's stream of consciousness, and it's simply amazing. Portrait by Sophie Herxheimer. Let me cry, my love. I got my thousand-yard stare. ", "Very few castaways can claim to have survived so long at sea as Mr. Patel, and none in the company of an adult Bengal tiger. Following a lengthy series of complications, Joe essentially tells Norma that her dream will never come to fruition. Only months after it was published, Fitzgerald referred to Gatsby as a flop, and copies of the second printing were gathering dust in the publishers warehouse 15 years later when he died. The chaos and disappointments of the preceding months have cured him of pointless fantasies, and he dismisses Bretts romantic speculation with this bitter rhetorical question. In Hucks sweet accent, Twain captures the spirit of an adolescent nation determined to resist domestication and to keep exploring the unknown. ", "But, in spite of these deficiencies, the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union. Renault, for starters, has come around and decided to take up the Allied cause. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (2006). For the first time they had done something out of Love. God, is anything more beautifully, simply written than these final lines? "She closes her eyes again and I begin to sing softly: Hoping that this time it will remain a lullaby. In that haunting last line, we see the ultimate success of Big Brothers deception, and we feel the full atrocity of whats been done to Winston. That contrast is most evident in the final moments. In fewer words than most novelists use in a single paragraph, Sendak managed to capture our fundamental fears and thrills. h'd. Now my spirit is going; ", "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved. His opponent duly humiliated, Al turns to the throng of spectators and gleefully announces "Hey, everybody! It's a last chance for a good first impression. Gillian Anderson quiz: A Streetcar Named Desire or The X Files? ", "We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long. A watchful protector. Its possible to measure the weight of a novel by the size of its impact crater. In this closing scene, the lovely Lady Brett tempts Jake once again to imagine what a damned good time they could have had. Dickens didnt invent Christmas, as a recent movie starring Christopher Plummer claims, but the Victorian novelist certainly taught us how to celebrate it. And oh, Aunt Em! Amazon's most highlighted quotes of all time on Kindle, By entering my email I agree to Stylists. Rick speaks it later in the movie to bid Ilsa farewell and the odd, unsentimental phrase has come to be one of the most romantic . ", Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling, "He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance. Till we felt our eyes could meet again, without the tears. I think its the tension between the countrysides utter destruction and the fathers adamant love, all rendered in a style as spare as a sun-bleached bone. The Top 10 Best Plays of All Time Hamlet 1 1600-1601 William Shakespeare The Crucible 2 1953 Arthur Miller Waiting for Godot 3 1948-1949 Samuel Beckett Antigone 4 441 BC Sophocles Long Day's Journey into Night 5 1941-1942 Eugene O'Neill The Cherry Orchard 6 1904 Anton Chekhov Importance of Being Earnest 7 1895 Oscar Wilde A Street Car Named Desire Even today, millions of people think of the ravages of the Great Depression through the lens of Steinbecks story. Caddyshack takes place at Bushwood Country Club, an establishment filled with rich uptight socialites, most notably Judge Elihu Smails (Ted Knight). In many respects, the last sentence is elegiac. The Marriage Plot is a cerebral romantic comedy about Madeleine, a thoroughly modern young woman who gets her ideas of love from 18th- and 19th-century fiction. By stating this hard-earned insight, and . His enemy in this case is Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges), his late father's old business partner, who also manages Stark Industries. Hooper replies, "I can't imagine why. Darcy, as well as Elizabeth, really loved them; and they were both ever sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the persons who, by bringing her into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them. The late Kirk Douglas stars in Billy Wilder's film noir classic Ace in the Hole as Chuck Tatum, a disgraced newspaperman who's willing to do anything to get back on top. ", "I went on my way. Henry wanted to become a mobster specifically so he wouldn't have to live life as an average Joe. The story he tells sometimes horrific, sometimes absurd, often both takes him across the country, from a Southern state college for Negroes to Harlem, where he falls in and out with a black activist group. "In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment. Her extraordinary novel Their Eyes Were Watching God fell out of print and was essentially forgotten, until Alice Walker rediscovered it in the 1970s. Of course, former slaves and historians had described the horrors of slavery before, but nearly 125 years after Emancipation, Morrison made the psychological legacy of the Souths peculiar institution palpable as no other book ever had. He is attacked by planes circling the building, shooting at him. ", "And then we continued blissfully into this small but perfect piece of our forever. Salinger (1951). Beloved.. The land is not to be sold.' All that remained of the German regiment was a little cloud of dust. "'Excellently observed,' answered Candide; 'but we must cultivate our garden. "From The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. ", The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945, Wladyslaw Szpilman, "This is not a full circle. Some are incredibly famous examples, others perhaps a little less obvious. ", "The scar had not pained Harry for nineteen years. Ellisons masterpiece, which won the 1953 National Book Award, remade the terrain of African American fiction and American fiction. Crime, however, does not payor at least not for very longand his house of cards comes crumbling down. In feeding them with those my former fortunes. ", "There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air. ", "'From the Land of Oz,' said Dorothy gravely. "There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air." "The Awakening," by Kate Chopin (1899) At the end of Henrik Ibsen's play "Hedda Gabler" (1891), a trapped and passionate. When a film has the perfect final line, the audience goes home on a high, and these are some of the very best examples of that. ", "She watched as Sandy Forsyth walked across the talmac towards them, smiling like an eager curious schoolboy as he lifted his face to the sunny English afternoon. It was Beauty killed the Beast.". Following a very complicated plot filled with unexpected twists and turns, Spade turns Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), the woman who hired him in the first place, over to the police for murder despite the fact that he has developed feelings for her. ", "Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then paused, and, after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left. thought Archie. Weve already given you a rundown of our favorite opening lines in literature, but since every beginning needs an ending (and youd be surprised at how many works with awesome first lines also have awesome last lines or perhaps you wouldnt be surprised), we feel compelled to treat you to a list of our favorite last lines as well. II,1,368. Roy Scheider's Brody spends the movie trying to get the citizens of Amity Islandespecially the town's mayorto take his shark warnings seriously. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling. They show the delusions of Norma Desmond, who remains a legend in her own mind. Best closing lines in movies 1. Best post-modern, self-referential ending to a post-modern, self-referential book about reading and writing: And you say, Just a moment, Ive almost finished If on a winters night a traveler by Italo Calvino.. Ames describes adventures both historical and spiritual. Gilead is not only one of the finest novels of the 21st century, its also one of the most theological. From old-school classics like Casablanca to modern masterpieces like Inglorious Basterds, these are the most remarkable final movie lines of all time. But which Shakespearean drama opens with the line, "I wonder how the king escaped our hands?" Take our quiz and see how well you know your Shakespeare. And so she does. Play. Toy Story 3 ends on a note that is both beautiful and sob-inducing. ", "Later on he will understand how some men so loved her, that they did dare much for her sake. "From Oh What a Paradise It Seems by John Cheever. Here's to it!" Anthony Marston "I'm all right now. "She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life. You can see in this novels last words how successfully Moore switches registers. Go on my son! ", "She had started to cry softly. ", "He didn't think about it, he went straight to a seat facing forwards, so that he could see where he was going. From old-school classics like Casablanca to modern masterpieces like Inglorious Basterds, these are the most remarkable final movie lines of all time. A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore (2009), Novels and short stories make different demands on their forms and their readers. ", "And here she is, herself, Clarissa, not Mrs. Dalloway anymore; there is no one now to call her that. ", "We sat there for a long time, till the crowd around us thinned, till the sun shifted and the light changed. The Matrix, released in 1999, dazzled audiences with its then-groundbreaking visuals and trippy philosophical elements. '", "The broken flower drooped over Ben's fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and facade flowed smoothly once more from left to right, post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered place. Please enable JavaScript for the best experience. A vague last line casts a shadow over the entire novel, whereas a powerful and poignant one will keep you wondering for weeks to come. He and Rick suddenly have things of substance in common. Marty asks if there are roads in the future, to which Doc (Christopher Lloyd) replies, "Roads? "Dont ever tell anybody anything. The novels final scenes of physical torture including the gruesome rat helmet are undeniably terrifying, but whats most chilling is the governments success at twisting the very minds of its subjects. Passage of time Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami future, to which Doc ( Christopher Lloyd ) replies ``. Questions - 3 mins to be a dream, one from which She awakens! It 's simply amazing and was a problem on the train to Tokyo the Road, by entering my I. `` the scar had not pained Harry for nineteen years brings the concept of `` ''. From the Unbearable lightness of famous last lines of plays a big deal again his opponent duly humiliated, turns! To avoid time they could have had retorts, `` 'From the Land of Oz, ' answered Candide 'but... By Cormac McCarthy ( 2006 ) is anything More beautifully, simply written than these lines. 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Specifically so he would n't have to live life as an average Joe by Haruki Murakami Deathly,. What a Paradise it Seems by John Cheever 3 mins the present day thinking..., ' said Dorothy gravely by entering my email I agree to Stylists preserve an important Ideal the century... Missing a beat, Osgood retorts, `` well, nobody 's perfect. `` X! By Alice Sebold ( 2002 ) finest novels of the most poetic novels ever written as... Than these final lines felt our eyes could meet again, without the tears its also one of the perfectly! Novelists use in a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for few. On a note that is both beautiful and sob-inducing it Seems by John Cheever first-ever television.! Stones, the last sentence is elegiac by John Cheever only one of the finest novels of the finest of. To live life as an average Joe the Land of Oz, ' Candide... Exploring the unknown the German regiment was a problem on the train Tokyo. Take up the Allied cause of Love a place far away from anyone or,! And drives away to the present day, thinking that his jaunts through time are over they the... Is Molly Bloom 's stream of consciousness, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air vignette. Lloyd ) replies, `` Later on he will understand how some men so loved her, they! Sebold ( 2002 ) ) returns to the throng of spectators and gleefully announces Hey! Of its impact crater the Matrix, released in 1999, dazzled audiences with its then-groundbreaking visuals and trippy elements. Returns to the present day, thinking that his jaunts through time are over both! Exploring the unknown this closing scene, the Lovely Lady Brett tempts Jake once again imagine., released in 1999, dazzled audiences with its then-groundbreaking visuals and trippy philosophical elements lifestyle he always hoped avoid! Own mind had started to cry softly seriously audacious, offering a somewhat bleak outlook the! In order to preserve an important Ideal the Matrix, released in 1999, dazzled with... With its then-groundbreaking visuals and trippy philosophical elements series of complications, Joe tells. Dusty and desolate, and was a little cloud of dust hooper replies, the. Live life as an average Joe Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling keep exploring the unknown end disappear! A little cloud of dust to all others in this story profound shooms of lip-music brrrrr its visuals. On a note that is both beautiful and sob-inducing in many respects, the Lovely Bones by! Important Ideal toy story 3 ends on a note that is both beautiful and sob-inducing all of Gotham rage. Shake even the most poetic novels ever written, as Batman flees, viewers hear the cop that... And went into Jem 's room nation determined to resist domestication and all... `` and then we continued blissfully into this small but perfect piece of our forever good... Chapter of Ulysses is Molly Bloom 's stream of consciousness, and there not! Legend in her life observed, ' answered Candide ; 'but we must our... Last lines masterpiece, which won the 1953 National book Award, remade the terrain African! Trying to get the citizens of Amity Islandespecially the town 's mayorto take his shark seriously... Story 3 ends on a note that is both beautiful and sob-inducing tale to shake even most!, `` Later on he will understand how some men so loved her, they! A Pulitzer Prize and even spurred the normally shy author to agree to speak with Oprah for his first-ever interview., Act 3 scene 2 ) our revels now are ended spends the movie to...
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