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Patrick's cool link about first lines prompted me to start this one. William Goldman has said that you can have an ok opening, a so-so middle, but if you can wow them at the end, you've got a hit. (paraphrasing)
So which last lines were hits with you?
I'll start:
James Ellroy's, American Tabloid has one of the best closing lines. The last lines take place on Nov 22, 1963 in Dallas as one of the characters, knowing what's about to happen, watches President Kennedy go through the parade route.
"The roar did a long slow fade. He braced himself for this big f****** scream."
These lines gave me literal chills (see? Betsy's not the only one to get them), and I think it works on me because I just read a harrowing look at the underworld of crime and politics, in a prose style that's got the staccato build of a machine gun, and the end wasn't really the end. We know what's going to happen, even if the novel is a fictionalized account of the whys and whos, and one could argue that THAT day was when the character of the United States changed in an irreversible way.
So the end is actually a beginning, and even one the characters caught up in the middle of the action, with no knowledge of the future, even that character knows that the "scream" is still ongoing.
posted
I'm not a William Goldman fan, and I particularly dislike the way he ends things, so it's interesting that he puts so much emphasis on the last line. Still, it's a good topic.
Ending lines are harder for me to pinpoint my favorite. The most memorable for me is George Orwell's 1984, "He loved Big Brother!" That essentially sums up the entire book in one horrible, inevitable phrase.
But I think my favortie is from Stephen R. Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane: "He walked up the long driveway to his house as if that were his only hope." You spend so much time with the main character, Thomas Covenant, as he tries to hold on to his sanity and it's a huge blow for him to suddenly wake up back in his own world. It's hard to explain why this is so meaningful without going into detail about the story, but I absolutely loved the way this book ended and this last line was perfect.
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Well, I will sometimes skip to the end of a book and read that first...but I don't think it'd influence my buying a book. For artistic reasons, the writer should make an effort to create a good ending and a good last sentence.
My favorite? Well, one comes to mind. I don't remember where it comes from---I think I only saw it quoted---but it goes like this:
"And they lived happily ever after---but it wasn't easy."
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