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Last Lines: A Quiz

by

Lauren Roberts

Back in March, I offered a “literary lines quiz” to see how many first lines of books you could recognize. Some are so well known as to be almost clichés. Others are more obscure, but have the ability to grip onto your reader’s memory so if you don’t remember much else about the book, you do remember the opening line. Some are just odd, others surprisingly mundane. What the best first lines have in common—regardless of whether they are shocking, horrifying, amusing, titillating, loving—is power, their innate ability to grab the reader and pull her into the story. Without that, the book will never be read.

What about ultimate or last lines, though? Shouldn’t they also be memorable in some way? Or is that asking too much? They do bring the story to a close, and if you think about it that is a lot of responsibility for a single sentence.

What I thought might be different and fun is to see if you can recognize these last lines from books, fiction and nonfiction, old and new. The only thing they have in common is that they are at least fairly well known. Try to do it without googling them, and see how many you can correctly identify. (Answers are at the end.)

 1.  The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off.

 2. And Carlson said, “Now what the hell ya suppose is eatin’ them two guys?”

 3.  Then, starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voice in the wind-bent wheat.

 4.  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.

 5.  And strangest of all is it to hold my wife's hand again, and to think that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead.

 6.  And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!

 7.  Later on he will understand how some men so loved her, that they did dare much for her sake.

 8.  I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

 9.  It was the strangest thing, but for the first time in a long time I almost felt serene.

10.  Not by combining together, to protect injustice and cruelty, and making a common capital of sine, is this Union to be saved,—but by repentance, justice, and mercy; for, not surer is the eternal law by which the millstone sinks in the ocean than by stronger law by which injustice and cruelty shall bring on nations the wrath of Almighty God!

11.  A chill night breeze came whispering down from the depths of the valley, and suddenly the places was full of ghosts,—shadows of men alive and dead,—my own among them. 

12.  “Cursed psychologist!”—he suddenly cut the conversation short in a rage, and without looking back, left the cell.

13.  He remembered the days when you cold get thirteen Royal Natives for a shilling.

14.  He died believing he had won his war.

15.  “Oh, father,” said Eppie, “what a pretty home ours is! I think nobody could be happier than we are.”

16.  Then there was only the ocean and the sky and the figure of Howard Roark.

17.  “I don’t believe that,” he answered.

18.  He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear.

19.  And such is their condescension, their indulgence, and their beneficence to those below them, that there is not a neighbor, a tenant, or a servant, who doth not most gratefully bless the day when Mr. Jones was married to his Sophia. 

20.  “. . . Maybe I could grow me a bale to the acre, like Pa was always talking about doing.”

21.  “. . . But since ‘tis as ‘tis, why, it might have been worse, and I feel my thanks accordingly.”

22. “. . . The books she looked at were mine.”

23.  “I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper with Ivan the coachman, falling into angry discussions, expressing my opinions tactlessly; there will still be the same wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife; I shall still go on scolding her for my own terror, and being remorseful for it; I shall still be as unable to understand with my reason why  I pray, and I shall still go on praying; but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.”

24.  He has just received the Legion of Honor.

25.  “. . .  We shall yet make these United States a moral nation.”

26.  He walked towards the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly.

27.  But that will be a long time from now, and soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.

28.  If we succeed, we cannot lose the struggle.

29.  But no one answered, unless it was the falling snow.

30.  It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth. 


Almost since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That “talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for her local newspaper and contributing editor to Booklist and Bookmarks magazines has reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, 900 bookmarks and approximately 1,000 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She is a member of the National Books Critics Circle (NBCC) and Book Publicists of Southern California as well as a longtime book design judge for Publishers Marketing Association’s Benjamin Franklin Awards. You can reach her at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

 

Answers:
 1.  Catch-22
 2.  Of Mice and Men
 3. In Cold Blood
 4.  Emma
 5.  War of the Worlds
 6.  A Christmas Carol
 7.  Dracula
 8.  Wuthering Heights
 9.  The Lost Continent
10.  Uncle Tom’s Cabin
11.  Mutiny on the Bounty
12.  The Possessed
13.  The Moon and Sixpence
14.  A Bright Shining Lie
15.  Silas Marner
16.  The Fountainhead
17.  Women in Love
18.  The House of Mirth
19.  Tom Jones
20.  Tobacco Road
21.  Far From the Madding Crowd
22.  Booked to Die
23.  Anna Karenina
24.  Madame Bovary
25.  Elmer Gantry
26.  Sons and Lovers
27.  All the King’s Men
28.  The Ugly American
29.  Mrs. Bridge
30.  Silent Spring

 
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