Every time another semester draws to a close, whether the first on campus or the last, a sort of nostalgia arises over the thought of things ending. The last time you wandered through the Diag without a suffocating puffer is often a memory lost to time. The last football game of the season — not much luck there. Even the last lecture for a class that you always kind of hated feels a bit bittersweet. I often find myself wanting things to end in a poignant way, or at least in a memorable one. Endings matter to us, in life and in literature, and so, as this semester draws to a close, 10 Daily Arts Writers have compiled their favorite final lines for your reading pleasure.
Senior Arts Editor Cora Rolfes can be reached at corolfes@umich.edu.
“Looking for Alaska” by John Green
“Thomas Edison’s last words were: ‘It’s very beautiful over there.’ I don’t know where there is, but I believe it’s somewhere, and I hope it’s beautiful.”
For a book originally titled “Famous Last Words,” the last line of John Green’s “Looking for Alaska” had to pull its weight. And, thankfully, it succeeds — this line, like so many others in the book, still manages to floor me even today. Ending a book ravaged by grief and death, this line marks a bittersweet forgiveness, a path to acceptance and peace after making big mistakes. It paints a not-so-scary picture of the afterlife, but also a realistic one. Narrator Miles doesn’t promise that the beautiful “there” Jefferson sees is real, he just hopes that it is.
I read this last line for the first time when I was 16, quarantined in my bedroom. I was experiencing a (likely Phoebe Bridgers-induced) obsession with death, unpacking my beliefs about the afterlife and getting more and more scared as I did so. This line helped me get out of my panic, helped me realize that death might not be worth spending so much time thinking about after all.
I no longer believe in a specific afterlife; I have no idea what my final moments will feel like. But this line reminds me that I also don’t know how much it really matters. I, too, just hope that the “somewhere” is beautiful.
Senior Arts Editor Campbell Johns can be reached at caajohns@umich.edu.
“The Sun Also Rises” by Ernest Hemingway
“‘Oh, Jake,’ Brett said, ‘we could have had such a damned good time together.’
“‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’”
With his sparse prose and dissolute characters, Ernest Hemingway ushered in the first novel of his Lost Generation. While “The Sun Also Rises” is essentially a novel about American and British expats traveling to Pamplona for the bull fights, it is more fundamentally the story of struggling through disillusionment in the wake of World War I. In line with Hemingway’s iceberg technique (which we probably all learned in high school English), there’s something deeply existential underpinning the couple’s dialogue here — but you wouldn’t immediately recognize this without reading about these discontented, aimless characters and their fights and amours. I love these last lines because they don’t work as standalone quotes; to appreciate the tragedy of Jake’s words, one needs to understand how his masculinity and self-conception were irrevocably shattered by a war that had, according to Henry James, “used up words.” This final exchange perfectly encapsulates how the protagonist’s wound in battle — which left him unable to have sex — led him to repress his desires and reserve himself to simply contemplating happiness. It is a testament to Hemingway’s ability to convey such depth of emotion by omitting so much.
Daily Arts Writer Lorenzo Norbis can be reached at lnorbis@umich.edu.
“Katabasis” by R.F. Kuang
“And together they emerged, to rebehold the stars.”
R.F. Kuang’s “Katabasis” is a razor-sharp reworking of the underworld tradition, transforming Dante’s descent into a scalding critique of modern academia. Rather than relying on homage, Kuang uses the structure of hell to map the pressures, distortions and seductions of elite institutions. “Hell is a campus,” one of our sojourners declares not even 100 pages into the novel. Kuang’s writing insists that the descent alone isn’t the story: the return is. Even as the narrative exposes how institutions extract, exploit and disfigure, it also gestures toward the fragile work of reclaiming selfhood from the ruins. “Katabasis” succeeds not because it condemns academia, but because it recognizes the possibility of life beyond it, built on connection rather than competition, on choosing to step back into the world rather than endlessly circling its mechanisms.
Daily Arts Writer Estlin Salah can be reached at essalah@umich.edu.
“Dubliners” 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.”
At the end of what is arguably the greatest short story written in English, this is a pretty line. But, without the rest of the novella that precedes it, it’s not a very powerful one. “The Dead,” the final short story in James Joyce’s collection “Dubliners,” follows a shy, young-ish man named Gabriel Conroy into the annual Christmas party thrown by his aunts each year. The action in this story is kept pretty minimal, but over the course of the night Gabriel is depicted to be flowing between passion, insecurity, confidence, mourning and realization — the first short story in the collection to all take place, more or less, within a character’s mind. Framed against the rest of the collection, Gabriel’s epiphany is not only about the melancholy of his own life but that of all Irish history. The novella is only about 45 pages, and it’s definitely worth your time.
Daily Arts Writer Elias Simon can be reached at elmsimon@umich.edu.
“Almond” by Sohn Won-pyung
“Lastly, and I know it sounds like an excuse, but neither you nor I nor anyone can ever really know if a story is happy or tragic.”
In spite of its short length, Sohn Won-pyung’s “Almond” leaves readers thinking about it for days after turning the last page. The book follows Yunjae, a young boy with alexithymia: a condition that hinders the function of the almond-sized amygdala in the brain that is responsible for feeling emotions. The novel centers his internal struggle with this biological difference, specifically after a tragic and violent event alters the course of his life. As the story goes on, he forms relationships with the people around him, but none of them are quite what you would expect.
To compensate for the lack of our narrator’s emotions, the readers feel all of them. The last line of the novel is a nod to the human experience, which is so heavily rooted in the emotions that make it up; when we take this away, we ironically see the expansiveness of human life. It also acknowledges that we can never truly understand how someone else’s brain works. For the duration of the novel, we are in Yunjae’s mind, and this is the only reason we are able to understand him in this way. Without the context provided by being in his head, we much more closely resemble the endless amount of people who are baffled by his actions. Like them, we may not know the inner workings of every mind that surrounds us in our everyday lives, but this final line reminds us to revel in this ambiguity and accept what we don’t know.
Daily Arts Writer Archisha Pathak can be reached at archpath@umich.edu.
“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Some last lines try to shock, but this one just quietly wins. F. Scott Fitzgerald closes “The Great Gatsby” with an image that feels almost understated, yet it lands heavier than any dramatic twist. It’s a sentence that casually sums up the entire novel’s ache of forward-facing optimism, distilling Gatsby’s whole project of chasing something shimmering and impossible into a single line.
Daily Arts Contributor Ava Emery can be reached at avaemery@umich.edu.
“Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin
“The morning weighs on my shoulders with the dreadful weight of hope and I take the blue envelope which Jacques has sent me and tear it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them away. Yet, as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me.”
There are few novels that one can reread over and over again and still discover some new piece of wisdom, yet James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” finds a way. The book follows David, an American expat living in Paris, as he grapples with his identity and sexuality in the stifling atmosphere of the 1950s. In the story’s final solemn lines, Baldwin visualizes the persistence of memory and grief that have plagued David throughout the novel and will surely continue to after its conclusion. In this passage we see that, though he will try to move on from his loss, ripping up the letter that doomed his lover to death, a few pieces still hit him, reminding him that Giovanni will always be a part of him. These concluding lines summarize the entire work brilliantly, employing the melancholic and deeply poetic language that Baldwin excels in and leaving a final emotional note for the reader to sit with.
Daily Arts Writer Taylor Koski can be reached at tckoski@umich.edu.
“Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley
“He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance.”
Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” is a tragic tale of ambition and destruction. The story begins with Victor Frankenstein’s drive to pursue the unknown and ends with his dying desire to destroy what he created. His ambition us ultimately what ruins him in the end. At the same time, the monster shows Victor remorse and regret for the violence he incited. The monster spent his life suffering, misunderstood by those around him after both his creator and the rest of the world turned their backs on him. With Victor’s death, the monster loses any chance he might have had at companionship. The novel’s closing line encapsulates the desolate and miserable life the monster lived and the peace he hopes to finally attain by escaping it.
Daily Arts Writer Meagan Ismail can be reached at mismai@umich.edu.
“Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut
“One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, ‘Poo-tee-weet?’”
World War II has just ended, and the world remains, in some ways, the exact same: Birds still sing. Kurt Vonnegut’s satire “Slaughterhouse-Five” sharply criticizes the irrationality of war and its senseless violence. His main character, Billy Pilgrim, is an American prisoner who survives the Allies’ bombing of Dresden, Germany; the random carnage crosses ideological and national lines, reducing everyone to victims. Vonnegut himself lived through the bombing and sought to write a novel that didn’t romanticize the conflict as so many depictions do. In doing so, he produced one of the most incisive anti-war novels of all time. Though we come up with narratives to justify our histories, there is never a sufficient explanation for the massacre of civilians. The bird’s “poo-tee-weet?” will always go unanswered.
Daily Arts Contributor Sofia Thornley can be reached at tsofia@umich.edu.
“The Night Circus” by Erin Morgenstern
“You think, as you walk away from Le Cirque des Rêves and into the creeping dawn, that you felt more awake within the confines of the circus.
“You are no longer quite certain which side of the fence is the dream.”
In 2011, the self-proclaimed “Circus of Dreams” arrived without warning, taking the literary world by storm and becoming a modern-day classic almost as quickly as its black-and-white striped tents could be put up in the night. Told in remarkably lush, lyrical prose, Erin Morgenstern’s debut novel tells the story of Celia and Marco, two magicians slowly falling in love amid a decades-long magical duel to the death. Yet, as it becomes more and more obvious that the duo make much better partners than enemies, it also becomes clear that unless one of them kills the other, everyone and everything they care about will suffer the consequences in their stead — including the very circus they call home.
From the very first line to the very last, “The Night Circus” cushions the reader within its pages, lulling them into a false sense of security as it drifts from booth to booth, spell to spell. There are few books I have ever read that have been so all-encompassing, so delightfully immersive, as to make me feel like I have truly fallen into the story alongside its characters. Perhaps that is why, by the time I reached its final page, the last line felt less like a conclusion to a story and more like a simple fact of life — between the circus and myself, I was no longer quite certain which was reality, and which was the dream.
Managing Arts Editor Camille Nagy can be reached at camnagy@umich.edu.
