{"id":4002,"date":"2025-12-18T12:49:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T12:49:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/2025\/12\/18\/ten-of-the-best-last-lines-in-literature\/"},"modified":"2025-12-18T12:49:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T12:49:08","slug":"ten-of-the-best-last-lines-in-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/2025\/12\/18\/ten-of-the-best-last-lines-in-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"Ten of the best last lines in literature"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<p><em>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 \u2014 <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.michigandaily.com\/sports\/football\/ohio-state-ices-michigan-with-12-minute-late-game-drive\/\"><em>not much luck there<\/em><\/a><em>. 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.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Senior Arts Editor Cora Rolfes can be reached at <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.michigandaily.com\/arts\/books\/the-michigan-dailys-favorite-last-lines\/mailto:corolfes@umich.edu\"><em>corolfes@umich.edu<\/em><\/a><em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>\u201cLooking for Alaska\u201d by John Green<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cThomas Edison\u2019s last words were: \u2018It\u2019s very beautiful over there.\u2019 I don\u2019t know where there is, but I believe it\u2019s somewhere, and I hope it\u2019s beautiful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<aside class=\"scaip scaip-1    \">\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<p>For a book <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/bSikwOLhfrQ?si=PkkE2Y2v7odjRtlc&amp;t=27\">originally<\/a> titled \u201cFamous Last Words,\u201d the last line of John Green\u2019s \u201cLooking for Alaska\u201d had to pull its weight. And, thankfully, it succeeds \u2014 this line, like <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/quotes\/17958-he-was-gone-and-i-did-not-have-time-to\">so<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/quotes\/26496-what-is-an-instant-death-anyway-how-long-is-an\">many<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/quotes\/134617-we-are-all-going-i-thought-and-it-applies-to\">others<\/a> 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\u2019t promise that the beautiful \u201cthere\u201d Jefferson sees is real, he just hopes that it is.<\/p>\n<p>I read this last line for the first time when I was 16, quarantined in my bedroom. I was experiencing a (likely <a href=\"https:\/\/www.americamagazine.org\/arts-culture\/2020\/09\/25\/phoebe-bridgers-death-punisher-review-essay\/\">Phoebe Bridgers<\/a>-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.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019t know how much it really matters. I, too, just hope that the \u201csomewhere\u201d is beautiful.<\/p>\n<p><em>Senior Arts Editor Campbell Johns can be reached at <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.michigandaily.com\/arts\/books\/the-michigan-dailys-favorite-last-lines\/mailto:caajohns@umich.edu\"><em>caajohns@umich.edu<\/em><\/a><em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>\u201cThe Sun Also Rises\u201d by Ernest Hemingway<\/strong><\/p>\n<aside class=\"scaip scaip-2    \">\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<p><em>\u201c<em>\u2018<\/em>Oh, Jake,<em>\u2019<\/em> Brett said, <em>\u2018<\/em>we could have had such a damned good time together.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>\u201c<em>\u2018<\/em>Yes,<em>\u2019<\/em> I said. <em>\u2018<\/em>Isn\u2019t it pretty to think so?<em>\u2019<\/em>\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p>With his sparse prose and dissolute characters, Ernest Hemingway ushered in the first novel of his <a href=\"https:\/\/writersinspire.org\/content\/lost-generation\">Lost Generation<\/a>. While \u201cThe Sun Also Rises\u201d 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\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/huntingthemuse.net\/library\/hemingways-iceberg-theory\">iceberg technique<\/a> (which we probably all learned in high school English), there\u2019s something deeply existential underpinning the couple\u2019s dialogue here \u2014 but you wouldn\u2019t immediately recognize this without reading about these discontented, aimless characters and their fights and amours. I love these last lines <em>because<\/em> they don\u2019t work as standalone quotes; to appreciate the tragedy of Jake\u2019s words, one needs to understand how his masculinity and self-conception were irrevocably shattered by a war that had, according to Henry James, \u201cused up words.\u201d This final exchange perfectly encapsulates how the protagonist\u2019s wound in battle \u2014 which left him unable to have sex \u2014 led him to repress his desires and reserve himself to simply contemplating happiness. It is a testament to Hemingway\u2019s ability to convey such depth of emotion by omitting so much.<\/p>\n<p><em>Daily Arts Writer Lorenzo Norbis can be reached at <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.michigandaily.com\/arts\/books\/the-michigan-dailys-favorite-last-lines\/mailto:lnorbis@umich.edu\"><em>lnorbis@umich.edu<\/em><\/a><em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>\u201cKatabasis\u201d by R.F. Kuang<\/strong><\/p>\n<aside class=\"scaip scaip-3    \">\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<p><em>\u201cAnd together they emerged, to rebehold the stars.\u201d<\/em><strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>R.F. Kuang\u2019s \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.michigandaily.com\/arts\/books\/you-have-to-want-to-fall-r-f-kuangs-katabasis-and-eschers-staircase-of-academia\/\">Katabasis<\/a>\u201d is a razor-sharp reworking of the underworld tradition, transforming Dante\u2019s 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. \u201cHell is a campus,\u201d one of our sojourners declares not even 100 pages into the novel. Kuang\u2019s writing insists that the descent alone isn\u2019t 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. \u201cKatabasis\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><em>Daily Arts Writer Estlin Salah can be reached at <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.michigandaily.com\/arts\/books\/the-michigan-dailys-favorite-last-lines\/mailto:essalah@umich.edu\"><em>essalah@umich.edu<\/em><\/a><em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>\u201cDubliners\u201d by James Joyce<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cHis 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.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<aside class=\"scaip scaip-4    \">\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<p>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\u2019s not a very powerful one. \u201cThe Dead,\u201d the final short story in James Joyce<em>\u2019<\/em>s collection \u201cDubliners,\u201d 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 \u2014\u00a0the first short story in the collection to all take place, more or less, within a character\u2019s mind. Framed against the rest of the collection, Gabriel\u2019s 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\u2019s definitely worth your time.<\/p>\n<p><em>Daily Arts Writer Elias Simon can be reached at <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.michigandaily.com\/arts\/books\/the-michigan-dailys-favorite-last-lines\/mailto:elmsimon@umich.edu\"><em>elmsimon@umich.edu<\/em><\/a><em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>\u201cAlmond\u201d by Sohn Won-pyung<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cLastly, 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.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In spite of its short length, Sohn Won-pyung\u2019s \u201cAlmond\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"scaip scaip-5    \">\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<p>To compensate for the lack of our narrator\u2019s emotions, the readers feel <em>all <\/em>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\u2019s brain works. For the duration of the novel, we are in Yunjae\u2019s 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\u2019t know.<\/p>\n<p><em>Daily Arts Writer Archisha Pathak can be reached at <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.michigandaily.com\/arts\/books\/the-michigan-dailys-favorite-last-lines\/mailto:archpath@umich.edu\"><em>archpath@umich.edu<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u201cThe Great Gatsby\u201d by F. Scott Fitzgerald<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>\u00a0<\/strong><em>\u201cSo we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Some last lines try to shock, but this one just quietly wins. F. Scott Fitzgerald closes \u201cThe Great Gatsby\u201d with an image that feels almost understated, yet it lands heavier than any dramatic twist. It\u2019s a sentence that casually sums up the entire novel\u2019s ache of forward-facing optimism, distilling Gatsby\u2019s whole project of chasing something shimmering and impossible into a single line.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"scaip scaip-6    \">\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<p><em>Daily Arts Contributor Ava Emery can be reached at <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.michigandaily.com\/arts\/books\/the-michigan-dailys-favorite-last-lines\/mailto:avaemery@umich.edu\"><em>avaemery@umich.edu.<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u201cGiovanni\u2019s Room\u201d by James Baldwin<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p>There are few novels that one can reread over and over again and still discover some new piece of wisdom, yet James Baldwin\u2019s \u201cGiovanni\u2019s Room\u201d 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\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><em>Daily Arts Writer Taylor Koski can be reached at <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.michigandaily.com\/arts\/books\/the-michigan-dailys-favorite-last-lines\/mailto:tckoski@umich.edu\"><em>tckoski@umich.edu<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u201cFrankenstein\u201d by Mary Shelley<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\u201c<em>He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Mary Shelley\u2019s \u201cFrankenstein\u201d is a tragic tale of ambition and destruction. The story begins with Victor Frankenstein\u2019s 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\u2019s death, the monster loses any chance he might have had at companionship. The novel\u2019s closing line encapsulates the desolate and miserable life the monster lived and the peace he hopes to finally attain by escaping it.<\/p>\n<p><em>Daily Arts Writer Meagan Ismail can be reached at <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.michigandaily.com\/arts\/books\/the-michigan-dailys-favorite-last-lines\/mailto:mismai@umich.edu\"><em>mismai@umich.edu<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u201cSlaughterhouse-Five\u201d by Kurt Vonnegut<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cOne bird said to Billy Pilgrim, \u2018Poo-tee-weet?\u2019\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p>World War II has just ended, and the world remains, in some ways, the exact same: Birds still sing. Kurt Vonnegut\u2019s satire \u201cSlaughterhouse-Five\u201d sharply criticizes the irrationality of war and its senseless violence. His main character, Billy Pilgrim, is an American prisoner who survives the Allies\u2019 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\u2019t 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\u2019s \u201cpoo-tee-weet?\u201d will always go unanswered.<\/p>\n<p><em>Daily Arts Contributor Sofia Thornley can be reached at <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.michigandaily.com\/arts\/books\/the-michigan-dailys-favorite-last-lines\/mailto:tsofia@umich.edu\"><em>tsofia@umich.edu<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u201cThe Night Circus\u201d by Erin Morgenstern<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cYou think, as you walk away from Le Cirque des R\u00eaves and into the creeping dawn, that you felt more awake within the confines of the circus. <\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cYou are no longer quite certain which side of the fence is the dream.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In 2011, the self-proclaimed \u201cCircus of Dreams\u201d arrived without warning, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/2013\/12\/13\/250432100\/first-novels-acquiring-minds\">taking the literary world by storm<\/a> 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\u2019s 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 \u2014 including the very circus they call home.<\/p>\n<p>From the very first line to the very last, \u201cThe Night Circus\u201d 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 \u2014 between the circus and myself, I was no longer quite certain which was reality, and which was the dream. <\/p>\n<p><em>Managing Arts Editor Camille Nagy can be reached at <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.michigandaily.com\/arts\/books\/the-michigan-dailys-favorite-last-lines\/mailto:camnagy@umich.edu\"><em>camnagy@umich.edu<\/em><\/a><em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<aside>\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<p><h3 class=\"jp-relatedposts-headline\"><em>Related articles<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 \u2014 not [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4003,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[2803,3923,259],"class_list":{"0":"post-4002","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-lines","9":"tag-literature","10":"tag-ten"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4002"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4004,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4002\/revisions\/4004"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}