A Dozen Favorite Final Sentences
(Like my Dozen Favorite First Sentences list, I post this one quite tentatively, because there are so very many great books out there, with so very many great last sentences. I’m taking only novels into consideration—or story collections so linked or cohesive that it’s hard not to regard them as novels—and I’ve restricted myself to single sentences, which ruled out a number of very fine books with brilliant, powerful, daring, or moving multi-sentence closing gestures. You’ll find these arranged in alphabetical order by the author’s last name.)
It could be that the sort of sentence one wants right here is the kind that runs, and laughs, and slides, and stops right on a dime. — from Speedboat by Renata Adler
Man and ghost stared at each other. — from Ghosts by César Aira, trans. by Chris Andrews
The aircraft rise from the runways of the airport, carrying the remnants of Vaughan’s semen to the instrument panels and radiator grilles of a thousand crashing cars, the leg stances of a million passengers. — from Crash by J. G. Ballard
It was the first morning of the world, and later it was finished. — from The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis
It was as if I were standing on that platform, with my schoolbooks and a smoke, on one of those endlessly accumulated afternoons after school when I stood almost outside of time simply waiting for a train, and I thought how much I’d have loved seeing someone like us streaming by. — from The Coast of Chicago by Stuart Dybek
And let us not forget that He taught us, in those raised voices in Galilee, and beneath the mango trees in Veluvana, and in the harsh valleys of Yen Chao, that the best way of loving Him is to love each other, and to love His work, even the worms and the rocks and the poisonous roots, and even those vast beings that do not seem to need our love, those Suns, those Worlds, those scattered Nebulae, which, like us, were once held in God’s hand and formed out of the same substance as us, and which certainly do not love us—indeed, they may not even know that we exist. — from Adam and Eve in Paradise by José Maria de Eça de Queirós, translated by Margaret Jull Costa
Being evil was her only fault. — from Love Creeps by Amanda Filipacchi
I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You’ve done enough, You’ve robbed me of enough, I’m too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever. — from The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
He watched Death’s small black going-away shape rising and falling as it swung off out of sight under the street lamps. — from Kleinzeit by Russell Hoban
I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us. — from Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson
No one watching this woman smear her initials in the steam on her water glass with her first finger, or slip cellophane packets of oyster crackers into her handbag for the sea gulls, could know how her thoughts are thronged by our absence, or know how she does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie. — from Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who. — from Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
— July 31, 2026