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
Before reaching cruising altitude the plane sliced through a thick layer of cloud and for a few seconds there was nothing but white outside the window and I couldn’t help feeling, as we cut through the ephemeral landscape slowly thinning and dispersing and branching out in a thousand unmappable directions, that this moment had been prepared especially for me, some kind of aerial requiem held in honor of the city I was leaving behind, and in the end, I remember thinking a few minutes later as the Lufthansa stewardess rattled down the aisle with her drinks cart, there was little difference between clouds and shadows and other phenomena given shape by the human imagination. — from Book of Clouds by Chloe Aridjis
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
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
— August 29, 2024