(no subject)
Today's Guardian has an interesting list of the ten best last sentences in literature. I thought it was quite a surprising, if not downright weird, selection. There are two obvious canditates I think of immediately, and neither of them were there:
The Greene one is a masterpiece of compressed relience on the reader's knowledge. And as for Joyce - well, if you don't immediately think of this passage when someone says "famous last sentences" then you surely have no business complining this sort of list. Although admittedly to actually quote the whole of the last sentence of Ulysses would require you to go back fifty or sixty pages.
Are there any others you can think of? I have so many fewer last lines in my head than first lines, it's strange.
- ‘She walked rapidly in the thin June sunlight towards the worst horror of all.’ -Graham Greene, Brighton Rock
- ‘. . . yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.’ -James Joyce, Ulysses
The Greene one is a masterpiece of compressed relience on the reader's knowledge. And as for Joyce - well, if you don't immediately think of this passage when someone says "famous last sentences" then you surely have no business complining this sort of list. Although admittedly to actually quote the whole of the last sentence of Ulysses would require you to go back fifty or sixty pages.
Are there any others you can think of? I have so many fewer last lines in my head than first lines, it's strange.